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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

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'.

It was a simpler time.

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> It was a simpler time.

Until you try to program the vcr to record a show while you're watching another show.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/quotes?item=qt0238698

Or program a VCR at all. That is literally a phrase that is used to refer to difficult and arcane tasks.

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 :)

This still happens in Australia with free to air channels on Digital TV

Didn't you have this code programming I was describing in my other comment?

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.

I completely agree with you about programming VCRs. Despite being in my teenage years around their peak usage, I found it quite easy to do.

Xerox and fax machines, on the other hand, are the work of the devil.

There's a major difference between people on this site (who likely had no issue scheduling a VCR) and the average consumer.

A sizable chunk of humanity, from my experience, is scared to even try.

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.

I should have been more clear: Several posters here on HN indicated they struggled with VCRs, and that is what I found surprising.

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?

edit: the system I used was VideoPlus+, it looks like similar systems were used elsewhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

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.

Ours was branded VCR Plus+ in the states. We had one but I found myself just doing it manually.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART

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.

You're watching too much TV if you consider that a complication.

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.

Put TV on desired channel. Put VCR on desired channel. Hit record.

There is no complication there. You don't need to program the VCR.

I'm sure the lost time and network sponsorship on that obligatory third show running in the 24/7 timeslot behind all others was worth it.

TVs and VCRs were considerably more expensive. One of the biggest use cases was compromising with family members or housemates.

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.

Most higher end VCRs could handle PAL/NTSC/SECAM formats just fine. I was sent some US (NTSC) tapes when I was in Australia.

Most newer (from around 1990) Australian PAL TVs could handle NTSC 60Hz 525 line video signal too.

>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.

There are ways to repair minor damage to a DVD, with a "polish" that fills in the scratches. Sometimes vaseline works as a polish.

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.

Does the terrible resolution not drive you mad? I recently tried watching an old VHS tape on my HDTV and was shocked by how awful it looked.

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.

That seems like more of a comment on the poor quality of Internet access in your area than the nature of multimedia content.

My parents bought an early DVD recorder.

That had the simplicity of a VCR, but with no waiting to rewind or fast-forward, much smaller media, and far better picture quality.

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.

Wasn't color tv just a b/v signal with color data in overtones?

3 colour guns but the shadow mask chopped it up into 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.

I would go through my parents vhs library when home alone. Mostly garbage, but I found Red October that way. It was ok.

I'm pretty sure this is also how TiVo worked before cable companies colonized the market.

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.

True, and it seems so unnecessary these days. I don't understand why you can't plug in some storage device and transfer it like any video on your PC.

That's how it works on my Beyonwiz PVR, which is getting pretty long in the tooth now - you can copy recordings to a USB device or network share.

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.

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