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Tapeheads and the Quiet Return of VHS
Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Phillips writes that something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams as browsing aisles is no more and the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country. Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search of one whose cover art called back a story that echoed your interests. Josh Johnson, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary 'Rewind This!' hopes to tell the story of how and why home video came about, and how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine. 'Essentially, the rental market expanded, because of voracious consumer demand, into non-blockbuster, off-Hollywood video content which would never have had a theatrical life otherwise,' says Palmer. While researching the documentary Palmer found something interesting: there is a resurgence taking place of people going back to VHS because a massive number of films are 'trapped on VHS' with 30 and 40 percent of films released on VHS never to be seen again on any other format. 'Most of the true VHS fanatics are children of the 1980s,' says Palmer. 'Whether they are motivated by a sense of nostalgia or prefer the format for the grainy aesthetic qualities of magnetic tape or some other reason entirely unknown, each tapehead is unique like a snowflake.'"
Courtesy of the Onion:
Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past
Wannabes. The religious hipster cool kids have been getting their media via STONE TABLET for several millenniums now.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
I have no desire to "go back to VHS" or even to own any VHS tapes. But as the article points out, there are several good movies that have not been released on DVD.
In those cases, I'd much rather have someone's mp4 conversion off piratebay than a fresh VHS tape because VHS tapes do not last the way digital files do.
Same is true for a number of good movies and TV series that were never released on VHS. You want to watch the original Batman '66? Be prepared for some TV Land logos in your mp4s.
The only reason every video ever made is not available on demand is idiotic IP laws and greed. That is what we all want, not this piecemeal idiocy.
Advice: on VPS providers
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
Sure, nowadays you can torrent the film or get it from Netflix, and then go on IMDB or Flixster to post a review or get into a masturbatory flame war with anonymous people who can't spell, but that in-real-life community aspect is gone except in a very few places.
Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search
Ownership means you can do what you want. Like make copies and sell the copies of the contents of the tape as an example.
You were a share cropper in the tape days, just like now.
Grainy? Has this moron ever SEEN a video off VHS? How about blurry with messed up tint? How about seeing annoying streaks across the screen from where the tape has worn?
I can see the motive behind records and audio tapes (not my thing), but this is RETARDED.
Some great films are indeed effectively trapped on VHS. In some cases they are never transferred to DVD/Blu-Ray, in other cases the quality of the transfer is pitiful compared to the VHS. In others, they are only available for a limited number of regions.
One example: They Might Be Giants
(I was going to mention The Lighthorsemen , but there is allegedly a Blu-Ray that exists now - but is it truly available?)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Its returning thanks to Macrovision and George Lucas.
I have the real trilogy, with Han shooting first, on VHS, nicely locked away on Macrovision.
Help digitizing that would be nice.
I had a Beta. Yeah, that's right. Beta top-loader.
I wouldn't go to a regular theater if someone paid -me-. People have lost the ability to understand that their behavior in a quiet movie theater affects others. Gum chompers, bag rattlers, talkers, cell phone texters et al, have ruined the experience with the exception of over 21 theaters.
Now, in my nice home theater, I can still invite friends, or converse with them afterwards on the subject matter. Without having to deal with what is frankly an unwashed, noisy, ill behaved mob easily provoked to confrontation when their behavior is pointed out to them.
In short, fuck the public experience. It stopped working when the "it's all about me" crowd arrived.
If there were no porn, we would still be using Beta. The kids would be rewatching that tape of The Last Unicorn that you bought for $120 over and over and over.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
TFA (http://techzwn.com/2012/02/interview-filmmakers-tell-of-the-home-video-revolution/ ) says "Something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams. Browsing aisles is no more, as the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country."
So the submitter actually changed it.
Sigh.
Stupid article, stupid person, stupid premise, stupid argument. Stupid stupid stupid. Video has followed the same trajectory as audio, from analog to to digital physical to downloads. Except that analog video sucks just as much as, if not more so than, analog audio tapes. I know there's something of a vinyl resurgence, and I even think there's something to it (not audio quality, experience), but there's a reason nobody ever wants to screw around with audio tapes again. They're a pain in the ass, there's static, you need to rewind them, etc. Except video is even more finicky. Remember screwing with the tracking? Pulling the tape out of the box and finding it not rewound? Finding a particular scene?
And is he seriously arguing that obscure films are *more* obscure now that you can watch them online, as opposed to finding them tucked away somewhere in the local video store? I'm also pretty sure that those obscure films have been digitized and are easy to "acquire" if you wanted to watch them.
DVDs are superior to VHS in literally every respect. You don't have to rewind them, random access is as easy as sequential access, quality is better, audio is better (5.1 channels), smaller media, smaller players, quieter players, no static, no head cleaning, no moving parts in the media, cheaper media, extra features... the list goes on and on.
Stupid.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Although VHS was very useful back in the 80's and 90's for recording various TV shows there was always playback issues between various brands of VHS machines simply because of how one machine recorded the show, the next one might have issues with grainy playback, fast forwarding or rewinding, or even audio issues. And remember the fun of buying the VHS cleaning tapes to try and keep the head(s) clean for optimal playback? Fun times!
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I guess this means me. I fit the demographic. I was born in the early 1980s.
There is something 'missing' in the digital remasters of films, though arguably it's of a non-quantifiable aesthetic. Arguably, it's something of nostalgia, and I'd grant someone who argues it that way.
I remember, as a child, watching The Lone Ranger. Not the black and white, but the movie made in the 1980s (or early 90s). It'd come off television and had the start and finish of the ad segmens; my grandfather had recorded it for us, carefully stopping/recording at the appropriate parts - but we still had parts of he "We now return you to USA's Friday Night Movie".
My brother and I also had an VHS 'copy' of the original Batman serials from television in the late 1940s ( I think). The cars were big, there was no color, and the "Batmobile" was no different than any of the other cars. (Much better than the 1950s Batman, IMO.) The same goes for the b&w Superman, which we recorded off of reruns off TV, at some point. The Batman serials, we'd somehowmanaged to record about 20 seconds over the middle - some Micromachines commercial, right in the middle of a fight scene.
Flashing forward, I saw most of my favorite movies first on VHS: Die Hard, The Saint, Braveheart, Terminator, Commando. A favorite VHS had character, of sorts. You could tell it was well watched when the colors had started to fade and there was static or muddled audio. There was no jumping around randomly for favorite scenes. Many of them had been recorded off the TV by one person or another and passed around amongst friends. It wasn't until over a decade later that saw the full, non-edited-for-TV version of Commando (awesome!).
And then there was rainy days, snow days, or really-bad-storm days. You'd sit at home with the generator on (if you had one) and maybe watch movies while someone made food. You'd sort through a dozen different movies to find one that didn't suck, and you'd look for something to like or something to make fun of: it'd end up becoming a favorite for one reason or another.
That said: most of these people need to get a life. :) While I will grant you that the 1980s was the last great decade of America (for some time to come, at least), if you get too wrapped up in 1980s VHS films, you've got something wrong with you. I believe the term is "reality avoidance".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Remember the seemingly outrageous fines for destroying a tape? Remember getting home from the video store to find you had artifacts on the lower 2/3 of the screen? How about the video cassette rewinding machine, god knows that JVC vcr was built to last eons. don't miss it at all.. not one bit.
The advance in technology has helped this more than harmed it. These days, put it up on Youtube to get known. Hell, put up a concept on a website just in hopes of funding. The passing of VHS and the arrival of streaming has been democratizing. If you're afraid of losing it, burn it onto a DVD. That DVD you burned will outlast any VHS tape and will do so through many, many plays. How many of us who grew up in the 80's didn't suffer the disappointment of losing our favorite film to a hungry VCR (I suspect my family, who were sick of rewatching the same movie rigged the thing to destroy the tape).
In short, fuck the public experience. It stopped working when the "it's all about me" crowd arrived.
That crowd doesn't go to see an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior. You should expand your cinematic horizons and stop watching the newest teen vampire movie as it comes out.
Going to a cinema like this is like going to a jazz club. You won't get the usual crowd of idiots, but likely have a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and have an intelligent conversation.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
$HIPSTERS and the $MEANINGLESS_ADJECTIVE return of $OBSOLETE_KITSCH
I am not a VHS fanatic. Even in the 80's, I hated the format. VHS tapes are/were made to the cheapest possible materials, so they wore out very easily and were highly susceptible to heat warping. Much like audio tapes, the sound tends to warble and even distort on overly bright video frames... such a kludgey format!
I do think we need to preserve the content of these tapes, but not the medium itself. I've been an all-streaming guy for 8-9 years and have no desire to go backward.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have several VHS tapes from 1980s I need to transfer as magnetic tape does not keep its contents forever (and pushing 30 years is risky). Few months ago I viewed one, a movie shown on late night TV from a Los Angeles station. One of the commercials has Cal Worthington and his "dog" Spot (car dealer who had various animals from armadillos to bears). Probably can no longer do that these days. Tape also has when CNN had a interview with astronauts on the Shuttle, they only had a short window via ground stations as this was before TDRSS. Much of it was ironing out some technical issues. Crew could not hear audio from CNN though CNN anchors could hear them. They eventually got it to work. It was interesting because it seemed more authentic. Nowadays it's seems so staged. What I noticed is how anchors were more like journalists rather than celebrities. Other commercials had Federated stereo stores with goofy antics, and a lawyer commercial that begins with a car accident (staged with stills and sound effects of a crash) followed by a lawyer who says, "If your involved in serious accident, you need to seek legal advice immediately!" [don't bother calling paramedics]. Fasinating stuff of what was and used to be.
mfwright@batnet.com
http://kingtapes.net/index.php/faq/2-do-vhs-tapes-degrade-over-time
VHS degrades very quickly at room temperature and regular viewing... I know I could not stand watching some of my old ones after watching DVD for a few years, the color was so faded, it was awful!.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
.. VHS was such poor quality that the fact that it won out over Beta always amazed me. Chroma channel of such poor bandwidth that the best you could say of VHS color is that you'd maybe get a blob of more or less the right color around that black and white object in the luma channel. Longitudinal audio tracks that did a record wipe effect any time a kink in the tape went over the audio head (granted, the RF audio on later stereo VHS was somewhat better). I thought about trying to edit on it once, but decided I didn't want to bother without any way to implement a timecode track. Even the 2 hour mode was crummy enough to not be anywhere close to broadcast quality, and that was in the analog vestigial-sideband 480i SD NTSC-M days of composite video.
And cleaning tape heads, and aligning transports, and dreading the day the pinch roller got a bit too sticky and unwound your only copy of your favorite movie into a rat's nest inside the VCR. (And yes, I've extracted a few such tape nests from family members' VCR's. Entirely too many of them learned that I knew how to fix the things.)
Beta was better. 3/4" U-Matic showed me what good was when it came to videotape formats. I was happy to leave VHS behind when I was able to record on Digital-8 format in broadcast quality, and once I got a camera that would record on an SD card in 720p I never looked back. I have heard that VHS tape makes reasonably good magnetic card stripes, though ..
With a VHS cassette, you can deliver a good smack upside the head. Now, it won't bust anyone's skull, but still pretty satisfying.
What you got with a DVD? Sure, maybe you can bust it in half, and try to stab'em in the eyes with the pieces, but that's a lot of work, certainly not as satisfying as a good-ole solid smack upside the head.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
That's not what he's talking about. Those people who don't know how to behave are not going to Ingmar Bergman films or even English-language arthouse/indie films, so the experience is only ever positive if you find a place showing such films - because for people who really like movies, the theater experience (including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home) is a big part of the enjoyment.
There are still such places - theaters that show classic films, new foreign films, and indie and art films. The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House in Rochester NY (where I went to university) is my favorite, though I don't live there anymore. Yeah you can get it all on DVD, but it's still worth going if you're into movies - and if you're not into movies, you're not watching those kinds of films anyway.
If you have an old film on VHS, you'd be insane not to rip it to your hard disk. I recently tried to play some old VHS tapes, and some of them were so stuck together that I was afraid they would wreck my player. The ones that I was able to play were all wobbly and some (color films) only played in black and white.
And what is this:
the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down
Ever heard of downloading? Or ripping a DVD/BD? If people are stupid enough to "buy" something they can only access as a stream, that's their problem. The alternative are certainly not VHS tapes.
The disadvantage was that if you had a second machine hooked up to the first and tried to record the show from the rental tape on to your own blank tape it would be a badly scrambled image that looked like dark blobs of crap but yet the audio wasn`t affected. Not sure how they did that but a ``descrambler`` device (not sold in most stores obviousely) between both machines was very easily able to fix the cheesy form of copy protection they had on the VHS tapes in the late 80`s and 90`s.
Always did wonder how they achieved that form of copy protection back in the day... perhaps the precurser of the RIAA
Oooooh, so the jazz (or "music") is played as if someone hooked up a saxophone to a horse and tortured it to keep out the kids? It makes so much sense!
The biggest advantage videotape created was the ability to copy and distribute your work without involving the distribution cartels. That's one of the reasons they beat on recordable media so bad. Their business model is predicated on creating an artificial shortage by creating a choke point in the distribution chain. My wife was watching "The Voice" the other day, and I laughed myself out of my chair when they offered the winner a recording contract with a big studio. That's like having an anchor chained to your neck. "But it's a chromed, Limited Edition, hand-forged Anchor!"
Not a precursor at all. It was the MPAA, and Macrovision. It's a simple method, where the tape has junk data between frames. When played back on a TV you'll never see them, but if another VCR tries to record it, it will try to record the entire data stream, and end up with artifacts when played back.
"Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (Part Two) (#9.2)" (2009)
Dave Lister: What are these things?
Kryten: They're Digital Versatile Discs, sir. DVDs for short. They were very popular in the early part of the 21st century before they died out and were replaced with what we use now.
Dave Lister: Oh, you mean videos?
Kryten: Precisely. Back then no one knew that the human race were utterly incapable of putting the DVDs back in their cases. Case in point: over 2 trillion went missing in just over 20 years. Videos are just too big to lose.
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
I'm really not sure VHS is the sole cause of this. There was another concurrently-developing technology - cable television - that may have had a hand in it as well.
Back the 1980s I fell in love with a channel called "American Movie Classics" - at the time it really was showing classic American films (okay, obviously that doesn't mean Bergman) all the time, and with no commercial interruptions! The host, Bob Dorian, would lead into the movie with a little 2-minute piece that would sometimes be about the movie's place in cinema history and at other times be some back-stage story. Over the course of the 80s and 90s I saw lots of John Ford, lots of post-1940 Alfred Hitchcock, Astaire and Rogers, film noir classics - all the sorts of movies you used to have to go to a movie house to watch! It was great. I will admit I taped a lot of it for no quantifiable reason... (and the tapes are still around, gathering dust out in our family room)
I realize AMC technically still exists; but it's not even close to what it was back then.
#DeleteChrome
When there are 20, 30, 40 million of these VCRs in the land, we will be invaded by millions of â(TM)tapeworms,â(TM) eating away at the very heart and essence of the most precious asset the copyright owner has, his copyrightâ
Copyright Infringements (Audio and Video Recorders): Hearing on S. 1758
Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 459
(1982) (testimony of Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture Association of
America, Inc.).
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
As tech fans, we should realize that every single thing ever invented has it's upsides and downsides. Everything. Except possibly for vaccines, those are the closest we've come to inventing something with no downsides. Everything else I can think of had at least a few negative consequences, VHS and then digital included.
I partially moved back to VHS (but still have plenty of DVDs). It was more because of my 2-year-old who likes playing with the disks - around half my DVDs are scratched to the point of being barely watchable. Honestly though, after starting to pick up VHS again, there are some upsides. Videos sell for a dollar or less and they're just about invincible to kids. Of course, I still use DVDs though. I just have to keep them in high places.
In short, fuck the public experience. It stopped working when the "it's all about me" crowd arrived.
Don't know what type of rose-colored nostalgia glasses you have on, but that wasn't a recent development. Cell phones, that's a new thing, but before that there was still crying kids, noisy cracker-jacks and people talking. Every generation thinks they invented sin, and every generation thinks the next one invented bad manners.
So there are reasons for using VHS, beyond pure nostalgia, or access to videos that aren't digitised.
Though you can also use DVDs to get very high quality audio. You can use PCM audio or AC3 at 640 kbps and play it in a standard DVD player through your hifi. (I know there is a dedicated DVD audio standard, but it never took off and not all hardware supports it, and the encoders are absurdly expensive). I put all 14 Beatles' albums on one DVD in AC3 at 640 with space to spare.
I have videotapes of movies that were never released on DVD, except as hacked together bootlegs. Movies like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, for example.
I'm an 80s movie fanatic, and so many movies that were R-rated that I remember watching have been hacked up so bad for TV play that some of the best scenes are incomprehensible; e.g. the "f*gs in the shower!" scene from Once Bitten. This happens even with some commercial-less cable movie channels as well with modern releases. And, if it's a flick very unlikely to be purchased or rented, it's almost like the original content has been lost to time.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
you'll find that people who grew up with cinema have the respect you crave.
it's precisely the home video, VoD, netflix generations that have fucked the cinema experience.
Particularly magnetic tape, it is suffer to wear as it is played. Each time you watch something, it gets worse due to wear. The more you watch, the worse it looks.
That and no generation loss are the big reasons digital formats are so totally superior. Even if VHS was a high end pro format, it still would suck compared to a similar digital format. The benefit of perfect reproduction of digital is just too massive.
That aside, DVD is superior to VHS quality. DVD gets you quality around Betacam SP. It gets you higher luma and chroma resolution than VHS, no ringing or overshoot, no bleed, and so on.
Those places were always a rarity in most of the United States and destined to become more rare as real estate prices and rents continued to rise. Far, far, far more people are exposed to those films via P2P and home video than a handful of art houses ever achieved.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Better than cassette? Ya sure, but then that's not hard. "Just below DAT?" no, not so much. With Hi-Fi enhancements yes it could get about 70dB SNR (CD and DAT are 96dB) on a new, unused tape. As with all analogue, it degraded over time and suffered generation loss.
In terms of digital it isn't hard to do better than DAT/CD if you like either. You can use DVDs, but not like you think. The DVD-A standard allows for 6-channels of 24-bit, 96kHz audio to be stored. 144dB SNR, DC-48kHz response. In other words, way beyond human hearing, and also the limits of recording technology. Blu-ray players all support it (the MLP coding it uses is what Dolby TrueHD uses) and for that matter you can get more audio and even higher sample rates on Blu-ray discs.
It is just more hipsterish bullshit of "Oh analogue is better." No, it isn't. You can have digital formats that capture more detail, and more importantly don't suffer from playback degradation and generation loss.
I've watched more movies streaming, that I would have totally breezed past in a video store. I've given foreign films a try, loads of documentaries and other oddities that I can enjoy with my monthly subscription to Netflix or through some of the other portals on my google TV. VHS can die. Seems to me this is just a bunch of elitist crap from people afraid of change or who can't let go of the past.
Turner Classic Movies channel still exists and presents classic movies (as in ~1930's to ~1960's with the occasional contemporary film) commercial free.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
> (including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home
Which is what exactly? To be entertained? I don't go to a movie theater to watch a documentary.
Methinks you can take your grainy & choppy 24 Hz "film" and keep it. I'll stick with my 120 Hz plasma with its vivid colors and hope someday movies grow beyond shitty 24 FPS.
Some people film, some like DLP, some like LED/OLED, some like Plasma. They all suck -- its about which Picture Quality (PQ) compromises are you willing to make.
I have found some of my favorite series as a kid on dvd lately, but still there's plenty of stuff I'd love to show my kids. Problem is that I don't have a tv anymore, only a projector with 135" screen, and even the dvds from the 70's-80's shows look rather horrible. Granted many Internet streams have the same problem. In the end it's often better to just let them watch the videos on the laptop or tablet.
tracking... tracking... The horror. The Horror.
Poor quality, wear out and lots of problems. I'm not too unhappy about that.
As a librarian, I have been amazed at the durability of VHS tapes. We have tapes that are 20 years old and have circulated hundreds of times, but show no sign of breaking or wearing down. The shelf-life of a DVD or Blu-Ray in our library is closer to 2 years. We recently got rid of our adult VHS collection because it wasn't circulating anymore. The children's VHS collection continues to circulate well, though, including the titles that we also have on DVD. Many families have retained their old VHS players because the tapes are less likely to be ruined by small children, and can be purchased for next to nothing.
It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
I don't think that this doesn't happen anymore due to lack of demand... I'd love to be able to go to the movies and see old classics on the big screen, and I'd love even more to be able to go and watch TV on the big screen. Sunday Night Football on an IMAX with 7.1 surround? Heck yeah!
I get the sneaking suspicion, however, that there is a lot of movie/tv industry money blocking the way of this happening, though. Also, nobody is going to pay $15 for tickets to an old movie.
The downside to vaccines is that they allowed Jenny McCarthy to have the spotlight far longer than she ever should have.
-David
and don't tell me that sucks.
What I miss most about VHS (and Betamax, for that matter) is the simple ability to fast-forward through all that security/copyright warning/unskippable trailer/etc that's starting to build up on DVD & BluRay. "This Operation is not permitted by disc" or words to that effect really annoy me. Sure, I could rip the movie and store it on a monster hard disk somewhere in the house, stream when required, but when you just want to watch a movie, they're irritating as hell.
(including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home
Which is what exactly? To be entertained? I don't go to a movie theater to watch a documentary.
The film experience involves having a large moving image at a distance that is comfortable for the eyes. Normal TV is a little close if you're making it apparently large enough (i.e., subtending a large enough angle to your eyes). You can replicate the film experience at home, but only if you've got a proper home cinema setup. I haven't, and I don't have the spare space to make one.
Other parts of the film experience are a mixed bag. The sound is worth replicating (and the easiest to do) but the oversalted popcorn, watery cola, surly youths pretending to be staff and usurious prices can all be safely omitted.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I managed to resist in that message, but I still want to know why the slashdot programmers are happy looking like complete morons.
Will they ever get unamerican character sets working, or are they just bigots.
I've heard they think they have a problem with unicode control and composing characters, give me a break! A level 1 filter to filter everything that isn't a graphic LTR character is a couple of minutes work!!
Slashdot is advert supported (in part) the next line is what they are losing.
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I'm surprised that so many people are complaining about their tapes. Sure, the cheaper brands sucked but then they would, they were cheap. I only ever bought decent/high grade Fuji, Sony and TDK tapes and I'm finding I'm pleasantly surprised as I work through my VHS tapes (going back to 1981) as to how good they still look as I copy them to DVD. There were very few that had gone super grainy anbd those were typically cheap tapes. Like eveyrything, if you paid for quality, you got better results. Ditto for the decks themselves. If your only experience of VHS is a £40 machine from Dixons, no wonder you think it sucked but if you had say a Panasonic £500 deck, you'd find it wasn't too bad. That said, colour bleed on the reds still looks awful :-(
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Why would I want to own a movie, when I have seen it once it has already been consumed and reduced to near uselessness.
Which "isles" would that be? The Western Isles? The Isle of Skye? The Scilly Isles?
AISLES!
The downside of the invention of vaccines was the unintended consequence of anti-vaccination nutters.
VHS is inferior in EVERY WAY to DVD. From the format it's self, you need at LEAST SVHS to get even 1/2 way to DVD. to the durability to the workflow for editing and creating a movie on tape.
Only complete morons would be "gong back" to VHS. I'm glad it's gone, dead, buried. Hell I'm happy that DV, HDV, Umatic, and Beta are dead.
Tape sucks, After working with Tape for 20+ years... I am glad it is dead.
Head alignment causing the camera to not record correctly, crap tape clogging heads, head maintenance, belt replacement, pinch roller replacement, oh god no.
Plus let's look at resolution. Regular VHS records and plays back 320X240 resolution MAX. SVHS doubled that. It's why all recordings looked smeared compared to the live broadcast. By the end of it's life Mass produced VHS was a lot better but still nothing like even a crappy made DVD. A SuperBit DVD will fake someone into believing they are watching a BluRay.
Shelf life of Tape is horrid, I have had to spend days trying to figure out how to get a tape to play one last time after sitting in a controlled vault for 12 years. Many tapes would adhere to themselves.
I can see an advantage with records, I can see an advantage with some other older stuff, but VHS was crap from day 1. It wasn't even the better format from day 1.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The copy protection signal is inserted in the vertical blanking interval, and it contains extra sync pulses and fake video data. Since the TV is not displaying anything during the blanking interval, nothing shows up on the screen. That's why it looks okay on the TV. A VCR, on the other hand, is trying to make a faithful recording of the entire signal that it sees. It therefore tries to record the signal containing the extra sync pulses. The AGC sees the extra sync pulses and the fake video data and sets its level incorrectly as a result. The real video information in the frame gets recorded at a much lower level than it normally would, so the screen turns black instead of showing the movie. You'll still hear the sound, however, because a completely separate circuit records the audio.
it's not data, you cant have Data on an analog medium. It's a signal. and they simply Blasted the hell out of the video on the blanking to make the AGC start turning down, then a 1/2 second later they make it go away so the agc over compensates.
It was easily defeated by simply turning down the AGC on the motherboard of the VHS deck, or if you were afraid of the insides, you bought a device for $59.95 that did the same thing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Specifically it put the noise in the blanking, which is supposed to be a fixed reference voltage that VCRs use for gain control. Put noise in there and their gain control is completly ruined. It's actually quite simple to remove with a little electronics knowledge - doesn't even need surfacemount skills, all stripboard will do - so never stopped commercial pirates. Just those who liked to copy tapes for friends or rent-and-copy to make a collection.
The DMCA actually has a very narrow section that relates only to macrovision, requiring that all video recorders manufactured in or imported into the US be disabled by macrovision - either as a property of their design, or in the event their design is macrovision-resistant by the inclusion of an extra chip to detect it and disable recording. [1201](k)(1)/
Reading this makes me want to go home tonight and watch my original Star Wars trilogy on VHS. It's not remastered, not special edition, and hasn't been tampered with or changed in any way. Those films do not exist on DVD or BluRay.
Back in the 80s, I had a couple part-time jobs at repair shops fixing VCRs, and kids jamming stuff into the front-load slots was a CONSTANT source of work. Matchbox cars, small stuffed animals, PB&J sandwiches, you name it...
Top-loaders were more resistant to the problem, and generally cheaper/easier to fix if the kid did manage to get something in there.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
lol Americans, self-censoring the word "hell"...
Many of the so-called "lost movies" or "trapped on vhs" movies. Aren't. They are not "legitimate" transfers. But the news service providers have thousands of these movies ripped from original vhs in excellent quality uploaded and available for the internet saavy. In fact, I can't think of one, ever released on video that cannot be found. alt.binaries.lostmovies - alt.binaries.disney - alt.binaries.multimedia - alt.binaries.moovee.
Because, short of building my own machine, there's no good DVR solution for over-the-air content and I don't have cable. I can stream it for free, but this often forces me to wait some period of time after the original broadcast. Usually a day. Also, the streaming sites often fail to properly support captioning. My wife has hearing loss, so captioning is of premium importance. So we pipe the digital TV signal through a digital-to-analog converter and record shows on VHS.
That's why intelligent people don't patronize services that don't "sell" movies but either sell access to streaming content, or sell downloadable files locked up in some sort of network-dependent DRM. Everything I've downloaded from The Pirate Bay works just fine when the Internet goes down. :)
And nowadays I use a search engine. But I suppose some people miss the days where traveling meant feeding and grooming a horse, cleaning up its crap, and riding on its back exposed to the elements, rather than riding in an enclosed, climate-controlled automobile where one just pours gas in or plugs the thing in.
And nowadays, people don't even need the minimal budgets or producer interest that a B movie needed to get made. Anyone with a camera and a YouTube account can produce, upload, promote, and distribute a movie now. The advent of the Internet has expanded the number of movies out there by an even larger percentage than the advent of VHS did.
I find plenty of VHS rips on The Pirate Bay. Google yields 43,000 results. Just because the companies that make profit off of distributing content don't see any reason to re-distribute old direct-to-VHS movies as downloads doesn't mean the movies are not available. If there be any contemporary interest in an old movie, it has probably been uploaded to TPB or a similar service. And if not, and you have the VHS copy of it... go rip it and upload it!
Liberty in your lifetime
No, I'm not nostalgic about some particular mode of analog distortion like some old guy stuck on tube amplifiers. Yes, DVD, Blueray look better. When they work that is... Way too many times I've rented some movie just to find it is scratched beyond readability so many minutes into it, usually just as it starts getting interesting. Yes, VHS wears out. But it degrades gradually, it doesn't just stop playing. I remember crappy looking pictures on rented tapes that had been viewed too many times. So what? I still got to watch the whole movie! I could see the whole thing that night, without driving back to a store which may not be open by the time I get to the scratch. Or waiting days to send it back and get a possibly better copy from Netflix!
Then there is the players. If I can get a DVD or Blueray player to last 6 months I think I am doing good. I don't know what it is, they just stop. I suspect maybe the lasers? I remember using VHS players for 5 or 6 years at a time!
Sure, now I just use Netflix over the internet for movie rentals. It's convenient, that's great. It's really great for watching shows. The movie selection is still much smaller than it was at the stores. At any given time what is available is what is available. If you want to see some specific older movie you probably cannot. And you can't 'own' a copy of a movie this way. At least not legally. For that you have to buy the DVD or Blueray. Then it's back to scratch land. Yes, that doesn't happen so much if you take care of them. That's easy for all you single people. Try keeping the scratches off your discs when you have a messy wife (doesn't put them away) and a 2 y/o kid! Good luck with that! Yes, kids and wives could kill a VHS tape too but it seems much less likely. We still have some old movies around on VHS and none have died that way yet.
There's so many ways to kill a person contained inside one little box.
VHS could beat the crap out of CDs/DVDs any day of the week.
If you don't want to be forced to wait through 20 mins of commercials to watch something you just paid for.
If you want the luxary of falling asleep during a movie and not have a 30 second menu screen audio clip repeat until you are annoyed enough to turn it off.
If you don't want a tiny scratch to completely bring your movie to a hault.
If you don't want an unnoticed piece of smudge forcing you to stop your movie and start it again, possibly being forced through another 20 mins of commercials.
If you use a universal remote and believe DVD functionality shouldn't be left to random menu screen implementations.
If you want the medium to still work 20 years later.
If you want your medium to most likley work 10 years later.
If you have kids and you want at least 6 months usage before someone messes it up.
if once your watching a movie, you are into the story and discontinue judgements on video quality.
Want medium that is protected by a plastic encasing (why couldn't DVDs be like floppy discs?!)
I love the "warm video" you get with VHS, all those staticy horizontal lines. Digital video just doesn't give you the same feel.
There is a way, but it requires some (expensive) lab equipment most people don't have. You would need two versions of the same recording, one without artifacts (uncompressed), the other one run through the usual encoders with artifacts.
Then show both versions to a test group and ask them in blind testing which one is better.
I remember a similar experiment from the audiophile world, about the audibility of digital artifacts in the CD system. The german magazine Stereoplay set up a high end analog stereo system consisting of turntable, pre-amplifier, power ampilfier and some very nice speakers. There were two configurations:
1) pre-amplifier directly connected to power amplifier
2) pre-amplifier connected to A/D converter connected to D/A converter connected to power amplifier
So the difference was that setup 2) had the signal digitized and conveted back.
In the listening test, the test group was unable to detect a difference ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
(pulls Woody Allen video clip out of his back pocket and plays it)
Alvy Singer: He can give it... do you have to give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan!
Man in Theatre Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called "TV, Media and Culture." So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me...
[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]
Alvy Singer: come over here for a second... tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Pretentious Frauds and idiots with loud opinions existed before the Web. When Allen filmed this scene over 30 years ago, I think he was really dreaming about having a phone with a YouTube app in his pocket so he could refute them all.
It's like these people don't know that piracy and self-publishing (or viewing self-published movies) exist. No movies are lost, it's easier to release and spread low-budget movies than ever, the available collection is bigger than ever. If you only work within the law and pretend you can't view self-published movies then you're living in the world of RMS' Right to Read and it's your own cowardly fault for boxing yourself in.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Ah, you just live in the wrong place. Any decently sized city will have a Repertory cinema or two around. And if you're really fortunate, you get something like Bell Lightbox: http://tiff.net/films/winter
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Never dealt with this issue so be gentle...
1. What's it take to convert/digitize VHS tape on a computer?
2. What's the best, or most appropriate, format to 'rip' the tapes into?
3. What programs do you need to do so (Linux preferred)?
4. Does PAL vs. SECAM matter?
5. Any experiences/stories from folks having done so?
Thanks!
To watch a movie in peace you have to go to the 10:00 showing on a Monday night. And you better bring a bag of cash to buy the tickets.
The last movie I saw at the the theater, was the final Harry Potter. I took my kids and after tickets, a barrel of popcorn, a pretzel and a bucket of flat cola, I was out $50. Throughout the entire movie I kept getting an annoying bright blue light shining in my face every three minutes by some jerk who couldn't wait until the movie was over to answer his texts, or update his Facebook or whatever. A 50 inch plasma costs less than 11 trips to the theater and you can rent the blue ray for $1 from Redbox. I don't need to see the crap the day it hits the theater anymore.
TCM is one reason why AMC is the way it is today. AMC simply couldn't compete with Turner's larger movie archives, so they went to showing newer contemporary films and later, original programming.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nope. It's movie theaters getting lax on who they toss out.
In the 70's, people would be told to be quite or asked to leave.
Return to that, and the problem will go away.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In real life, you simply couldn't see that the people you were talking to couldn't spell :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Betamax failed depite technical superiority because VHS offered better:
1) Total maximum capacity of the individual tapes (Which mattered when blank tapes were $25 each in 1980)
2) Availability of rental titles
3) Cost of record/playback machines
I know of many parents of small children that deliberately keep VHS around. VHS tapes of the old children's classics can be found at Goodwill and garage sales for cheap. They have the added benefit of being virtually indestructible. If the tape sits on the floor for a week, getting kicked around, it's basically still good as new (albeit needing a decent dusting). A DVD/BluRay would be unusable after that.
But that's what made going to the art houses so cool--you could look down on all those people living in benighted communities without cool art houses.
Ha ha this text is never gonna be seen by Lumpy because he can only read and respond to subject lines and headings. Oh Lumpy! I slept with your mom and refused to give her $20 for it.
VHS is inferior except that the content being talked about IS NOT AVAILABLE ON DVD. Had Lumpy bothered to read the article summary he might have realized it's about the content rather than the medium. Oh well, he'll never know because I didn't put it in the subject line.
The content has value despite it's low quality medium. See also: Youtube. The the quality of videos certainly didn't make the site. It was unique content that wasn't available elsewhere.
From the summary that Lumpy couldn't bother to read:
I had a large collection of VCR tapes that I recently decided to preserve in digital format. Everything from kids cartoons, recordings of birthday parties and family gatherings, to the Stargate and Terminator movies.
My advice? Don't buy a new VCR. It will eat your tapes and break after about ten plays. Go find a used one from the 80's or early 90s at a yard sale or online. We found one and it has worked spectacularly despite its age. The new ones are designed to fail. Like many things, "they don't make 'em like that anymore."
I want this account deleted.
I heard of a series seen in Japan of where they do movies based on actual developments and put it together like a documentary. I've not seen it but one episode was of the guys who developed the VHS deck. It had scenes where their lab has stacks of o-scopes and other test equipment (old stuff of late 60s early 70s). Empty boxes of take out food, they worked and worked of all-nighters so the place was really trashy. Much effort was put into loading mechanism to reduce tape jams. They approached Sony (who turned them down) and eventually went to Victor Corp of Japan and got them to also license the format to other companies. One scene I heard is an engineer was assigned to this project with overall mission to fire the people involved (I haven't seen this so I may not have the full story), the engineer feels like committing hari-kari or what samurais do when given "opportunity to honorably kill themselves." Talked to someone that saw it, it sounds amazing.
mfwright@batnet.com
> You can replicate the film experience at home, but only if you've got a proper home cinema setup.
Oh please. It's not rocket science.
You _do_ realize that the viewing angle for THX is:
This tells you the optimal distance from screen to seats to replicate the EXACT viewing feeling.
http://myhometheater.homestead.com/viewingdistancecalculator.html
> I haven't, and I don't have the spare space to make one.
Even a shitty little 42" screen CAN replicate the film experience -- why don't you actually try defining the exact nature of what the problem is before blowing it off.
The only times I want to watch a VHS are the original Star Wars Trilogy. Mainly because George Lucas had
to go and add a bunch of CGI nonsense to the greatest story ever told. Also Hayden Christennsen. I don't know
if that's how you spell his name and I don't care. He's a douche. But yeah VHS is the only way to watch Star
Wars. Actually someone could probably make a lot of money by releasing not fucked with blu ray versions of
those movies.
and sailed the high seas browsing the isles for films to plunder!
For the same reasons, future generations may know little of the days when buying a game meant you owned it and could install it and play it even if the Internet was down.
I don't use Steam and I never will.
Ah, yes! TCM, the true place for catching a replay of Soylent Green, Logan's Run and other sci-fi classics not seen practically anywhere.
Is it bad that I remember all those movies?
#DeleteChrome
Unfortunately TCM is not part of my Comcast tier - I'd rather spend the money on Netflix. But I've heard TCM is pretty good.
Back in the day, AMC was part of the base package from McCaw Cablevision or whatever the name of our provider was.
#DeleteChrome
If it is, it is worse that I have all those movies on DVD.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I still remember Farrah Fawcett's awful, AWFUL acting in Logan's Run.
On the other hand, I always liked Charlton Heston - even though he sometimes makes William Shatner seem subdued by comparison.
#DeleteChrome
Laserdisc was an analog format. analog implies no bits, implies the degradation of the media was not technically bitrot
In addition to encoding and DVD players causing artifacting, the television itself could be introducing artifacting during a post-processing routine. I was reading a review on a 1 year old plasma that the reviewer had some blocky artifacting on some quick transitions before he disabled the 600mhz interpolation mode.
They call that color banding and is definitely a problem for older and less expensive HDTVs.
Thanks. I had an analog TV at the time, so I guess it was the result of a low quality DAC on the component jacks out or poor encoding.
I wish I had mod points to give you, especially since his post garnered a +5 - apparently he's not the only one that has reading comprehension issues.
Unique Content. That's what it's really all about. People who relate primarily by the lowest common denominators are not people who care about unique content, or even about variety. The VHS revolution was a big deal because of all the obscure media people were finally able to share, and to watch whenever they wanted to, with whomever they wanted to.