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A Cartrivision Player TV

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There were a bunch of early videotape systems. I once came across a device in a surplus store which was a cassette rewinder for a large, strange cassette. It had a key lock and a counter. The idea was that video stores would rent out cassettes you could only watch once, because the player lacked a rewind mechanism. Then you had to return the video. The store would rewind it, an event counted by the counter. The store would be billed accordingly, by the movie distributor.

Fortunately this approach did not catch on.

That's how these Cartrivision systems worked. Rented tapes could not be rewound in the players, just stopped. Only special machines could rewind them. The cassettes designed for home recording could be rewound in the players though. I'm not aware of any other video cassette tape system that had this.

I liked that the remote controls on these old things (if they had one) would actually have a servo physically turn the dial one notch.

Also, ask anyone that had an old tv with a physical dial if they remember using a matchbook, paper, etc, to hold the dial offset just a little so that the picture was clear. A surprisingly common memory for many.

Heck yeah folded piece of cardboard wedged into the dial to get those "in-between" signals back when I was a stupid kid who knew nothing about calibrating the VFO...

I am still quite fond of the early "clicker" style remotes that used no batteries and worked by audio impulse and later used inaudible ultrasonics. I think it would be fun to revive the control scheme for a modern hobby project.

Edit: someone did it! https://www.hackster.io/news/control-alexa-with-an-old-schoo...

My grandparents' dog would change the channels when he scratched himself and his dog tags would ring at the right frequency.

My grandparents had a Zenith console TV that had a remote control that used ultrasonic tuning forks. [0] The tuner had presets and some sort of stepper or solenoid driving it. Hit the channel up button, and CLACK! thump-thump-thump you'd go to your next preset. You could make the TV do random things by jingling keys or coins.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adler#Contributions_to_...

SpaceCommander remote control owner here. This brown (gold lettering and highlights) unit sits in my big box of oddball, vintage tech stuff along with a few vacuum tubes, QIC tapes, Sun-4c parts, and other now-useless stuff.

If you find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan

techmoan is great for retrotech. also in the same vein, but more focused on retro compute is 8-Bit Guy, and then for just retrotech of all sorts, Technology Connections has to be one of the most well-researched and entertainingly presented channels on YouTube.

Techmoan is great for the visuals, but his information is sometimes wildly inaccurate. Still, worth checking out every few months.

Since we're on the subject, Adrian's Digital Basement is my favorite.

Adding TechTangents too: https://youtube.com/c/AkBKukU

And CuriousMarc (he’s a legend): https://youtube.com/c/CuriousMarc

And Cathode Ray Dude: https://youtube.com/c/CathodeRayDude

Have you ever tried to use a laserdisc player? They pretty much only come in two sorts now:

1. Broken 2. Repaired

I have one of the third sort, unbroken and unrepaired. But it's a low-end CLD-S250. I don't even remember when and where I got it, and the only LDs I own are the original Star Wars trilogy.

And the belts haven’t worn out? I believe it, but it’s pretty wild.

I haven't tried playing a disc in it for a while. I'll try tonight and report back. (Since Harmy's Despecialized Edition I haven't really had any reason to use the player.)

Single play tape cassettes. Jeez, the sheer waste of that.

Have you heard of the monstrosity that is time-limited dvds? Not single play but almost as egregious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay

And don't forget the abomination that was DIVX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

> Released June 8, 1998

> Discontinued June 16, 1999

Goodness that is astonishing.

https://twitter.com/cabel/status/1405180815768621056

I have! Hated that idea, too.

I think the idea was to have it be a watch-once rental, so it could only be rewound by the store you rented it from.

I sure hope so, but I didn't quite get that impression from the thread.

There's an older thread linked inside the thread that indicates that the rental stores would rewind the tapes. Unclear if they would then rent them out again.

> the stores had special machines that could rewind the red tapes, but those weren't sold to customers. It's amusing in light of the later "be kind, rewind" campaign Blockbuster shoved in our faces for so long.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1013527565468749824?s=20

It makes no sense. Rentals are already time limited so making them unable to be rewound is just plain consumer hostile. It’s not hard to see why the format died so quickly.

Even if it had caught on there would no doubt be a grey market for those red tape rewinders.

Yep. But there wasn't a good model for home movies yet! Elsewhere I saw that the rewind machine had a counter and the store would be billed for each movie viewing. So they had the streaming payment structure in the tape era!

Oh there it is, missed that. Thanks.

> if they just mailed them to the customer they would have invented proto-netflix in 1972, but nooooo, cartrivision had to do absolutely everything wrong.

No, they would have invented a still foobared prototype of Blockbuster Video.

Blockbuster did not mail directly to the customer at any point that I can remember. I think OP has it correct.

They did in fact have a DVD by mail service. It came out a year or two after Netflix ate their lunch. You could also return the disks at your local Blockbuster for a quicker turnaround. It was too little to late to save the company.

Blockbuster (in the UK, at least) started doing DVDs-by-post since at least 2007 (probably earlier…) to compete with companies like LoveFilm that did DVDs-by-post since 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoveFilm

Doing DVDs-by-post makes sense (makes cents?) because their mailing cost is negligible and library operations can likely be fully-automated - and low media-costs mean damaged, lost, and unreturned media won’t materially affect the business.

VHS-by-post, on the other hand, has issues:

* Large bulky media will cost far more to mail because it can’t be handled by existing postal equipment for letters/envelopes.

* Tape signal damage caused by EM fields - I don’t expect 1970s/1980s post office equipment to have much EM shielding.

* VHS picture quality is awful: people subscribed to HBO instead.

* Handling: DVD libraries are automated thanks to barcodes and robots - both of those things weren’t really ready to build a VHS-by-mail library. Not to mention needing to rewind tapes.

Which is why the inconvenience of the customer waiting for a mailed rental would be a foobared, inconvenient prototype of Blockbuster that never happened, compared to the real one where you just get the item over the counter and take it home to watch.

Mailing DVD rentals was literally what Netflix did before the advent of web streaming in the mid to late 2000s. They could offer a wider selection than Blockbuster, and people generally find it more convenient to sit around at home instead of putting on pants and going to their local video rental store.

While web streaming becoming popular (and the selection available for streaming becoming much wider) definitely dealt a killing blow to Blockbuster, Netflix was already successful with their mail-in rental service, and had made a name for themselves with it.

From what I understand, Netflix always intended to get into streaming. The DVD by mail thing was just a stopgap while the technology improved.

https://dvd.netflix.com/

Like this? AKA, the "original" Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWZHh5oVjB0

Similarly the same channel posted the Cartivision manual explaining how the whole system works and what features it has.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1bCZlMExKLU

Since Twitter won’t let you click through to read the whole thing without logging in, here’s a better link.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1423369057181454339.html

I hope that decision eventually kills twitter threads, but I seem to be able to access it just fine (from the EU) are they rolling it out per region?

It's definitely a staged rollout but also very inconstantly so at the moment. Sometimes I get the message right away, sometimes 4 tweets into a chain, sometimes never. All from the same machine in the same hour.

Looks like the feature is still being A/B tested

Non auth-walled version:

https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1423369057181454339

nice to see nitter popping up now after having ran into it what seems like just yesterday here

I think I'm going to have to follow @Foone, this is the second thread I've seen by them and it is of just as high of quality and informative content as the first.

happy foone follower, strongly recommend. would use again. 5 stars.

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