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Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month (mentalfloss.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Most of us stopped using video cassette recorders a very, very long time ago. By 2008, DVD had officially replaced VHS as the preferred home media format, and the glory days of the 1980s -- when VHS and Betamax battled it out to be the number-one choice for watching and recording movies and television at home -- were very much in the rear-view mirror. So it might surprise you to learn that VCRs are still being manufactured -- at least they were until this month. Funai Electric, the last remaining Japanese company to make the units, has announced that the company will cease production on its VCR units, due to declining sales and difficulty acquiring parts. Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North America, under brand names like Sanyo, but last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide.
That's it! Time to buy a Betamax.
"Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month"
"Funai Electric, the last remaining Japanese company to make the units, has announced that the company will cease production on its VCR units, due to declining sales and difficulty acquiring parts."
"Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North America, under brand names like Sanyo, but last year's figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide."
So China will make its last VCR under contract for a Japanese rebrander.
VCRs haven't competed against DVDs for a long time. If you buy a movie, it has come on DVD (or blue-ray) for over a decade.
The reason people buy VCRs now is to record shows off the TV to watch them later. That's not easy to do on a DVD player. So as DVRs have become more popular, they've replaced the final uses for VCR.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Who in hell bought these?
No sir I dont like it.
Suck it hipsters!
I imagine two groups of people are still buying them, aside for specialty uses.
Some people BUY movies, and some of those have hundreds of video tapes they've purchased over the years. For some old movies, they can be replaced with DVD iexpensively, but Disney is an important exception. 50 Disney movies isn't cheap.
I also know people for whom their primary entertainment is shows they've recorded. They are comfortable with their routine. Current DVRs available for purchase haven't converted all of these people, and DVRs rented from the cable company are expensive.
Then there are 200 niche uses, with ten or twenty people in each niche.
That sounds like a lot to me.
750,000 sales isn't enough to be interesting these days :(
No one can just make money anymore, you have to make MORE than you made yesterday or you're a failure :/
(Wonder how that will work out for Nintendo next year...)
but Disney is an important exception. 50 Disney movies isn't cheap.
And Disney VHS cassettes come with DRM, so you can't always convert them to DVD yourself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You just need a video "stabilizer"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How do you DRM an Analog Recording?
All the VHS to DVD converters I have seen you just plug in the Analog Video and Audio out (Yellow, White Red) to a receiver then it converts it to a digital signal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you look on the net, you'll find lots of people have been kind enough to do it for you.
What, you never heard of a cable descrambler? Those things were the shit in the 90's. I'm so glad I didn't pay to watch that Woodstock where everyone went apeshit about bottled water.
The digital ones were cool too, but they were spoofers, not descramblers. They just made your box look like test equipment so no charges. Too bad they got blocked so fast.
Google on macrovision
read up on macrovision.
lots of ways to mess with analog signals and 'drm them'.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The VCRs are made in China by a Japanese company. VCRs haven't been made *in* Japan for a while now.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Think old games with "illegal" floppy disk sectors, but this time with some anomalous out of spec bursts on the signal.
Now, either you gear defeats this old analog stuff, or it is of no consequence given it was intended to make a second VCR in writing mode fail.
BTW the one converter I saw was not really a converter per se, but a combined VCR and DVD player and burner.
An old TV tuner PCI card would be cool too : there's usually a composite input, and even if the TV antenna input isn't useful for TV anymore you may use it to receive FM radio instead.
but Disney is an important exception. 50 Disney movies isn't cheap.
And Disney VHS cassettes come with DRM, so you can't always convert them to DVD yourself.
I would argue it's not worth the effort. Most of Disney's high-profile movies are available restored on blu-ray now. The increase in picture and audio quality is worth rebuying instead of converting an analog SD format to a newer medium.
Macrovision isn't exactly DRM. Heck, back in the day we could defeat it with a baseband signal adapter from Radio Shack. You could adjust the signal level, and peg the AGC circuit so that it couldn't be fooled into screwing with the brightness anymore.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm pretty sure that at any one time, a large selection of Disney movies are "in the vault" and not available for purchase at retail. That is an issue. And Disney's anti-consumer attitude in this manner has actually subjected them to MORE piracy. Of course, when you have most of Congress in your pocket, you can have copyright terms extended periodically to compensate.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Works fine with my 720 line digital TV. Paid for itself by avoiding cable DVR fees. I hear it wontbwork with a 1080.
In the analogue realm there's lots of ways to apply DRM to a signal but all of which require the support from a hardware manufacturer to implement the lockout. There's nothing someone can do to stop you copying a VHS if the recorder ignores macrovision, and most of them do.
If modern DRM is putting a money in a safe, handing you a key and telling you that you're only allowed to open the safe when you're told to, then old school macrovision is putting money in a safe, leaving the door open, handing you the key and telling you that when told you should lock up the safe.
I worked at a thrift shop for a few months. There are people whose children browse the VHS tapes the entire time mom or dad shops and they end up leaving with an armload of them. And they never go away, people bring boxes in just as fast as they go out. It's kind of amazing when you consider what a GOD-AWFUL format it is. People love a bargain, though.
Both the Salvation Army and Goodwill have reported strong supplies of "refurbished" VCRs in a wide variety of makes and models. Get your home entertainment system to blink 12:00 today; stop by your local shop and pick one up!
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I thought that too at first. But it takes a long time to ship from China. They've probably built up significant stocks they're anticipating demand will be effectively zero after they sell through those stocks.
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> . There's nothing someone can do to stop you copying a VHS if the recorder ignores macrovision, and most of them do.
Macrovision was originally developed for VCRs that were ALREADY in use. The VCR doesn't have to support Macrovision. It pulses the off-screen lines very bright, then very low, causing the AGC to adjust the picture brightness in the opposite direction.
I have one - maybe two - VCRs around. Both are very old, but at least one is a nice four head model. You never know when you might find an old tape and wonder what is on it or know what is on it and want that content.
750,000 units a year is still over 2,000 a day -- there's plenty of companies that would kill for those kind of numbers.
Or a camcorder.
Download the torrents. Much easier.
According to this article http://www.heise.de/newsticker... it's not VCRs but video cassettes. Which make the number much more plausible IMHO.
V2000 for me.
There were also devices specifically designed to filter out the noise Macrovision added in the VBI. I think I still have one kicking around somewhere; if you google "Macrovision removal circuit," you'll find several largely similar devices that'll do the job.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You're missing my point. The VCR has no say in the matter which makes this DRM scheme the most easily circumvented. You're entirely relying on the receiving equipment to do something with the signal, and surprise surprise most cheap video capture dongles have no problem with this.
If you can display it on a TV, you can display it on your computer screen. If you can display it on a computer screen you can capture the MPG stream.
DRM in the digital world only concerns itself preventing bit-perfect copies. The analogue hole wasn't closeable by Macrovision because the entire technology was analogue.
I don't have a DVR. I had been using VHS to record some late-night shows that I would enjoy watching in the morning while on my treadmill. This worked up until Time Warner Cable made my VCR unusable by ceasing analog broadcasts to my VCR's tuner was of no use. I don't want to rent several DVRs from TWC. I found a company on the web that sells a variety of M-Card enabled DVRs and cable boxes, but they turned out to be a scam. So, I'm wondering what I should do. I hear TiVo doesn't work without a subscription anymore. Have I no recourse but to rent multiple boxes from TWC?