SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
When is the last time you remember using a VCR?
| 3% | 10 votes |
| 4% | 13 votes |
| 13% | 39 votes |
| 10% | 31 votes |
| 18% | 55 votes |
| 48% | 143 votes |
| 0% | 1 votes |
| 1% | 3 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
When is the last time you remember using a VCR?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 44 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being
that a belch is more satisfying.
-- Ingmar Bergman
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Friday July 25 2014, @02:45PM
VCRs had a shoddy picture, but nobody can deny for recording standard-definition movies, they're incredible. I still proudly use my VCR. I have some great movies, like an original in-box copy of Star Trek: First Contact. You can still find blank VHS cassettes, and VCRs too.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Friday July 25 2014, @06:05PM
VHS ran at 15 FPS for the high qualtity SP. For the super extended play stuff it went down to 3 or 4 FPS. JVC had a commercial success with VHS because the better format, Betamax, was run by stupid SONY. Now who owned a Betamax machine? Who can say they even saw one. Last one I saw was in 1998. I have a VHS/DVD machine but no TV.
To SONY's credit, Betamax gave us the SONY vs. Paramount case.
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Friday July 25 2014, @07:51PM
I have a Sony C7 betamax still running, I also have a lot newer (still old though) JVC SuperVHS machine for those nostalgic occasions
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper on Saturday July 26 2014, @06:11AM
That's complete nonsense. VHS had a full 50 (PAL/SECAM) or 60 (NTSC) fields per second, no matter what. If it didn't, interlaced and 3:2 pulldown material would have looked HORRENDOUS. You can't just skip fields (or pairs of them) like that, without major processing for the conversion.
The low quality is a result of the low resolution. It still had 480/586 lines, but only about 1/3rd of the horizontal resolution of broadcast TV. And that's in addition to the random noise introduced in the picture by the analog nature of the format.
It's easy to prove this by digitizing a VHS tape. If you encode it with a lower frame-rate, you'll see an obvious difference with the original. If you encode it with a lower vertical resolution, you'll see an obvious difference. But lowering the horizontal resolution, you won't be able to tell the difference with the original until you get well below 240 or so... And temporal denoising is highly recomended.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday July 28 2014, @11:07AM
I'm young, I barely remember SP, so my recollection may be off. VHS had far better luma resolution than chroma, chroma was something like 1/10th that of PAL (which is already compressed compared to a 4:4:4 signal) - 300khz or something. And obviously as it's taking a pal signal the chroma is already merged with luma and needs splitting back out, which in a home VCR will be via a really cheap nasty filter. SVHS had far better chroma resolution from memory.
(Never dealt with NTSC - terrible thing. Only thing going for it was the increased framerate, but with a tiny 480 lines, and a "tint" control, it was a poor contender to PAL)
In the world of HD though I'd rather have 1080i30 than 1080i25. I'd rather have 720p50 though. At least the UHD standards have got rid of interlaced, with 2160p and 4320p being the only acceptable resolutions. From memory though the 8K stuff that NHK have been plugging for the last few years has been 120fps.
I'm looking forward to IBC this year, haven't been for a few years, be interesting to see what's changed.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday July 28 2014, @10:29PM
PAL was never a contender. NTSC dates from 1941, and TVs built back then remained fully compatible, even after the introduction of color, up until the digital switch-over just a few years ago.
PAL didn't exist until the 60s, a decade after NTSC added color, and was not compatible with the array of B&W TV standards across Europe and the world, requiring replacement, which NTSC did not.
NTSC's higher refresh rate means it didn't have the flicker problems 50Hz PAL TVs did. There was no need for 120Hz NTSC TVs, like there was for 100Hz PAL TVs.
The higher frame-rate meant fast action, like sports, looks far better. 3:2 pulldown meant NTSC viewers got to watch films as they were shot, not with a 4% speed-up that ruins pacing, and absolutely destroys musicals. It's jarring to watch movies in PAL.
The 20% increased resolution is no great advantage over the 17% higher frame-rate.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday July 28 2014, @10:36PM
And today the pattern repeats... The US develops a nice highdef ATSC broadcast standard, then Europe gets touchy and develops their own less-efficient (COFDM) and low-def digital standard. Now all the non-ATSC countries want to break backwards compatibility, force everyone to get new TVs for DVB-T2, all to get highdef like ATSC had from day-1, and still not getting the broadcast radius and power efficiency of ATSC, which is likely to persist largely unchanged for 70+ years, like NTSC before it.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday July 25 2014, @09:17PM
Also consider that you can share whatever you record with anyone at any time you want with no restrictions whatsoever. *cough cough* I'm looking at you DVRs!
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday July 26 2014, @06:14AM
Go for a cheap DVR, that records to an external USB drive, with no way to impose restrictions on how you use it.
eg. http://www.amazon.com/EMatic-AT103B/dp/B00IJLLVSM [amazon.com]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by youngatheart on Monday July 28 2014, @03:39AM
Thanks for this. I've been interested in what it would take to do my own Aero type setup, and this takes me half-way there.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday July 28 2014, @12:59PM
Those don't have any networking, so it's nothing resembling Aereo... Just a very simple DVR.
A good place to start would be an HDHomeRun. I imagine even a $30 WiFi router with a USB port, running OpenWRT, could do the DVR to USB HDD, while still giving you full access to the content over the network.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday July 26 2014, @06:04AM
Fuzzy picture that gets worse with every play, tapes that get "eaten" when machines start going bad, TERRIBLE picture with letter-boxed wide-screen recordings, the need to rewind and lack of random access, inability to edit (eg. remove commercials) after recording, and astronomically high media prices compared to something like H.264 on a DVR's hard drive.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday July 27 2014, @03:04PM
VCR's pictures were superior to analog broadcast, usually as good and often better than cable. Yes, compared to a BluRay playing on a hi-def TV it is a shoddy picture.
Mine broke last winter and I'm still trying to replace it; I have a collection of tapes that span thirty years and I was nowhere near digitizing them all before the last VCR broke.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by geb on Sunday July 27 2014, @04:43PM
Simplicity is not the word I would use for a machine with so many moving components.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 25 2014, @03:02PM
I wonder if it would be possible to estimate the amount of time saved across the human race since DVDs eliminated the need to rewind your media before you could watch it again.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 25 2014, @03:10PM
Also: VHS cassettes are worthless on the second-hand market and (as far as I know) not readily recycled. That means that in landfills across the world there is a "VHS Layer" which future archaeologists will be able to use to judge exactly when that region switched to DVD.
How long will the information on those landfilled tapes be readable? Will they lose their integrity faster or slower at the bottom of a giant anearobic compost pile than they would under surface conditions? When global warming / Vladimir Putin / Monsanto / gay marriage collapses civilisation and sends us all back to the dark ages in a few decades time, will our successors a thousand years hence be able to piece together all of the now-extant Doctor Who episodes?
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday July 25 2014, @05:01PM
We can't even piece together all of the past episodes of Doctor Who today. I think a better question is "how much homemade porn are they going to find, and how are they going to interpret it? Will they think recordings of people engaged in coitus were made, then displayed publicly in some sort of religious ritual?"
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday July 26 2014, @10:48PM
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Friday July 25 2014, @09:22PM
Tell me about it, I have a loft/attic full of Star Trek tapes - The complete set in fact, barring Enterprise (so, TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY/FILMS), that's a LOT of tapes, and I have no idea what to do with them :(
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 26 2014, @10:48PM
No, Obama's masters and the Bible belt will do it before any of them.
(Score: 2, Funny) by shortscreen on Friday July 25 2014, @05:26PM
Yeah but you'd still have to subtract the amount of time wasted on unskippable previews and FBI warnings, and time spent ripping the whole disc to bypass the region lock.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday July 25 2014, @11:09PM
But then you must also consider that against the time saved by other people who got it via torrent because of the initial person with the disc getting pissed off because of said lock and warnings and previews and uploading out of spite. Could be a close competition.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Friday July 25 2014, @08:05PM
Not to mention the savings in "Please be kind - REWIND" stickers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 28 2014, @09:07PM
Wait, you don't rewind those DVDs? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday July 26 2014, @06:17AM
Time saved would be near zero, since you just hit the button and go do something else...
UNLESS, for some strange reason, you were doing it BY HAND.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday July 25 2014, @03:16PM
Probably about three years ago when I dug out a copy of The Matrix on VHS and a used VCR from a collective electronics storage pile in a shared media room.
About a year later that VCR was destroyed by a sledge hammer or a baseball bat as part of a promotional event. Good times.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1) by SrLnclt on Friday July 25 2014, @09:25PM
The Matrix was the first film I bought on DVD. I'm sure I'm not the only one, especially in this crowd. It came out at just the right time to show off the increased picture/sound quality DVD had to offer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 26 2014, @01:33AM
I originally got it in VHS and a friend had it on DVD. For fun, we put the two TVs side by side (VHS with coax and DVD with component or S-Video). We were both amazed by the extra detail DVD had, including the subtle green shading added to the scenes in the matrix and the subtle blue added to scenes in the real world. The special effects were even more spectacular as well and bullets had that ring effect, rather than just a generic blur.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday July 26 2014, @12:28PM
I remember seeing shops offering "3 Free DVDs with every new DVD Player (excluding 'The Matrix')'. I take that as clear evidence that 'The Matrix' drove DVD sales and helped hammer the nails into VHS's coffin.
Don't forget the way it pretty much defined the market for 'DVD Special Features', too.
If only there had been a sequel...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25 2014, @04:05PM
I remembered using my VCR just now, when I read the question.
Now if you ask me when I last used it ... well, that's been a bit longer (I'm too lazy to figure out how long exactly).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:27PM
You win the "Annoy the creator award". Congratulations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 25 2014, @04:18PM
I've recently watched a movie or two on it. I've a decent library of tapes and I don't really feel like converting them. Perhaps when the old player finally dies I'll get around to it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday July 25 2014, @07:14PM
Better do it before the VCR breaks down. Converting a video tape you cannot play any more is not that easy ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by randmcnatt on Friday July 25 2014, @06:42PM
The Wright brothers were not the first to fly: they were the first to land.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Friday July 25 2014, @08:03PM
I've still got a VHS recorder for the same financial reason - very cheap to buy, and the media is absolute peanuts. It's a shame that most of the films you see in charity shops / thrift stores are absolute bilge, but you see the odd one that's worth buying.
I got into audio cassettes about 6 years ago for the same reason - you could buy really nice sounding decks and boomboxes for next to nothing, and they're genuinely interesting things to own.
Oh, and Han shoots first on VHS ;)
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday July 26 2014, @05:59AM
For under $100 you can get a highdef DVR with 1GB HDD, which will store far more than a mountain of VHS tapes, unlimited reuse, random access, no deterioration with repeated plays, higher quality, etc.
The Laserdisc transfer of the theatrical release has been available on DVD for quite a few years now.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Friday July 25 2014, @10:04PM
"Spanky and Our Gang"
Now that is good entertainment, not burdened by political correctness . . . I loved watching the Little Rascal re-runs when I was growing up. Thank you for reminding me about them. My wife is from India, loves old movies and shows, and likes to laugh. This is the ticket! Unfortunately DVD is going to have to be the media. Amazon, here I come . . .
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 26 2014, @06:22PM
Almost a decade ago I needed a nostalgia fix so I ordered the VHS version of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue [wikipedia.org] and fortunately my roommate had an old VCR I used to watch it.
Pretty surreal, actually -- not only seeing Disney and Warner Bros. characters interacting with each other for a common cause, but hearing Bugs Bunny talking about smoking crack or the chipmunk Theodore discovering and talking about a marijuana stash under the bed (how did he know what weed smells like?).
Those kinds of shows were actually pretty big back then, I remember another feature-length G.I. Joe movie where G.I. Joe and Cobra both teamed up to fight drug dealers after both organizations discovered that two of their high-ranking men were addicted to drugs.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday July 27 2014, @06:03AM
Being old enough to remember adventures in porn on BBS systems, I had amassed a VHS tape or two. I even have a few magazines around like k rations in case society breaks down and there is no Internet or electricity for awhile.
Used a hardware mpeg encoder off a HD DVR to dump high quality (relatively) encodes from an older (but good) VCR. Sold the VCR right after that since it was a good model.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by maxim on Sunday July 27 2014, @10:25AM
I still own an VCR, but haven't touched it for ages, and barely have any tape for it.
But I really miss it, and its ability to autorecord the tv shows I have seen.
Me thinks to turn it on once again sometime :-)
(Score: 2) by unitron on Monday July 28 2014, @05:39PM
...because porn.
As it happens I just put a VCR back into service to go back and rewatch the most previous (from 2010, I think) series of 24, which I only got through a third or so of because Sackhoff's character was so annoying, so that I can watch the current season.
One one of my TiVos.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @06:21PM
because porn.
Not really.
Because 2 hours vs 1 hour and 150 bucks cheaper for the player and less weight (less shipping cost). Defects beta did not fix in time. It was mostly about cost. When I asked my dad to get a beta he bought a VHS and put it plainly "its 150 bucks cheaper and does the exact same thing" he was right. The VHS had better margins and JVC was willing to license the tech out more broadly. Sony wanted the market to itself.
This sums it up way better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday July 28 2014, @07:17PM
So the the people that answered "I am using one now, and LOVING it"... How do you get the internet on a VCR.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday July 28 2014, @09:11PM
Simple: Get a graphics card with composite out, connect that to your VCR, insert an empty tape and press "record". Then surf away.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.