The VHS is Dead

Ronnie Coote writes "The UK's largest retailer of electronics is phasing out VHS VCRs. Sales of DVD players have outstripped VCRs by 40-to-1 recently. So how long until the mass market will be saying goodbye to the DVD player?" A few historical links to commemorate the occasion: Sony Kills Betamax, Why VHS Was Better, and How to Preserve VHS Recordings. For the future, maybe we'll have Digital VHS, but I suspect it will mostly be hard drive-based recorders.

Actually, VHS wasn't better.

[DurendalMac]

Maybe in the early days of the video wars, but Beta turned out to be a far superior format than VHS. The quality was better, less quality was lost when copying, the tapes were a bit smaller, Beta tapes last longer, etc. The reason VHS won was because a Beta would only hold one hour and a VHS would hold two when they were released. Later Beta tapes would hold 5 hours in an extended play format, and they'd lose less quality in the extended format as well. Sucks that VHS had to win.

Re:Actually, VHS wasn't better.

[geekoid]

actually, Sony killed Betamax in the consumer market because they expected everyone to pay them a license just to distribute movies on the tapes.

They're still cost effective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you have a big screen TV, the qualit of VHS is noticeable but almot a non-issue when it comes to recording a TV show. Until I got my DVR Lyra I still used a VCR even to record HDTV shows off of sattelite. They are fast easy and most importantly cheap. 40 dollar deck 2 dollar tape, you can catch that show that you want to see after you get back from whatever it is you're running off to. And best of all, NO MONTHLY FEE!

Still for sale though-Good enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not certain why you got a funny for telling the truth.

I have over a 100 VHS tapes going back over a decade. Quite a lot of it irreplaceable.

I have (some) of the equipment needed to convert (I need a genlock), and the skill, although time is an issue.

However the majority have none of the above, and VHS is a good example of the "good enough" and "If it aint broke" principles.

Eventually I'll get a DVD recorder (once all the "whatcha gonna call it" settles down), but then there's the issue of "what's good to record on TV?"

Re:Mandatory NETCRAFT

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_phe nomena#Netcraft_confirms_it [wikipedia.org]

Re:Still for sale though

[Just Some Guy]

HAHAHA YEAH THAT'S A KNEESLAPPER. Yeesh, mods on crack again.

Anyway, we recently bought a Pyro A/V Link [adstech.com] analog-to-digital converter. It plugs into the Firewire port on my wife's iMac and appears as a video camera to iMovie. Converting our VHS movies to DVD consists of:

1. Open iMovie.
2. Click "Import" and hit "play" on the VCR.
3. Wait until the import is finished.
4. Export the project to iDVD.
5. Click "Burn".
6. Profit. In this case, that means don't spend more money on the DVD version of a movie we already own than the cost of the blank DVD-R.

The killer app for us is being able to move our kids' movies to a more future-compatible format. As a bonus, we can use the same device to burn content from our DVR without having to mess with its broken Firewire port.

My wife mumbled something about "wedding video", so I guess everybody has their own pet use.

Re:Betamax gets the last laugh

[tgibbs]

The number of scratched DVDs that I get from my video store, I think perhaps VHS was actually better. These DVD movies are just crap with their pausing and skipping.

I used to think the same thing, then I got a decent player. Haven't seen a DVD skip since then.

Re:Betamax gets the last laugh

[Mant]

Try cleaning your DVD player. If that doesn't help and brand new discs still skip, try replacing it.

Your experience is pretty atypical.

Re:No it ain't dead.

[SoCalChris]

Man, if only you were in a position to...teach them patience or something. But nevermind, you're just a parent.

Let me guess how many kids you've got...

Zero, right? No matter what you try, most toddlers don't have patience. It isn't something you can teach a 2 year old. If you really think that you can, you've got a big surprise coming when you do have kids.

Re:Damn it.

[pyrros]

Good DVD players (both hardware and software) will remember the time at which the last N discs were stopped, and offer to resume from there.

Re:Actually, VHS wasn't better.

[neubottle]

>> Sony killed Betamax That is simply not so. Sony's only license was on the shell. The studios made a business decision that the dual inventory of Beta and VHS was not supported by the low volume of sales in Beta. However the conventional wisdom about the market being driven by the T-120 VHS is absolutely true. Sony thought that users wanted to timeshift broadcast programs. They wanted that, but they wanted movies more. The longer lengths available on VHS opened the door for movies.

Re:Betamax gets the last laugh

[shepd]

Betamax gets the last laugh - it seems that it was better than DVD too.

Soooory, not even close. I once did a technical comparison and Betamax [wikipedia.org] is about 5% better than VHS (10%, maybe). It has a few more lines of resolution (220 vs 200, IIRC) and cleaner chroma recording. It definately does not even touch DVD for quality.

You might be talking about BetaCam [wikipedia.org], which does compete with DVD for quality (although, again, doesn't match). However, it doesn't compete on price; a decent BetaCam VTR usually being in the $1,000+ range.

BetaCam came out a long time after BetaMax was totally dead. Its VHS competition, Super-VHS [wikipedia.org], found a niche market in the homes of cheap people who wanted near DVD-level quality at a reasonable price (at the time). Also, it seems to be popular with very small TV studios. Super-VHS is not as good as BetaCam, although it is very reasonably close, and is about 1/3 the price.

... was tried.

[LordByronStyrofoam]

VHS tape drives for backup was tried, back in 8088-based PC days. They used to advertise them in Byte magazine. They were a little touchy, tho, so they never gained trust, so never gained momentum.

Re:What I want...

[icarusone]

You can run a ReplayTV without a monthly service if "Record Wednesdays on Channel 4 at 9:00PM for 1 hour" service is all you want. The 12.95 per month is to use the guide service.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[havaloc]

They actually have devices [danmere.com] which can make 4GB backups on VHS, and it was even on Slashdot [slashdot.org] in 1998. The comments are gone, but I seem to remember that it didn't work very well.

Re:Buy a VCR... Now! -- Boot sales

[Cryptnotic]

It's sort of like a swap meet. You can load up your car/pickup full of stuff you want to sell, then go to the place. You pay some amount of money ($20 or so), and then you get a designated spot and you can sell stuff to the other people who come. People who come to buy stuff either pay nothing to get in or they pay only a nominal fee ($3 or so).

Re:Netcraft confirmed?

[DocSavage64109]

Very few VCRs can record Macromedia encoded content without additional hardware to strip/clean the video signal. What Macromedia does is add an alternating black and white stripe to your video signal that displays off the screen for most tvs. This "invisible" stripe tricks your VCRs auto-gain control into adjusting the picture brighter then darker over and over throughout the movie. The resulting recording is thus unwatchable.

Get an OLD VHS deck...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Many of the older (mechanical tuner, die cast chassis, top loading) VHS machines have AGC and sync circuitry that seems unfazed by Macrovision encoding. I have an ancient Panasonic PV-1000 that I keep around just for this reason. Short of the occasional drive belt or sensor bulb replacement, the thing just refuses to die. Of course, the fact that the thing originally sold for close to $1000 may have something to do with that. This thing is built like the proverbial "brick shithouse".

Re:Still for sale though-can't FF, blame DVDForum

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Letting the Media conglomerates decide when you can
fast-forward is part of the original deal to get a license to build
DVD players. Google was not immediately helpful, but the truth is out there...

Re:... was tried.

[MmmDee]

Actually, a "standard" cassette recorder was quite often used in the early TRS80 / Apple / SwTPC / Altair days for software distribution and data recording. The larger businesses using minicomputers (VAX and such) used 9-track magnetic tape drives and 2400 foot tapes at 800 or 1600bpi, then 6250 bpi (the latter, in GCR format, was very forgiving of errors as it had built in redundancy). However, with several hundred megabytes (circa 1970's-1980's) to save, this required several tape changes and an "operator" for system backups. Better equipped shops had VHS data records (though they never really caught on so far as I know). As I recall, they stored about 5GB per standard VHS tape. Heaven forbid if an error occurred on the tape as they weren't very forgiving owing to the whole concept of where to place the TOC.