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Operating System Specific Discussions => Other Operating Systems => Topic started by: SysAdmin on May 03, 2014, 09:56:07 PM
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http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/05/03/1811202/ask-slashdot-which-vhs-player-to-buy
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http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/05/03/1811202/ask-slashdot-which-vhs-player-to-buy
I've got and old 4 Head, Dual Deck, studio player, though sadly it has macrovision installed.
To get around that I picked up a Vidicraft IVE-100 integrated video enhacner. They are cheaper than many of the black boxes on Ebay, though sadly only support mono sound.
Then again when transfering from old VHS', who cares? The quality sucks anyhow. :)
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I think they were fighting over this issue in Amish Mafia.
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I have a old 4 head VCR I bought several years ago that has never been used (I'd already moved to DVD), but I threw out every VHS tape I have (they really suck).
Funny, I play rentals in the Bluray player, but I don't buy that format.
Can anybody give me a good reason to keep using older video storage devices?
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Can anybody give me a good reason to keep using older video storage devices?
For a truly genuine experience.
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Nothing less than DVD these days, who wants to watch betamax/VHS/SVHS tapes anymore?
We have a few DVD's and a couple of Blu-Ray's. A huge collection of "digital content". HD makes a huge difference over older formats (as expected). The detail and far better sound 7.2 etc is worth it.
SD DVD stuff up scales well, depending on the original content. But watching HD movies is the way to go.
I even watch old stuff that has been released in HD format, which is great as you get a more movie like release as if you are watching it at a theater/cinema. Back in the day when movies were released to tape it was at a lot lower resolution than what you would get going out to the theater/cinema to watch it.
The end of this year/start of next year proves to be a very exciting time for movie buffs with the 4k and 8k standard becoming more mainstream.
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who wants to watch betamax/VHS/SVHS tapes anymore?
Who wants to play games at 32 colours, at 640 x 512 resolution, with 4 channel stereo sound, running at 7mhz, with a 1 button joystick, from a slow old floppy disk drive? ;)
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Nothing less than DVD these days, who wants to watch betamax/VHS/SVHS tapes anymore?
ive got a cassette deck connected to my dvd hd/player burner ..can record all my cassetes to dvd if i want or just play them through the dvd using the mad multi everything amp i got ..and the vhs/dvd player runs through the 2nd channel so i guess i could record a cassette on the dvd while playing a vhs on the other machine an play ps3 games on the other tv channel ..only thing not connected is my turntable bought when i was 20s yrs old approx 30 yrs ago ..sadly the belt has disintergrated ..
why watch vhs ..for the memories i guess ..why have an amiga1200 ..for the memories ..its takes you to a better time..
it really was more fun then .
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I still keep one VHS deck for transferring old VHS tapes to DVD (connected to DVD recording deck).
There are a lot of really neat sci-fi (and other genre) B-movies that are out of print and will never get a release on later formats. Also, if you're a fan of classic Doctor Who or other British 1960s/70s sci-fi shows, well, those were largely filmed/mastered by the BBC on standard definition video equipment, so later blu-ray/DVD releases of these can't improve much on the standard definition image quality of the commercial VHS tapes sold in the 1980s/90s. Therefore, it's worthwhile to buy used copies of these shows on VHS for very little money as opposed to buying them on DVD/Blu-ray (which is quite expensive if you want to buy dozens of episodes).
Also, I've used the VHS deck to transfer old family home videos from VHS, and done this for friends too...so for me it's useful to keep one around for archival preservation/digitization.
Another fun reason to keep a VHS deck is to use as a "time machine". There are people out there who roam the garage-sales (boot sales) and pick up box-loads of old VHS tapes recorded off the air by people at home in the 1970s/80s/90s. They then scour these for old TV-shows, news shows, commercials, etc. that have never been archived anywhere else. Sometimes, even the original content producer didn't keep a copy. For local news shows / public-access channel shows / etc. sometimes the off-the-air copy is the only surviving one. Archive.org and YouTube are full of rescued TV content salvaged from old garage-sale VHS tapes.
Just from an entertainment perspective, I was surprised when watching an old VHS movie how the slight blurriness, VHS picture quality and occasional dropouts actually had me feeling nostalgic! I enjoyed those artifacts as much as I enjoy the warm sounding light pop and crackle of an old record.
And lastly - while eye-poking, pore-counting Hi-Def sharpness is nice and all - in the end it's about the quality of the content, not how many hairs you can count on the actors' heads. I'd rather watch a good movie on VHS than a poor movie in razor sharp Hi-Def.
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Can anybody give me a good reason to keep using older video storage devices?
Sure - for watching any of the content that's never been released on DVD. There's plenty of content that even the el-cheapo "six films on one disc at a ridiculously low bitrate" companies haven't put out there (find me a non-VHS copy of Invasion from Inner Earth, wouldja? Or Bobobobs? The Littl' Bits?) Or simply because VHS is a super-cheap way to get legal copies of movies now that everybody's dumping theirs in thrift stores...
Also, as much as VHS suffers from low quality, DVD isn't that good either. It doesn't progressively degrade over time the way VHS does, but it does inflict craptastic MPEG-2 compression on the picture, and it just gets worse the more footage you try to squeeze onto one disc. (Really, Laserdisc is the way to go.)
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I still keep a pair of Sony SLV-R5UCs, a pair of SL-HF750s, and some of the older Panasonic SVHS units. I always wanted an old commercial VHS/SVHS machine but I really don't want to take the chance on buying an old piece of crap and getting stuck with shipping. I can also do 8mm, Hi8, and several other old formats to DV or MPEG2 as well. Don't get me started on old audio formats now. How many of us still have an old RS-1700 kicking around? How about the old Adat XT still in the basement? Time to run those babies again... All that stuff lives right next to my Amigas!
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Bought a DVD/VHS combo probably 5 years ago for copying - so far no VHS has been copied...
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I have an almost new (means used only about 20x!) Panasonic NV-HS950 with TBC here,
and about 100 Original PAL VHS (mostly in German only, used with a different machine) and
about 20 Original Amiga-Videotapes (see AmigaFuture ASD). Worldwide shipping would be
possible if you are interested... :-)
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And...I have a friend with a Super Betamax.
Much improved picture over standard Betamax or VHS, but I still wouldn't want to use it.
I used to copy audio over to a HiFi Stereo VHS unit for longer playback, then I got a multi DVD changer (that I primarily used for CDs) and stopped using that.
And yes, there are a lot of old releases on VHS that aren't available in other formats, but the playback is still pretty shabby and copying those isn't going to improve quality.
Personally, I really dig the old TV shows that were shot on film (like the original Star Trek) since higher quality releases are merely a matter of remastering.
If I could decrypt everything I own, I'd just store it on a network drive.
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I want one of these to go with it!!
(http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/18mncb01izja7jpg.jpg)
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And yes, there are a lot of old releases on VHS that aren't available in other formats, but the playback is still pretty shabby and copying those isn't going to improve quality.
Yeah, but shabby is still a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Personally, I really dig the old TV shows that were shot on film (like the original Star Trek) since higher quality releases are merely a matter of remastering.
No question - but unfortunately, it's not like you can just go back and re-film shows that were shot on video. Again, do you want it in suboptimal quality, or not at all?
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I've never been a great fan of VHS - though I own a JVC S-VHS recorder which is a pretty good machine. I've always preferred disk formats like LaserDisc (of course) and the mostly-forgotten CED format. There's some really odd stuff on them which have disappeared into history, and sometimes they're in a purer form (such as the Tom And Jerry cartoons which can't be found uncensored on DVD - on LaserDisc they're original with all politically incorrect jokes included (which are a sign of the time and shouldn't be erased from history), along with the original soundtracks). Not only that, but the instability of the picture, and the lack of digital fringing (unlike DVD) gives them a much more cinema-like feel.
If you want original Star Trek series, I'd say LaserDisc would be your best bet really for the closest to how they were meant to be.
I suddenly want to watch my CED of "The Ninja Mission" - the only Ninja film I've seen where the Ninjas are so awesome in their black clothing, they try to blend into the background... of a snowy scandinavian country.
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Also, as much as VHS suffers from low quality, DVD isn't that good either. It doesn't progressively degrade over time the way VHS does, but it does inflict craptastic MPEG-2 compression on the picture, and it just gets worse the more footage you try to squeeze onto one disc.
One of the first films I watched on my first ever DVD player was Fellowship of the Ring, and was instantly struck by the crappiness of the black gradient banding (it may even have been a single-disc rental DVD of the cinema release).
It's a long time since I owned a VCR though, and I don't miss them.
I did have a good (Toshiba iirc) one back in the day, but it ended up needing a head replacement and never made it through of surgery... horrible machines to try to service/repair.
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One of the first films I watched on my first ever DVD player was Fellowship of the Ring, and was instantly struck by the crappiness of the black gradient banding (it may even have been a single-disc rental DVD of the cinema release).
Yeah, that was the first time I noticed it, too - it baffles me that nobody thought this was an issue back then.
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I've never been a great fan of VHS - though I own a JVC S-VHS recorder which is a pretty good machine. I've always preferred disk formats like LaserDisc (of course) and the mostly-forgotten CED format. There's some really odd stuff on them which have disappeared into history, and sometimes they're in a purer form (such as the Tom And Jerry cartoons which can't be found uncensored on DVD - on LaserDisc they're original with all politically incorrect jokes included (which are a sign of the time and shouldn't be erased from history), along with the original soundtracks). Not only that, but the instability of the picture, and the lack of digital fringing (unlike DVD) gives them a much more cinema-like feel.
If you want original Star Trek series, I'd say LaserDisc would be your best bet really for the closest to how they were meant to be.
I suddenly want to watch my CED of "The Ninja Mission" - the only Ninja film I've seen where the Ninjas are so awesome in their black clothing, they try to blend into the background... of a snowy scandinavian country.
CED videodiscs eh?
Forgotten?
Until now, I'd never heard of them.
I had to look it up.
Interesting mechanics.
Over time does the analog playback degrade?
While I am impressed with Laserdiscs, I'm happy to standardize on DVDs.
I have a Blu-Ray player, but those discs are harder to decrypt, and the higher resolution isn't necessary for some playback devices.
Heck, to occupy myself during periods of delay, I'll often playback video I've converted to lower resolutions on my cell phone.
In fact, no matter what else it might hold, my multimedia folder always has a copy of the Stooge's "Disorder In The Court".
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One of the first films I watched on my first ever DVD player was Fellowship of the Ring, and was instantly struck by the crappiness of the black gradient banding (it may even have been a single-disc rental DVD of the cinema release).
...
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Nup. It was a crap conversion. The scenes in Moria looked over-saturated and it made the effects look mediocre. BluRay theatrical looks great however.
All our home movie VHS stuff is converted to digital and backed up on DVD at high quality. Our commercial VHS movies were downloaded from the internet when our last VHS recorder died. With the Video cassette inserts kept for the DVD case.
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Stuff stepanie in the incinerator??
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Who wants to play games at 32 colours, at 640 x 512 resolution, with 4 channel stereo sound, running at 7mhz, with a 1 button joystick, from a slow old floppy disk drive? ;)
At least the games didn't chew their tape or their video quality didn't degrade the more times you played them. Only downside was that floppy disks would fail after awhile, WHDLoad to the rescue. :)
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CED videodiscs eh?
Forgotten?
Until now, I'd never heard of them.
I had to look it up.
Interesting mechanics.
Over time does the analog playback degrade?
It does, and the original quality is worse than VHS.
I have a large collection of these and a couple of players.
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I've been running into a lot of CEDs at garage/estate sales lately. I've kinda half-considered grabbing a few (there's a pawn shop an hour or so down the road that has a player,) but if I want nifty analogue home video formats, I've already got a cassette deck and a LD player...
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Nup. It was a crap conversion. The scenes in Moria looked over-saturated and it made the effects look mediocre. BluRay theatrical looks great however.
No dispute there, and I wasn't saying that DVD is intrinsically worse than VHS, however that's my lasting impression of DVD (as the bright shiny uncorruptable future that replaced VHS). A little unfair to DVD perhaps given that it was a ~3 hour action movie that really needed to be high bitrate crammed onto a single disc.
Exactly the same pros and cons as digital storage vs Vinyl when it comes down to it: Sacrificing depth and texture for a more stable storage/playback medium.
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I think I gave up on "neat" alternate formats with the eight track tape player (I still have a few of those tapes).
They almost suckered me into CD-i with its 68K based processor and its modified OS-9 operating system, but man was the picture quality substandard.
If the picture quality of CED is sub-VHS, its amazing any of the players or discs have survived.
I hope those rare VHS releases all get copied.
I can foresee a day when, even though millions of the players were produced, finding a functional VHS deck may be difficult.
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CEDs are a better quality format than VHS was at the time. Of course VHS was active until the end of the century, whereas CED technology stopped in about 1985.
At the time, though, CED was definitely ahead with its true stereo sound and better picture to boot.
A CED disk should last longer than a VHS tape because it's stored physically rather than magnetically - but just like with vinyl, you need to be sure they're stored correctly in proper temperature and above all vertically. Many times you'll find they've been stored horizontally and because they're so heavy, the weight of the top of the stack will crush those on the bottom.
I like CED - if you look after the discs, they can give surprisingly good video and audio. Plus, they have character - I've never felt the same about VHS.
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Well, anything that doesn't have to be re-winded has my vote.
BTW - Thanks for the info.
I hate when I've missed something.
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I have a old 4 head VCR I bought several years ago that has never been used (I'd already moved to DVD), but I threw out every VHS tape I have (they really suck).
Funny, I play rentals in the Bluray player, but I don't buy that format.
Can anybody give me a good reason to keep using older video storage devices?
And wouldn't you know, some VHS tapes are actually rising in value. I've had a few that were worth $20 and up. Then those that don't ever cross over to DVD (I.E. The Quest (1986)) I transfer to DVD and sell on Ebay. :)