Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month
mentalfloss.com
mentalfloss.com
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.
Until you try to program the vcr to record a show while you're watching another show.
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.
edit: the system I used was VideoPlus+, it looks like similar systems were used elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
Every VCR I ever owned had that ability, clear back to my first Betamax.
There is no complication there. You don't need to program the VCR.
Xerox and fax machines, on the other hand, are the work of the devil.
A sizable chunk of humanity, from my experience, is scared to even try.
It's now 2016. She's got two DVRs... and an alarm clock.
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.
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.
That had the simplicity of a VCR, but with no waiting to rewind or fast-forward, much smaller media, and far better picture quality.
And oh man, HBO used to air some trash back then especially during day time.
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.
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.
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.
As I mentioned in another comment, some of my thoughts on these kind of advantages are probably rooted in nostalgia :)
Most newer (from around 1990) Australian PAL TVs could handle NTSC 60Hz 525 line video signal too.
That said, I do not see the modern day appeal. It's not an antikythera.
thus even with the move to colour, information was lost horizontally as a continuous line was replaced with dots.
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 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.
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...
It can't just be nostalgia—my first portable playback device was a Sony Walkman and I can't ever imagine wanting to use one again.
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.
https://bluechat.io/list/top-ten-reasons-why-vinyl-is-better...
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.
If you'd played the game in Europe, your TV would have had a SCART connector. That provided much better picture quality, and wasn't as fuzzy.
After about 10 minutes I forget what I'm watching on anyway.
I'm not going to set that up at home though..
[1] http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/01/15/Team-...
So no need to lug that CRT around just for that.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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've spent a few bucks on used records just to have the large format album art.
For whatever reason I don't have any nostalgia for the ritual of listening to a record, even though I tend to listen to full albums anyway.
I don't know if they just do a more careful job with makeup now, or if they slightly defocus the camera, or how that was resolved.
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.
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.
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.
The same thing will happen with mp3s. Remember those random clicks and skips of early, buggy encoders?
We're going to lose a lot of history when we can't read VCR tapes anymore.
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.
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).
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 margins must have been infinitesimal.
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.
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....
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.
Now, that's a hockey stick.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-final-...
In fact, I made digital backups of all my dvds and got rid of the physical media.
Backup is easy and I can stream my entire collection to every room in the house (or my computer/phone when I'm outside).
Hacker, you chew on that while you struggle to sell some half-decent and useful app to twenty people. :)
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.
Although I believe you can use a digital converter/tuner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS
Here is a video recorded on a dvhs in 1993. It aged rather well I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY