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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.

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Okay. That's what you want. Some people think that iCassettes have better picture quality and BananaCRTs have better ascetics and they find the overall user experience of iCassette players and BananaCRTs integrates together better than buying a VHS deck and a TV from different manufacturers and having to figure out how to hook up the standard but confusing connector all by yourself. Those people get to buy things too. And if the market is dominated by products that cater to their wants and not yours, maybe it's because your wants are in the minority.

DVDs have been region locked for a long time, and yet still took off.

I wonder how much of that we owe to the fact that people were finding ways around region locking, and that DVDs were also used for software distributions.

I'm willing to bet that the number of people working around region locking was so small (in a financial sense) that it didn't matter.

Don't Macs let you switch regions a limited number of times?

Does it need to play video's from ArVid VHS tapes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

So, your happy with the VHS and don't need to play Beta tapes.

PS: Sounds like your happy with a walled guarden and want something that just works. Did you get a Blueray player or a conbo that also handels HD-DVD's?

Slightly different, I think. VHS and Beta were competing formats, but you could play any VHS tape in any VHS player. That was the point the parent was making, I think.

Sure, I muddled the point but ArVid VHS tapes ARE VHS tapes. Like how some CD players also let you use MP3 CD’s.

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