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Comment by sgerenser | Hacker News Reader

He mentions that studios assumed people copied rented tapes, but I have to imagine that was relatively uncommon. Not many people had two VCRs, and by the time VCRs got cheap enough that people started to have multiples, most rental VHS tapes were protected by MacroVision[0] copy protection. Which was relatively easy to bypass if you knew what you were doing but wasn’t something the average home movie viewer was going to bother with.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System

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My father in law has a room completely filled with VCR tape copies. My wife tells me that they weren’t allowed to mention them since they attended a church that an FBI agent also attended. The FBI agents job was looking for people making copies of Copyright material (I presume on a larger scale than my FIL). In the nearly 3 decades I’ve visited their home, I’ve never seen anyone watch a single one of those VCR tapes. LOL

We had a family friend with something similar but a few years later - and every single tape was legit because he’d buy the remainders from the rental stores when they sold them off.

If they tried they'd probably be unwatchable. VHS tapes degrade over time by just existing, you don't have to watch them for them to degrade. In the late 90's I was a part of a group on Usenet that digitized old VHS tapes. Though the tech at the time didn't allow for very good digitization.

You probably haven’t watched a VHS tape recently. I’ve not come across one that’s degraded by simply sitting on a shelf (or in a garage that got up to 120ºF each summer for the past nearly 20 years.

Hang on, “unwatchable” or “degraded”? Maybe you don’t remember what a brand new VHS tape should look like, but they definitely do degrade steadily over time even when properly stored. Not to say they’re guaranteed “unwatchable”, but definitely degraded.

Yeah, I probably worded that wrong. And that degradation is why we were digitizing them. We wanted the best quality we could get with what we had. The movies we were working on were out of print and would never be released again in any form.

Is that depredation measurable in any way? Not DVD or LaserDisc quality, but much better than I remembered. I’ve put on some tapes that I was actually surprised they looked as good as they did (on a much nicer Trinitron CRT than I ever had when the tapes were new).

>Is that depredation measurable in any way?

Not that I know of. It's just an observation that our group of about 15 people agreed on. These were movies that were used a lot (pr0n) and were visibly getting worse (banding, tracking, wear, etc.), not just sitting on a shelf. We would also share them with each other through the mail and use the GoVideo dubbing decks that we all had to make copies. This was for alt.binaries.movies.erotica and associated newsgroups. Probably TMI :)

Agreed. I recently popped in Star Trek V for kicks and it worked flawlessly. However, I must say, while the physical tape may have aged well, the content surely did not - yeesh, what a stinker.

Anyway, it all depends on the storage - the best advice I ever heard was "store your things where you live" (in other words most of us don't live in the attic or the basement).

Of all the Star Treks to watch for kicks, you picked V? I'd have no complaints if it and Start Trek I ceased to exist.

Oh, I know it. I came upon it rummaging and popped it in later that evening.

Honestly, I think in a single act I nearly destroyed my youngest son's interest in the series by having him watch the first one with me. I haven't seen those movies in years, but it really reminded me how big Star Trek was back then to be able make such bold assumptions of the audience on so many levels.

You know though, all this talk - I think I'm going to dig up another and watch it tonight. There's actually a couple I still haven't seen.

The first film has a lot more going for it than V. It's not great if you go in expecting a Star Trek movie, though. Scratches a very different itch.

I watched some 90's videotapes from the early days of movies being sold at affordable prices at my parents house last year. VHS quality has always been poor compared to DVD, but they didn't seem particularly degraded.

They have been sitting in a climate controlled room all that time.

By the 90s the typical American household already had > 2 TVs. Two VCRs would not be that uncommon. It was common enough active measures were taken to prevent copying (as you linked). After all, VHS tapes are rewritable and quite durable. If you don't mind minor degredation you can reuse them dozens of times, or more. People would accumulate dozens (if not hundreds) of VHS tapes over the years with stuff they didn't want to keep anymore. So spare media wasn't usually an issue.

Now, I don't recall all that many copied rental movies, growing up. I do recall a lot of films off TV being recorded and passed around and even duplicated, though. Knowing someone with cable or satellite TV who was reliable in hitting pause/record during the commercials was Important.

I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15 inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith show or an old TV in the garage for football games.

But I’m sure there are some trade organizations stats about all this somewhere. And yes, I know people who had huge catalogs of movies recorded off TV (on beta lol).

> I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15 inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith show or an old TV in the garage for football games.

This is accurate, though by the early 90s some houses had three TVs. The third kind was the one from the late 70s or early 80s that'd recently been replaced by a new "main" TV, which older TV sat in a spare bedroom or basement "rec room" and you had to hit it sometimes to keep it working.

Did copy protection really help? In the early-mid 90s my dad was dead set against copying VHS tapes. A neighbor down the street had no problem copying anything from live TV to Blockbuster rentals. Their library was a massive mess of tapes from various sources.

I don’t recall them having any special setup except 2 VCRs. They also weren’t the type to be able to bypass copy right.

MacroVision worked by messing with the automatic gain control by fluctuating white bars in the horizontal blanking interval. Cheap, low end VCRs didn’t have automatic gain control and made much better copies.

That’s probably why they could make copies. They definitely weren’t perfect copies but I figured they reused tapes and recorded over stuff.

That makes sense, all this talk of VHS copy protection in this thread, I never knew this existed. Apparently my parents had cheaper VCRs because I never had any issues copying a tape.

I was in high school mid 80s. I brought my VHS over to a friends to try and copy a tape. It didn't work. We couldn't figure out why and an internet search to discover work arounds wasn't yet available.

So I guess it kinda worked. Honestly though most movies we were watching were rented anyway, we weren't buying very many.

we would tape some shows off TV too.

In the early ($99) days of VHS movies though, I don't believe MacroVision was a thing.

I recall frequenting the only video rental store in Homer, Alaska (ma-and-pa, of course, this was pre-Blockbuster and a small town in Alaska, of course) and I believe they would rent multiple copies of a popular title but dubbed onto blank VHS tapes.

I also had friends and relatives that had a few pirated films. The sci-fi nerds I knew all had "Star Wars" and "Empire" on VHS long before it was either possible or affordable to (probably picked up at a booth at a sci-fi convention).

I know, not the majority though by any means.

The first time I saw Star Wars was at a drive-in. The second time I saw it was on laserdisc(!) at someone’s house years later. The third time was when it was broadcast on TV. The fourth time was on VCR tape. The fact that our family could watch a movie in our home just by going to the rental store was mind blowing.

I remember it being a big deal when Star Wars finally came to TV. I don’t understand why, but my kids laugh when I tell them for the big event we hauled my aunt’s large TV across the lawn (she lived next door) over to our house just so we could watch it in color instead of on the 15” BW that we had. We also made popcorn.

For years, "Star Wars" was one of the "big movies" that wasn't available on home video. The documentary "The Making of Star Wars," on the other hand, was released on VHS (and Betamax?) very early on, and I recall as being prominently displayed in seemingly every video rental store.

Ironically, "The Making of Star Wars" doesn't currently appear to be available for streaming on any of the services, at least according to JustWatch.com.

Appears to be a full copy on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak

Didn’t grow up in the US but I knew only one other family that had two VCRs. Recording movies from TV was common though.

By the end of the decade copying was super common.

We recorded plenty of movies off TV in the 90s and had 2 VCRs. But the few times we tried making a copy of a rental VHS tape resulted in an unusable copy due to MacroVision. Point being I don’t think copying rental tapes by the end customer was a huge problem for the movie studios, unless I just got unlucky and MacroVision wasn’t as pervasive as I thought.

Someone else mentioned independent video stores copying tapes to rent and that I find more likely to have been a concern.

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