Last Major Supplier Calls It Quits For VHS

thefickler writes "The last major supplier of VHS videotapes is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. This uncharitable commentator has this to say: 'Will VHS be missed? Not ... with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.'" At least my dad's got the blank-tape market cornered.

Comments

No players on the market

[dotancohen]

I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one, so in that sense the format has been dead a long time. Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media, I wonder in how many years the last playable VHS cassette will wear out. 20? 50? Will there even be an operable player at that time, that can output video into a then-standard format?

Re:No players on the market

[keraneuology]

I still see DVD/VHS combo units around fairly frequently....

Re:No players on the market

[ScrewMaster]

I recently had the challenge of trying to find a VHS player in a retail store. I couldn't find one, so in that sense the format has been dead a long time. Now that no major manufacturer is producing new media, I wonder in how many years the last playable VHS cassette will wear out. 20? 50? Will there even be an operable player at that time, that can output video into a then-standard format?

Probably not, although there will probably still be paid services available than can convert them to digital media. Anyone with a VHS collection who still has a working VCR had best get a good framegrabber board and start digitizing them before it's too late. I have a couple of VCRs (although I haven't used them for a long time) and for a mere $100 per tape hour I'll be happy to put them on DVD for you.

Sure, that's ridiculous ... but wait a few years. People will be paying big money to have little Tommy's graduation video converted.

Re:No players on the market

[sortius_nod]

There's a lot here in Australia. Not that I'd buy one.

Kind of feels like being a caveman using VHS.

Now BetaMAX, that's a standard you can be proud of.

Re:No players on the market

[flajann]

... Like you said, though, you have to stay on top of it. It's all too easy to find yourself suddenly unable to read your old media. I understand that NASA is losing enormous quantities of 9-track tape data from the sixties because they can't find equipment to read them, and the tapes are reaching the end of their lifespan. Not good.

Really sad about NASA -- that information should be preserved and made publically available. The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to recover it. We've lost all the details on building the Saturn V rocket, and we lost that a long time ago. Lots of technical hurdles had to be overcome, and it would also be good to have that information preserved for future rocket engineers.

Then again, the history of mankind on this planet is puncuated with massive loss of information throughout the ages. Libraries are allowed to fall into decay or are destroyed by conquering nations, languages are lost to time, and the like.

But if there's one thing us humans love doing is creating volumes and volumes of information -- just visit any library.

And now we have the totality of the Internet, with who knows how many websites, blogs, and what not. Torrents of stuff that comes and goes. More stuff than any one person could read in a million lifetimes -- nor probably would not want to.

Ahh, humans. A fascinating species, if I may say so myself. It will be fun to watch its progress over the next few decades.

Re:No players on the market

[WCLPeter]

I have an old, high end mitsubishi VHS I need to get fixed (tape transport mech)

From "tape transport mech" I'm going to assume you're saying that the tape doesn't go all the way into the unit when you insert it? If this is the case it is often caused by one of the belts that drive the gears, that operate the transport system, being worn so it's not gripping tightly.

This happened to me on my VCR a while back, and still did until my niece decided to spill juice in it. ;-)

If you haven't done it yet, take the cover off, plug it back in, and then insert a tape you don't care about. Watch how the gears, levers, and belts move. One of them will look like it's slipping. Probably the one that drives the equipment that pulls the tape in, lowering the cage. If the tape gets stuck, pulling the plug and then plugging it back in will usually cause the sensor to read a tape halfway in and eject it.

Try it a few more times until you can spot what is loose or stuck. Once you spot the location, if it's easily reached, put the tape in and then at the same time use your finger to turn the cylinder / gear / gizmo that the belt is trying to turn. This extra push from you *should* be enough to finish lowering the cage. Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible. Use your common judgment and determine for yourself if it's safe.

I was able to use my old VCR for an extra 4 years, until the aforementioned niece decided it would be fun to spill a drink in there. ;-)

Of course, if this doesn't work it probably won't be fixable with the "turning gizmo with finger" method. In this case you'll want to look for a local "mom and pop" electronics store that does home electronics repairs. Or you could just look online for another high-end VCR, I do believe they still make them, although I haven't looked.

Re:No players on the market

[RiotingPacifist]

Obviously if you electrocute yourself, or mangle your finger, or cause any other unforeseen damage to yourself / VCR, I'm not responsible.

Be aware that the psu is inside the VCR(well end stuff it is anyway) so there will be some transformers with high current/voltage lying about in there.

Re:No players on the market

[value_added]

With all due respect to antrophologists, we don't need 24/7 records of the boring everyday life of everyone. People lost things before in fires and leakages and break-ins and whatnot before too, it's nothing new.

That boring everyday life you refer to forms the basis of our historical knowledge. Consider, for example, the letters and diaries written during the Civil War with electronic forms of communications related to the recent war in Iraq. The former is housed in museums and is repeatedly poured over by writers and scholars of every sort, while the latter is stored unceremoniously in Outlook and Yahoo inboxes, on transient blogs, and similarly transient backup tapes of White House email servers.

Your guess is as good as mine as to how history will be written (or re-written) if those records aren't archived, and in a format that can be read for posterity.

Re:first

[dotancohen]

first - nothing better to do on christmas day

Try masturbating. See how well I type with one hand?

DVD = VHS?

[SolidAltar]

Except for TiVo there still remains no replacement for VHS's ease of use. Pop in a tape, hit record. I know that there are DVD recorders that can do this but at least a year ago you still had to worry about DVD type, ending a track, etc.

A large portion of the populace does not have a TiVo or a DVD recorder - meaning they lost functionality.

Re:Security systems

[ScrewMaster]

Don't most store security systems use VHS tapes for their security cameras?

If they switch to non-erasable DVD, there's going to be a metric ton of these that just go to waste every day.

Nah ... they'll just go on hard disk. They just put in a bunch of security cameras at work (all IP-based) and I'm sure the feeds are going to some hard drive array somewhere.

VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[SynapseLapse]

When you try to play your DVD-RWs. No, seriously. I've got a Hauppauge PVR150 in my desktop (Salvaged from the sad remains of the first Mythbok that died...) and I've been using it rip my parents old home movies recorded to VHS. These tapes are 20 years old and play great. The question is, what the heck can I burn it to so it might survive 30 more years?

Re:VHS says, call me in 30 years.

[Dogtanian]

I mean the Microsoft Office document format is almost undocumentable

You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.

what hope do we have reverse engineering it from 1000 years from now, especially if there was a civilisation collapse, and the one doing the recovering doesn't have much continuity to ours.

If they get back to anything like our level, I'm sure they'll figure it out. Possibly with a bit of work, but they'll probably do it.

Not the obscure weird-ass formats, perhaps, but the dead common ones like those based around MPEG-2, JPEG, etc. Yeah, I think they'll manage.

Human beings are incredibly ingenious. Did you know that they recently retrieved the colour from a black-and-white copy of UK TV series Dad's Army?

It was originally shot on colour, but the BBC (as they used to do a lot) wiped it, and only a black and white telecine copy remained.

The engineers noted that "chroma dots" (v. minor interference caused by the colour signal not having been filtered out of the signal before the mono copy was made) remained on many such films. (The engineers at the time "should" have turned this off, but it wasn't a big deal).

They managed to use this pattern of tiny dots to figure out what the original colour information had been. Now, that's clever.

Anyone as clever as us with the desire to retrieve metric assloads of information from rotting media will be able to manage it, I'm sure.

If they remain very primitive for a long time, I'm worried about more than some hard drives; I'm sure that there will still be a number of human-viewable hard copies anyway. Probably way more than there were of the middle ages as well.

User Interface

[AtomicSnarl]

Almost as sad as the people still using it.

You push it in the slot, push Play, and it works. No menus to wander, no special features to get in the way, no Director's Cut, no frigging mind games with some dinky remote with tiny print and bitty buttons to poke at to get the bloody thing to play, now. Get off my lawn! Damn kids these days... Harumph. Where did I put my bifocals?

This message sponsored by AARP, because you'll be old someday, too!

This isn't about blank VHS media, folks!

[adnonsense]

I RTFA (hey, it's Christmas!) and using my advanced English comprehension skills can hereby inform you that it's about what's apparently the last major supplier of content in the VHS format in the USA giving up on VHS. It says nothing about manufacturers of VHS media (aka blank tapes) stopping production.

I bet blank tapes will be available for a good few years yet.

Re:No unskippable ads

[kvezach]

That err, "feature", is called the User Operation Prohibition flag. Some DVD players can be patched to disregard the UOP, others disregard the UOP by default. Do a web search if you're interested... I note it's also considered DRM, which just shows exactly whose "rights" are being preserved here.

Re:Security systems

[Toll_Free]

There was a time that notebooks where the only way you could remember to configure the switches on the terminal, but I'm dating my grandfather now :)

--Toll_Free

Re:So which format is next DVD or BlueRay?

[MsGeek]

My guess? Blu-Ray, unless Sony allows small producers to reasonably produce BluRay discs.

Re:Security systems

[karnal]

*gulp*

You're dating your grandfather now? Why do we need to know that?

Re:Song of the South

[cayenne8]

"I guess Disney just fears a negative public reaction too much to release the movie, which would be no issue if they hadn't buckled under to protests against it in the first place. It now looks like Disney agrees -- or close -- that the film itself was in some way particularly racist. (More than other films of the time, say, portrayin a similar era.) I was unsurprised that they didn't choose to make their first big Blue Ray film Song of the South ;)"

Funny, tho.....I was just recently at Disney World, and all those characters are still prominately displayed on the log ride there.

I really think it is a shame, that our society is so fucking "PC" now, that we won't still show programs that might have something not politically correct. I mean, c'mon...this IS a piece of history of the US. Media of the past should be available so that people can see what people thought and how much was acceptable in the past. Not making things like this available are almost like re-writing history. Do we not learn from the past both good and bad?

This almost seems, in the US, to be the commercial version of censorship that many European states do with regard to Nazi symbolism and historical content or artifacts. Geez people...it happened....don't run away from the past, view it....learn from it....move on.

Hell...I think it actually would be healthy for people today to know where society has come from...show them that cartoons often had characters blowing up into "black face"...and let people see for themselves how society has changed over the years.

Re:THINKGEEK has converters

[Tintivilus]

Use a timebase corrector between the source and your capture card. It'll clean up garbled VHS video and accidentally strip macrovision in the process.