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The VCR Comes to an End


Anderton

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The last commercially-produced VCR by Funai Electric will roll of the assembly line this month. At one point, Funai sold 15 million VCRs a year...last year, 750K. They say not only is the market contracting, but it's hard to find the parts needed to make the machines.

 

Better transfer your tapes over to DVD when you get a chance...

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I remember 20 or more years ago when the "last convertible ever" rolled off some car assembly line somewhere. It made all the news. Now look at all the convertibles around and probably no one even remembers their so called "retirement" from the planet.

 

I have a couple of panasonic dvd-vhs recorder gizmos although I transferred all my tapes years ago. I don't doubt some boutique operation will figure out how/why to bring back vhs recorders again some day.

 

Just think....."analog video mojo" (ie:-smear).

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I wonder where they're getting the transports. Seems like about 10 years ago, I read that the last manufacturer of VHS transports left the party. But I wonder who those 750,000 people who bought VHS players last year are? Every now and then one shows up on the local FreeCycle board, usually including some kids' movies or exercise tapes.

 

I still have some PCM-F1 tapes on Beta that I've never digitized, and probably never will. I still have one Beta tape deck working, but the last two I got from FreeCycle were beyond repair. Gotta keep up with the obsolescence.

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That old grainy, smudgy VCR vibe holds a lot of nostalgia.

 

We still have a box with a bunch of VCRs the kids watched endlessly growing up. For many, many years, we just had a tiny TV, had to have been no larger than a 10" screen, but we huddled around to watch stuff like The Little Mermaid and Ferngully and The Rescuers Down Under and All Dogs Go To Heaven, Ghostbusters, etc.

 

We do love our big 1080p flat TV, no question. But we were just as happy, all things considered, with the little screen with the bad resolution.

 

I'm amazed they have been still making those things at all over the last decade or so......

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

 

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I'm just wondering how long it will be until they discontinue DVD in favor of Blue ray...Or whatever is next.

It's hard to keep from becoming a Luddite at times.

 

I'm a DVD holdout guy. I have a Blu-Ray burner that Iove for backup, but it can't play Blu-Ray videos because it's not feeding something that allows the copy protection to be defeated (e.g., an HDMI input).

 

With optical media drives disappearing from computers, I suppose it's just a matter of time before DVDs go away too. However in this case, it's a step backward if everything's going to end up in the cloud. Until everyone has access to fat internet pipes all the time, there's still a lot to be said for optical storage and playback...not to mention recording. When I'm on the road with my laptop (which still has an optical drive, thank you), it's convenient to throw a couple DVDs in my carry-on compared to renting a movie at the hotel from a selection that doesn't interest me, and has nowhere near the view quality of a DVD on a laptop.

 

When I got a MacBook Pro first thing I did was get a SuperDrive and Handbrake a lot of DVDs :)

 

BTW if you have Disney VHS tapes, some of them are worth a fortune on the collector's market. Unbelievable. I guess they're like rare baseball cards or something.

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Honestly, I thought VCRs were done at least 12-15 years ago. When did DVDs start?

 

Eventually everything will stream. And then when the power goes out, people will completely lose their minds... LOL

 

As for me, I enjoy Netflix but many of their documentaries are only available on DVD so for now... I still watch them.

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I saw the article the other day too, but I don't recall where… a quick Google search turns up lots of links though… :)

 

http://www.movies.com/movie-news/whe...ing-vcrs/21012

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...cr-vhs-betamax

 

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-th...lt-production/

 

Frankly, I was surprised that anyone was still making VCRs at this point.

 

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VHS gave us tape eating problems (no matter how well you kept the heads clean), and DVD/Blu-Ray give us freezing problems (especially on rented disk that haven't been handled with the best of care).

 

Any engineering problem for a commercial product requires a point between low cost and reliability. They are more often than not mutually exclusive. If you want better reliability, it costs more money to make (and buy) and if you want a lower price, reliability takes a hit.

 

I just wish the sweet spot for video technology was a little bit more towards the reliability side of the equation.

 

I have a few commercial VCR tapes that I won't digitize. It's cheaper to just buy a replacement DVD/Blu-Ray - but I probably won't do that either.

 

It happens with audio to. From the 78 to the 45 to the 33.3 to the 8 track to the cassette to the DAT to the ADAT to the CD to the SACD to the WAV to the mp3 - we get to buy the same art over and over and over if we want to keep playing our 'old friends'.

 

Technology marches on, and things change. I still have some floppy disks - mainly for an old synth or two that I still like some of the sounds on. I'm a pack rat at heard, and like to save things even if I don't use them anymore, so it saddens me a bit to see things I've saved go obsolete because there is no playing medium, but it's a mental thing, if they were really important, I would have taken the time to convert them.

 

Me? I don't like storing things in "The Cloud". I don't like trusting others with my safety and security. So whatever I store in the cloud, gets stored locally as well. Admittedly it's mostly magnetic storage, but I keep redundant copies of anything important.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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Me? I don't like storing things in "The Cloud".

 

I always thought "the cloud" was kind of a major marketing faux pas. Clouds dissipate, they rain on you, and sometimes the clouds just aren't in the sky at all. It doesn't exactly connote safety, solidity, and security.

 

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The thing I like least about "the cloud" is that whoever runs it might decide one day that they're not making enough money and go out of business. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my Yahoo e-mail address won't go away when Verizon takes over.

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I always thought "the cloud" was kind of a major marketing faux pas. Clouds dissipate, they rain on you, and sometimes the clouds just aren't in the sky at all. It doesn't exactly connote safety, solidity, and security.

 

I agree with you, the name doesn't sound secure. Think, Stormy Weather (with apologies to Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler)

 

But if they called The Cloud Fort Knox, I still wouldn't trust all my data there. I don't know how careful they are, what kind of redundancy they have and what kind of security they have. Plus then there's human error - or somebody coming to work feeling under the weather, or concerned about a loved one, and might not be as focused as he or she usually is. If anybody is going to corrupt my data, I want it to be me ;)

 

I have had a web site http://www.nortonmusic.com since the 1990s. So technically my web site is hosted "In The Cloud" and has been before that term was coined.

 

I started with a local company, Cyber-Gate. It was purchased by Mindspring.or Earthlink but who bought the customers but not the infrastructure. The website would go down too long, too often

 

So I switched to ValueWeb on the advice of a friend. They were fine with a guarantee of 99.9% up time. But then they were bought by another company (forget the name) who didn't honor the guarantee and wouldn't have made any money if they did.

 

On many "rate the webhosts" shootout sites, I decided on WebHosting.com. Absolute worst web host decision I ever made (now we are getting to the point). Not only were they off line too often and too long, one time when they came back up half my site was missing, the other half corrupted. Tech help was actually irritated that I complained (obviously overworked but also unprofessional - I called them "Web Hosing" after that.

 

Being the "do not trust others with my data":type, I kept an entire copy of my website on my computer. So I removed all the corrupted pages at Web Hosing and uploaded fresh copies. And started looking for a new company immediately.

 

I found one (forgot the name) who was purchased by another, and another, and is now Hostway who do a decent job. They rarely go down, but when you need tech help, it isn't the quickest or the best but I rarely need it. I stay there because things could be much worse. (Think Web-Hosing)

 

So I am not going to trust "the cloud" with my data. Anything on "the cloud" is also stored on earth under my control. So if I'm going to store redundant data here, why would I want to use The Cloud? My Internet connection isn't that fast (I live about 3 miles from the end of the fiber optic cable termination).

 

Perhaps I'm being over-cautious and depriving myself of some convenience. But I have two businesses, my duo http://www.s-cats.com and my Band-in-a-Box aftermarket business at http://www.nortonmusic.com

 

Especially at nortonmusic.com I'm extra careful, as I'm responsible for my customers' credit card numbers. I chose my shopping cart because it is the best safety record I could find, it allows me to remove the customer's card number from "the cloud" after the order is processed, and I don't keep a complete copy of the card number on my computer. If the number isn't on line, it's very difficult to hack. That means my customers have to enter their card number for every order, but it also means if they get their data stolen, it's not my fault.

 

So I'm pretty cloud free, and for what information has to be in the cloud, I have a copy under a safety umbrella, just in case it rains.

 

Sorry for the hijack, let me see if i can figure out how to get back on track.

 

I might have a couple of virgin video tapes and a pre-watched movie or two - anybody wanna buy them? Of course, I don't have a player so I can't guarantee they will work ;)

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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I heard back in-the-old-days, the Beta-Max was a good audio recording device, and to a lesser extent, so were VHS units. The old ADAT's used a tape that resembled a VHS tape.

 

A very short history: Beta HiFi was sometimes used for audio recording at home because it was better than cassettes. It was also the recording medium for the Sony PCM-F1 digital converter. The pair made what became the DAT recorder in the next generation. What was really cool was that you could record four channels of better-than-average audio using an F1 processor for two channels with the other two channels on BetaHiFi. VHS HiFi was better than standard VHS for home video recording and commercial videotapes, but it never got any traction in the pro audio field.

 

The Alesis ADAT used S-VHS tape with a standard VHS transport. The ADAT M20, which was never completely finished before it was discontinued, was the "professional" version that used the same tape with a beefier transport. TASCAM's competition, the DTRS series (DA-88, DA-38, DA-98, and DA-78) used Hi-8 (8mm) videotape.

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Yes, the VCR is now dying, but it's hard to overstate it's importance in the whole "media" universe. It was a big game changer in the TV/Movie/Video realm. Media companies like Disney PANICKED when the home VCR was brought to the market, and in fact Disney SUED Sony in an attempt to keep them from being sold. Disney and other media companies were certain the ability to tape shows off-the-air would be financial ruination for them.

 

Of course, that didn't turn out to be the case at all, and I think Disney makes as much if not more revenue from selling videos than they do from movie tickets. Disney and others figured out how to adapt and take advantage of this new technology.

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I always thought "the cloud" was kind of a major marketing faux pas. Clouds dissipate, they rain on you, and sometimes the clouds just aren't in the sky at all. It doesn't exactly connote safety, solidity, and security.

 

Maybe the Cloud companies are thinking of the "silver lining"... with dollar signs in their eyes… :idea:;)

 

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A very short history: Beta HiFi was sometimes used for audio recording at home because it was better than cassettes.

 

I still have a Sony Super Beta Hi-Fi machine I used to master audio on in the late 80's. It still works fine and I have a bunch of Sony Pro-X Beta tapes still in wrapper. I keep stuff until it dies... and then I fix it, so I can keep it even longer. Same with open-reel, audio cassette, CD, DVD, whatever. My studio looks like a museum, but I use stuff that works and don't really think about how old it is or what I'm "supposed" to be using. I guess you could say I have a long thrill period. That is, the thrill is never really gone.

 

 

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