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Comment by mickeyp | Hacker News Reader

> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.

Ugh. Good riddance to VHS. I still have "fond" memories of sitting down to watch a movie only to have it interrupted half-way through for one of these reasons:

1. Tape's banjaxed and it's full of noise and other garbled junk due to bad recording, poor playback, or deterioration of the tape itself.

Or, my personal favourite:

2. Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later. Or it's half of your Uncle Fester's 48th birthday cake reveal, shakily recorded with a home camcorder.

DVDs were the best thing to ever happen to the home movie entertainment in the late 90s.

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Same thing for audio tapes. Inconvenient, sound like crap. At least, vinyl has something for it, it is also inconvenient and sounds like crap, but at least you don't have to rewind them, and all the noise and distortion it introduces can be considered pleasant and "warm".

Really, there is a good reason all these things are gone except for nostalgic purposes.

Video game cartridges are actually practical, they are essentially read-only SSDs! Some even include specialized co-processors so they are more than just storage. While they were made with the electronics of their time, they are in essence, much more modern than disks or tape.

I think vinyl sounding terrible is bandwidth limiter or something missing in amplifier. Above 10 grands they sound not much different against high-res digital audio.

Perhaps they’re not using proper gold connectors.

Yeah they should be using prefabulated ammulite casing...jokes aside vinyl shouldn't sound worse than CD et al at all. They just cost a halfway fortune to get working.

> vinyl shouldn't sound worse than CD et al at all

CDs are slightly beyond the limits of human hearing, meaning that with proper mastering and output filters, you can't do better, though professionals may prefer higher resolution as it is easier to work with. It also means that below CD quality could be noticeable with trained ears.

CD is 44.1 kHz, 16 bit stereo, or 1411 kbps. That's a lot to ask to a physical stylus riding a plastic groove. It may be possible with a laser turntable (these things exist) in a clean room, with a special precision-cut record, but why bother when a cheap digital system can do just as well. In fact, that's probably why laser turntables didn't catch on, they picked every speck of dust, and were already obsoleted by CDs.

Now, if you enjoy vinyl for reasons other than high fidelity, that's fine. Like I said, some kind of distortion can be pleasant, but then, you are listening to your system, not the record. A bit like a guitarist whose amp is treated more like a part of his instrument rather than a device that reproduces exactly what it is being fed, but louder. And mechanical/analog systems have a certain charm that may not do the sound any good, but certainly contribute to the enjoyment.

Audio cassettes sound good if you used a quality tape.

If it hadn't deteriorated. Tape was not forever.

"Bored comedy writer", says your HN bio. And yet here you are, with this post, doing your best work.

Meh.

Try a type IV metal tape. A lot of very very shit tape types out there but a quality format will last and be good.

Everytime I rented a video on DVD, they were scratched. Renting DVDs was always an uncertain experience of not knowing whether I would see the whole movie or not. Often times entire scenes would just drop. Great technology, horrible implementation.

VHS was big, clunky, complicated and reliable. I never doubted it. Sure the quality was not as good, but if you were watching the movie for the first time, you didn’t care. It was consistent crap quality and I much preferred it over DVD.

I feel like this is a rose-colored memory. I had VCRs eat and destroy multiple VHS tapes to a point where they became unwatchable.

DVDs could get scratched, but usually you didn't have to worry about the player killing the movie, and generally even when the movie got scratched it would still work for me.

By like 2002, DVDs became so cheap to order ($2-$8 per) that most movie rental places would replace them if a user reported one as scratched. It often paid for itself in a single rental.

VHS tapes were never that cheap.

I recall it depended a lot on what DVD player you got. Some would play through scratched DVDs merely skipping over the bad parts, others would stutter through the bad parts while some would just stop. Interestingly enough it was often the cheaper Chinese brands that would handle the bad DVDs better than the more expensive brands (but not always!). Luckily the players I had were always pretty good so I could play pretty much any DVD movie without any trouble.

> Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later.

Did that really happen though? VHS tapes had a plastic tab that could be removed to prevent recording. Any commercial VHS tape would not allow that. So that would only be happening if you recorded some movie and someone else used the same tape to record their show. Not really a VHS problem.

TV shows were scheduled for your local stations and there may be an alternate channel that would have an echo or rebroadcast schedule.

If you wanted to watch "your show" you had to either have someone record it, or record it yourself. There were even VCRs that could be programmed to start recording at a certain point for a specific duration.

In all of humanity's many combinations of people, situations, and outcomes, yes, this has happened hundreds of thousands of times.

It's literally a meme that "oh! no, don't watch that one--that has our sex tape in the middle".

> There were even VCRs that could be programmed to start recording at a certain point for a specific duration.

Although programming VCRs correctly required skill, because the user interfaces were so abysmal.

It was a meme that parents couldn't do it.

For younger readers: there was a single small display on the early programmable VCRs that could show a few digits, which needed to sequentially program the slot, channel, start time, and end time. Years later there were LCD screens on the remote, although they were still cryptic, and they didn't always synchronise correctly to the VCR, so results were unpredictable. Even later there were on-screen user interfaces (which were still extremely quirky). Reading a manual was definitely required at first.

Copying was rampant, and recording off of TV (including movies) too.

People wouldn't bother with the tab, because they kept recording over stuff, dozens or 100s of times.

Or discover the “game” ran long and you only got the first ten minutes of The Simpsons!

If the missing plastic was missing, you only needed to cover with tape. Then it was able to be used for a new recording.

>Did that really happen though?

Yes. All the freakin time. :)

Yeah, I remember this distinctly. VHS tapes used to be really, really expensive. So even though they were $25 in inflation adjusted dollars by the 90s, people had already been used to reusing the same tape until it died, because the one they are currently using was like $80 (inflation adjusted) new.

It was like buying a new slow cooker every time you need one. It's not that expensive, but it seems wasteful non-the-less.

Media was ephemeral back then.

Does anybody else remember McDonalds selling inexpensive VHS copies of popular movies like "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" with an additional food purchase, back when movies still cost a fortune?

>McDonald's Corp. will... sell Dances With Wolves for a bargain price.

As part of a special holiday promotion, McDonald's will sell the Oscar-winning movie for $7.99 with the purchase of a sandwich - at a time when video stores are selling it for its original list price, $99.98.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1992-11-29-92112...

They sold several movies before "priced to own" movies became mainstream.

https://letterboxd.com/travissmcclain/list/mcdonalds-vhs-pro...

Yup my parents used this quite a bit, I didn't realize it was such a good deal though. I also ended up having a lot of Ronald McDonald cartoons lol

Don't forget you had to re-wind the entire tape or get charged extra for the rental! We had a dedicated re-winder next to our TV at one point.

How kind of you.

Was it in the shape of a race car?

Article I believe is saying commercial pre-recorded VHS movies are collectible. Re: point 2, such tapes should not have a copy protection tab, so a properly functioning VCR should prevent this scenario. Just mentioning lest people get the impression VHS simply didn’t address this case. Cf. https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/record...

You just put tape on the corners and it's writable again

Which elevates the transgression from plausible simple mistake to premeditated destruction. There’s not an issue with the technology here, great grandparent commenter has an issue with bad human behavior (notwithstanding faulty cassette manufacturing and defective VCRs, of course).

This right here, my cousin worked at a video store which usually threw out cassettes not deemed working order and we took those and overwrote them with other newer movies. Was pretty awesome having 2 vhs on top of each other then pressing play and record and watch the movie and save it at the same time, the future was limitless at that point!

>Was pretty awesome having 2 vhs on top

2 VCRs on top of each other? Or are you trying to Kleenex the video tape system so that regardless if it was a tape or a machine, it's just VHS?

i cant remember the setup exactly but play the video on one vhs and record it with the other, i remember not all tv's supporting it sorry its quite some years ago :)

Sort of reminds me of the IT guy at my high school who was shipped a crate of AOL floppies (I guess to distribute to the kids) who just moved the tabs and slapped a new label on them when he needed one.

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