My nostalgia towards VCRs comes not from the inherent features of the format, but rather the circumstances around its usage.
Specifically, I fondly remember the days when all you needed to record TV was to push the 'record' button. You didn't have to indefinitely rent a set-top box from your cable provider; your video storage was easily expandable (just buy more tapes), there was no such thing as unskippable commercials or 'sorry you're not authorized to record this channel'.
Or you program the VCR and it starts and stops recording in time. But the TV schedule is so off that you miss that movie completely. I swear that in Croatia, in the 90's, announced tv schedule was just a suggestion of what they might put on at around that timeframe. Except Santa Barbara, people went mad if that wasn't on schedule :)
I am surprised at the number of comments to this effect on a site where I am normally in awe of the depth and breadth of technical knowledge, and the willingness to learn by doing, that is displayed. I found VCRs easy enough to use and only ever got caught out by Programme Delivery Control.
My aunt used to have two VCRs and an alarm clock. She'd use the alarm to remind her to hit record. She struggled with the timer, but I don't think she trusted it to record what she asked it to.
It's now 2016. She's got two DVRs... and an alarm clock.
To clarify, I'm not claiming that programming a VCR actually is difficult. I don't know, because I'm slightly too young to have ever tried it. I was merely pointing out that "VCR programming is difficult" is or was a cultural meme.
I don't know about the US, but in Europe we had this dead easy code programming (forgot what the name for it was). Each show had a code printed next to it in the weekly showtime guide. You'd open up some VCR menu, enter the code, and thus program the thing in 10 seconds. It would start recording at exactly the right time because the channel would send a special signal together with the beginning of the show. Worked 100% at least 80% of the time ;).
Actually, even the oldest VCRs let you do that, when your source was a coax connection (cable or antenna) and you were using a true TV with its own tuner. You would select on the VCR whether to view the VCR tuner or bypass it.
While it is true that this was possible, that does not mean it was easy. It may have happened, but I cannot recall a single time when I or someone in my family actually succeeded in doing that.
Odd, that was one of the main uses of our VCR. It never seemed complicated to me (tune VCR, record. Change channel on TV, watch) Maybe it was a lot easier in Europe with the SCART hookup?
In Europe (not sure about the rest of the world) the newspapers printed numerical codes along with each TV listing. If you typed that into the VCR it would populate the start and end times for you, possibly the channel as well?
That's a shorthand for telling the VCR the channel and timeframe to record; it's not related to the ability to record one channel while viewing another.
Every VCR I ever owned had that ability, clear back to my first Betamax.
Same! SCART [1] was amazing; it was a single plug for analog video and audio.
You'd typically have a coax splitter so both the VCR and the TV could get an independent feed from cable/antenna. Then you'd use SCART to get the VCR's output on the TV's 'AV' input, a special input mode like 'HDMI' on modern TVs.
I agree, it was easy (and I live in the US). Even programming a time-delayed recording was pretty easy though a lot of owners never even seemed to learn how to set the clock. However, there were a set of people who, for some reason, could just not grok the picture currently on the TV being something different than what was being recorded.
It only takes two shows that run on different networks. Running popular shows in conflicting time slots was a common strategy to retain viewer share, especially before the VCR was widespread.
I miss VCRs. Yeah the image quality is poor next to BluRay or even standard DVDs, but I don't really care about that and the usability is much simpler. As you said, skipping previews is easy, there is no region locking, and the tapes themselves are in my experience much more durable. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to spend five minutes cleaning a DVD to get it to play without skipping or freezing. And I've easily lost hundreds of dollars worth of purchased DVDs due to scratches (I have kids). VHS tapes on the other hand never gave me any problems and always worked.
Maybe no region lock, but the fragmentation between NTSC, PAL and SECAM means the situation was the same.
It was worse actually because it's easy to find a DVD reader that ignore zones, but if you had a NTSC tape in a PAL country the only solution was to import a NTSC VCR from abroad.
And sorry but I completely disagree on quality; maybe VHS is more kid-proof (as long as they don't figure out how to open it and pull the tape), but a DVD correctly handled will last forever while a VHS degrade over time, especially when you play it often. And if you pause the VCR for too long it's even worse.
>DVD correctly handled will last forever while a VHS degrade over time, especially when you play it often
True, but a mangled VHS can be still be recovered. The analog nature of the degradation means that VHS is still somewhat usuable, whereas damaged DVDs are often useless.
For many people there is also a huge nostalgia factor at play.
Yeah sure, there is probably specialized equipment for recovery too. It just doesn't really compare to pulling the tape out of a shattered VHS cassette, taping it together, respooling on another cassette and getting something playable.
As I mentioned in another comment, some of my thoughts on these kind of advantages are probably rooted in nostalgia :)
I still have one, and that's exactly what I use it for: To record a show for someone.
I tried burning it to a DVD from an MPEG recorded from a TV card on my computer, but it took way too long (both in actual time, and how much time I had to spend messing with it) and they had trouble with it as well.
So the VCR is still in active (but infrequent) use. I wrote a little script to generate VCR+ codes directly from MythTV listings and I program the VCR weeks in advance.
Doesn't bother me in the least. I am in the camp with Nicholas Negroponte who in his book Being Digital dismissed HD video as a waste of bandwidth, arguing that the same bandwidth should be used for more personalized, interactive experiences.
Basically standard def video is fine for almost any entertainmment. I'd much rather get smooth streaming of a lower-def video than choppy, pixelated HD without having to pay for a top-tier connection speed from my ISP.
It was "good" for its time --but it could have been more user friendly if they had let that outfit legally manufacture double decker duplicating VCRs which were sued from selling to consumers -- tho I think they were allowed to sell to commercial interests. No thanks to mr Valenti, it seems.
That said, I do not see the modern day appeal. It's not an antikythera.
VHS and other analog media have distinctive characteristics (eg. scanlines) that some people find appealing. The same thing happens with analog audio formats like vinyl records.
yes i agree, and black and white TV had essentially complete uninterrupted image information on each line it scanned as it was only limited by the phosphor dust size in the original camera tube, like looking at the perfect image through blinds and one's brain filled in the gaps between the lines.
thus even with the move to colour, information was lost horizontally as a continuous line was replaced with dots.
Me too. I have fond memories of watching skinemax and HBO in early 90s, trying to record money scenes from various B and C rated flix. No complicated setup. Just hit REC button of my Panasonic VCR remote.
And oh man, HBO used to air some trash back then especially during day time.
TiVo got the casual, in-home usability of VCRs correct. Where it lacked compared to VCRs was transferring those recordings to another TV, possibly outside of your house. This limitation also affects any other DVR, and it's a fairly significant one.
I have this funny feeling that FreeView certification in the UK and Australia on DVRs means restricting transferring videos from the device. Happy to be corrected on that one.
I don't own a DVR at the moment but my parents do. Getting recordings off that one means figuring out the (temporary) URL that DLNA/uPNP uses for playback and pointing wget at it.
This is crazy "Many collectors consider VHS to be the vinyl of analog video recording, and think the future could see them hoarded just as enthusiastically"
I can sort of get the melancholy/nostalgia for vinyl records, despite the crackles and pops... But low def video? How can someone think it's superior to modern alternatives? I can understand not being enamored with seeing people's warts on high def... But aside from faces, high def is demonstrably better, no?
I think the appeal exists for exactly the same reason: the affectations of the medium.
Both vinyl and VHS are obviously inferior as a medium for high-fidelity playback compared to modern digital formats. Both impart their own artefacts and types of imperfection which may be aesthetically desirable for what they evoke. Consider the recent "Alien: Isolation" game- the developers made extensive use (and abuse) of analog video playback equipment to recreate the battered, lo-fi feel of technology in the other Alien films.
A big assumption here is that the throwback to these old mediums is quality or artefacts but, with vinyl at least, I think that's largely wrong. Most of the arguments I see for it is the packaging. The package a vinyl record comes in has multiple large pieces of artwork, liner notes, lyrics etc. The medium also encourages listening to music as a main activity when we're all now so used to it being background noise.
With VHS you get crappy quality, you need more physical storage space (but, unlike vinyl, you don't get better packaging in return), and seeking is much more difficult (with vinyl seeking is almost as easy as CD/digital). Nostalgia is probably the biggest driver when it comes to VHS (in the same way audio cassettes are gaining in popularity).
I'd suggest LaserDisc is closer to the vinyl of video - maybe CED - but LaserDisc qualitywise was almost broadcast, and pushed the best the medium (NTSC) could do.
I grew up watching the Wizard of Oz every year on standard def broadcast TV. Then I moved to LA and got a chance to see it in a theatre from a restored print on actual film (this was 20 years ago). The detail was incredible, but it also took some of the magic away because it was now painfully obvious that it was shot on a sound stage. Production flaws that had been hidden by the low definition were now painfully visible. I haven't watched it since, despite the fact that I have it on DVD.
It's probably an urban legend, but I remember hearing that porn DVD's didn't sell well initially because VHS did a better job at covering.... "imperfections"
I can understand not wanting a high quality signal of something not meant to be high quality. But DVDs can hold a low-quality video just fine. I've got some SD DVDs.
And VCRs are generally substantially lower quality than the "original" since VCR tapes are much lower resolution than NTSC, so that doesn't really work well.
Really, none of the vinyl arguments apply here.
(Full disclosure, I don't really buy the vinyl arguments either. My personal suspicion is that vinyl has historically been thought to be better not because of vinyl advantages but because vinyl mixes weren't participating in the loudness war. I'll buy that a non-war'ed vinyl might sound better than a war'ed CD, but I'd rather have a non-war'ed CD.)
> Full disclosure, I don't really buy the vinyl arguments either. My personal suspicion is that vinyl has historically been thought to be better not because of vinyl advantages but because vinyl mixes weren't participating in the loudness war. I'll buy that a non-war'ed vinyl might sound better than a war'ed CD, but I'd rather have a non-war'ed CD.
Heh. Everybody forgets that the Loudness War goes all the way back to even the Beatles. It's not new.
However, most people who "prefer" vinyl do so because it sounds "warm". They like the sonic imprint that the needle, preamp, amplifier (which has to be tube, dontcha know), and speakers put on the sound.
In reality, it's personal preference with a dose of whatever you were raised on in adolescence. It's like guitar preference--you may like the sound a Fender Stratocaster makes when we all know that a Rickenbacker 360 is objectively superior while staying in tune better. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic :) )
But, yes, calling vinyl "better" is quite silly. Especially since it degrades with every playing.
>> "Heh. Everybody forgets that the Loudness War goes all the way back to even the Beatles. It's not new."
Loudness was something to strive for then sure but it wasn't crushing the dynamics out of music the way we've been doing since the 90's. Digital made that possible so older vinyl records will have much greater dynamic range.
Personally my preference for vinyl is packaging. I like large art, liner notes, and lyrics. I also like that it encourages me to make listening my main activity instead of using music as background noise. In these areas vinyl is superior but I don't think any medium is overall better than another. They're useful for different things. I subscribe to two streaming services and have headphones on most of the day. Without digital streaming I'd spend half the day flipping records and going crazy.
IIRC, the "no vinyl loudness war" argument is based on the fact that vinyl loudness is limited since it causes a higher probability of needle skipping. This is also the reason for why vinyls are recorded with the bass de-emphasised, needing a corresponding vinyl RIAA preamp.
> But, yes, calling vinyl "better" is quite silly. Especially since it degrades with every playing.
For what is worth, this is what I heard a vinyl fan say about this: "Since the needle changes the disk, every time you play a vinyl you are effectively listening to it for the first time. DVDs can't do that"
The 'warmth' of vinyl isn't just due to the mastering (though this certainly plays a part), it's also meant to be because of the physical limitations of the vinyl itself. IIRC the grooves made for low frequencies are easier to create than the grooves for high frequencies.
Intersting so it's essentially EQ'd differently post pressing? Did they not take this into account when creating the master by cutting low frequencies or boosting highs?
Yes, they did. An inherent tradeoff between mids and bass has to be made to prevent the needle skipping, too. A great example is if you go listen to roots or dub reggae, like Barrington Levy - mids are sucked in to accommodate the huge bass, and the treble is pushed up to compensate for the resultant lack of clarity/character.
Needle skipping is also the original reason for mid/side (or in old terms, lateral/vertical) style processing - in a stereo record groove, anything mono is equal on both sides, hence in the 'mid(dle)' of the mix. Anything panned is more prominent on one side than another. Compressing the mid and side differently allows you to maximise the stereo-ness of the record without as much effect on the overall mix, and without throwing the needle off to the side. When multi-channel recordings first came out, they originally mixed different instruments to different channels instead of trying to create a cohesive single image. It was basically between headphones and the quest for loudness that engineers found that you can get 'more' out of the record with a (now-traditional) centre-focused mix.
Reading up a little further it appears vinyl had issues with both high and low frequencies, but the bass frequencies tended to be boosted by the amp. The weaknesses on the high and low frequencies seems to tie in with the RIAA equalisation information.
>How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives?
There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market, collectors/nostalgists, archivist. There are many nostaligists who enjoy vinyl for the warm feeling it psycologically imparts and similarly so for VHS video.
Where the legacy-media market splits is when it comes to archivist. There are many archivist who prefer the vinyl medium over digital because of media-rot issues. The robustness of vinyl is exceptional compared to other medium [1] If you want to play back a CD you are reliant on a CD player and all of it's integrated circuits working properly to extract the information. With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail. This is attractive to archivists.
The closest equivalent of vinyl in the video domain is film: super low tech play back (heck you can even look at it) it's longevity is worse than vinyl though.
[1]probably due to it's low information density and how the data is sequenced. I.e. one aberrant perturbation of the medium or read head doesn't cause large chunks of the data to be lost or unreadable.
"With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail."
All you need something that rotates and a thin nail?
It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it did not sound as well as the real thing.
It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs micromachined components.
Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and every unit is expensive to make.
It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl.
Normal players also destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much them cost?
Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers.
One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore all the information.
It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is noise, degradation and so on.
In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.
Vinyl's robustness comes from being purely mechanical and analog. That's film's advantage too. To play back a CD, you need the physical electronics to read the data (even moreso for magnetic media formats) but you also need the algorithms needed to turn the physical data into information. With vinyl the wiggles in the medium are directly related to wiggles in the sound waves the medium is encoding; all you have to do is amplify them. Even if you had no idea what a record is, you could stumble across the playback mechanism by accident.
You are right, the video analogue to vinyl is film. I can see the appeal of 35mm film, I can see people imagining it as more natural (being analogue) and having certain human/warm qualities --but I can't see that in VHS. VHS is very utilitarian, I can only guess it's the "vernacular" aspect of it. It was the every man or woman's medium, it was not classy, not professional, so maybe that, the vernacular, the pedestrian appeal. Like the Bic pen or the cheap Dutch bikes, acetate eyeglasses frames, polyester, etc.
When I'm at my grandparents I get a kick out of watching VHS movies on their old CRT TV. Plus I get to watch the unadulterated version of 'A New Hope'.
After about 10 minutes I forget what I'm watching on anyway.
The unadulterated version of the original Star Wars is, kind of, available, as the "Despecialized Edition" widely floating around the universe. It's HD. So, so much better than VHS, particularly if you have a big TV on which to play it.
Just to add: there's also the Silver Screen edition [1], which is sourced from a single cleaned up 35mm film print, instead of from scenes spliced from various sources.
Why not set it up at home? It takes up one little corner and you get the added bonus of being able to play lightgun games, which my kids cant get enough of!
There are lightguns that work with LCDs. They use the same principle as a wiimote (LED bars at the top/bottom of the screen, plus some calibration). Accuracy isn't 100%, but it's no worse than the CRT lightguns I used in the past.
Maybe they love the fact that every time they play a tape it is slowly being destroyed. Most VHS tape will reduce to noise after repeated playback over time. Especially if the player is lousy, you can see quality loss within a few viewings.
You would have to be visually impared to not see the huge difference between VHS and a hidef digital video.
I doubt that most people can tell the difference between vinyl and a CD. Many audiopaths (aka audiophiles) will of course argue that vinyl is vastly superior, bringing up all kinds of pseudo-science which is also used to sell overpriced gear
Vinyl and cd are simple to tell apart. On cd there's no hums, no crackles, better bass and overall fidelity is better. It's like the different between DVD and bluray. On a good system anyone can tell the difference.
Technically better doesn't inherently mean more enjoyable, though.
I would say the success of "VHS Camera" apps and the like (and mostly with people scarcely old enough to remember what a VHS looked like) suggests there's quite a bit of taste for the general aesthetic of analog video.
Nobody in this thread has said it, but, like vinyl, there are a lot of weird cassettes out there that you cannot find on DVD or YouTube. If you're looking for surreal/nostalgic/obscure videos, VHS is a phenomenal format, similar to vinyl for particular genres (dance music, country, 20s-40s music...).
That's true but many/most people who are into vinyl are convinced that it sounds objectively better, IME. Not because of the compression/mastering issues everyone knows about, not because of the nostalgia factor- they literally just think it's an inherently better medium for recording and replaying audio. Such is the power of the human imagination. :)
Nobody will tell you that they vinyl is technically better, but that it sounds subjectively better for them.
They will tell you that sounds better(for them). It is not imagination, it is taste.
Lots of artist and people that love old music(like Beatles) prefer vinyl because it was the medium for what it was created. I understand them, they have a point.
If I play Sonic the Hedgehog or original Mario on an emulator and a digital TV I see pixels that were not there on fuzzy old screens.
The consequences of the fact that vinyl is ultimately made out of atoms is lost on many. The idea that "analog" means "infinite precision" is surprisingly common.
Which is still a bizarre claim. If anything is "the vinyl of analog video recording", it's actual film on reels, not videotape. It's more accurate to say that VHS is the compact cassette of analog video recording.
Well, I get that. My issue is I can't see anything redeeming in the technology. It's not "warm to the eyes" or the artifacts don't humanize it, they usually get in the way of the experience. VHS to me, was a useful tool, but inferior, none the less.
I understand if someone wants to keep their old collection, but.... Paying thousands for a "rare" copy of an inferior technology? I don't get it.
Conspicuous consumption, I can spend the thousands and you can't therefore I'm better.
Personally I'm not a big fan of this seedy aspect of humanity, and would file a bug on it, if someone could just point me to the right github account...
“Watching them on VHS is closer to the old drive-in or grindhouse theater, the way the director intended it to look.” Practically no director intended for the films to look terrible on VHS tapes, it was a limitation of the technology. I understand enjoying the look of the technology as a consumer and I doubt the producers cared for it.
Maybe they didn't care about it, but I guess they accounted for it. For example, the medium can hide costume or makeup elements that would otherwise break the suspension of disbelief (personally I find this to be the case when watching HD remasters of older scifi).
I was under the impression that there was no way to stop VHS tapes degrading for every time you watch them. Or does that only apply to recording?
I remember taping music videos from MTV on VHS when I was a kid, like a mix tape of videos. And that tape was pretty worn out after just a few re-recordings, the quality was noticeably affected.
I found that stuff you recorded yourself was lower grade than what you bought prerecorded. I had some purchased movies that were watched many dozens of times and were still fine. And Blockbuster did, for a while, have a great business in renting out tapes over and over again, and I don't recall ever getting a noticeably degraded copy from them.
Used pro-grade VHS VCRs are getting expensive. That's what you want for transcribing old VHS tapes to some other medium. Pro units have timebase correction and lack Macrovision copy protection, so you can get a clean signal out.
> Their VCRs are made in China and sold in many territories, including North America, under brand names like Sanyo..
The title is misleading as it seems they are ceasing their production in China (likely already ceased in Japan).
Further, with 750,000 units sold worldwide by them, there is enough of a market for China to continue manufacturing (a quick search also shows some on Alibaba making VCR/DVD combo players).
One peculiar thing in the last few years of the VHS era, was that they were really cheap.
They were so much more mechanically complex than DVD players, but still as cheap as the cheap no name DVD players - although they must have been much more expensive to manufacture.
The engineering was initially more complex. But once the production tooling was done, it probably didn't cost a lot to churn them out.
The quality of the components in a cheap VCR is also shocking. Compare a early Sony Betamax deck to one of the $49 VCRs you could buy at the end of their era.
I still have a VCR that I very occasionally use to watch some old VHS tapes. Nostalgia nite, with buttered popcorn. The OP article will probably be the kick in the butt I need to send those tapes off for copying to DVD.
When my VCR finally dies, I'll probably miss most the flashing green "12:00". It indicates that in 31 years, I never did RTFM to figure out how to set the time. And never will. One finds one's inner rebel in the least significant places....
Its not so much the vinyl comparison, as it is there is a a lot of content that never made it to DVD, let alone blu-ray. It took decades for the Osamu Tezuka Unico films to get a release on DVD, and some movies may never see one. The cult animated series The Bionic Six has yet to see such. While youtube exists, it's vulnerable to releasing edited or incomplete versions of the originals.
I got a lot of movies on VHS rated G to R movies in a box in my basement. Last VCR I had ate tapes and I had to quit using it as I didn't know how to fix that.
I know there are DVD and VHS hybrids that were able to copy VHS tapes to DVD-R disks. But that can't be done with copy protection in the VHS tapes.
My wife and I have our wedding in 1997 on two VHS tapes, I haven't had a capture card to convert it to MP4 files or whatever. We got a lot of tapes in 8MM format and the advanced format that replaced it using video cameras as well. I don't make much money because I am disabled and trying to get better so I can write code again. So paying a professional to transfer it would cost too much.
In Thailand they quit using VHS tapes and went to the VideoCD format as CD players are cheaper to make than VHS VCRs, plus when they pirate a movie it is on VideoCD format using 3 or 4 CDs to play the whole movie. In the USA we went to Video DVD disks (Red Box or Family Video, etc), or BluRay disks.
> At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income for Ampex,” he wrote[1].
> but last year’s figures reported just 750,000 sales worldwide...
Wow.
I can't see anyone mourning the passing of VHS. Dreadful quality. Whereas in the audio arena CDs didn't improve on Vinyl, DVD technology was way better than VHS.
What defines the definition in VCR tape? The size of the magnetic grains in the tape or something like that? Is it possible to manufacture a special magnetic VCR tape that could write DVD-quality definition?
In practice it'd just be the standard of the signal that's being recorded (PAL/NTSC/SECAM). Wouldn't surprise me if the actual tape is capable of handling more..
Consumer VHS VCRs could not reproduce the full fidelity of a broadcast NTSC picture. Commercial VCRs, which typically used Betamax, were better and used by broadcasters until digital took over.
You would need to convert it to NTSC. Probably most set-top boxes still have a cable coax output on channel 3 or 4, which you could connect to your VCR.
That's good for the _free software community_, as most of the VCR's ship with proprietary, closed source software. Notice how I didn't say open source software. The term open source software is beginning to be a marketing term. You have "open source software" companies like GitLab, who claim they are an "open source company", but their primary product is closed source.
Specifically, I fondly remember the days when all you needed to record TV was to push the 'record' button. You didn't have to indefinitely rent a set-top box from your cable provider; your video storage was easily expandable (just buy more tapes), there was no such thing as unskippable commercials or 'sorry you're not authorized to record this channel'.
It was a simpler time.