> If $190 feels outrageous for a film about a kangaroo accidentally coming into money, consider the price of a limited-edition copy of the 1989 Disney film “The Little Mermaid,” which is listed on Etsy for $45,000. The cover art for this hard-to-find copy is said to contain a male anatomical part drawn into a sea castle.
Not really a direct response to the article, but just because someone threw it up with a 45k price tag on Etsy isn't really a good sign these are actually "worth" that much. Anyone can set an arbitrary value for these, and jumping from $200 (which is pretty "absurd", but well within reason for collectors) to almost $50k without any other stepping stones seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
Ah, the good old Disney "Black Diamond" nonsense again. It's a new reseller trap. (I know this particular case is more about the cover art but it's the same thing).
I really wish people would learn to look at sold comps instead of what the listing prices are.
To me this might be money laundering if it’s not really collectible or in demand. I’m not sure I understand the demand for VHS when both DVD and Blu-ray are superior media formats that are more user friendly than VHS
I think there's some demand for this sort of thing. People definitely collect way weirder. I've dabbled in retrocomputing, and spend e.g. a couple hundred bucks on rare but totally useless hardware because I enjoy it.
But there's wasting money on a hobby and, well, spending tens of thousands of dollars. The union on a Venn diagram of people with tens of thousands of dollars of disposable income who are fanatical collectors of obscure Disney VHS tapes and shop on Etsy has to be vanishingly small. :)
Dvd and blue ray are both fragile and highly temporary. VHS is too, but if it starts breaking you still get a grainy film instead of nothing. I own neither but i get the appeal
Surely the author of the article knows that too. But they need to sell an emotion evoking clickbait article, and quoting a few big irrelevant numbers helps with that.
> “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,” said Matthew Booth, 47, the owner of Videodrome in Atlanta, which sells VHS tapes in addition to its Blu-ray and DVD rental business.
If you're in the area, you owe it to yourself to check out. Some of the local filmmakers will stock their own films on VHS and only have them available for a short time. It's super indie and incredibly cool. [1]
It seems that a large number of posts here are from the NYT. This always makes me wonder if they, and others, post on sites like this to drive up their page views.
While I'm sure plenty of sites do, a huge venue like NYT has so many readers there is bound to be HN users among them that will post anything remotely relevant. Most times I see something on a major site that I think would be worthwhile for HN, it has been posted long before I saw it.
It's never stuck out to me as being overrepresented in posts here, but I've never thought about it either. Full disclosure: it's one of the main news sources I follow.
(Opinions are my own)
They don't. A site like HN isn't in the top 10,000 referrers and no one has ever heard of it; traffic from this exact post is barely a blip. There's no business value.
Teams responsible for backlinks would post on established social media in a very transparent way (from official accounts, etc.)
Besides everyone here has JS disabled, four ad blockers installed and uses a text-based browser. If I personally made the call they would never have employees (or paid contractors) post here of all places.
You may also get access through a local library (or via university). But as others mentioned, the paywall is easily avoided through blockers (no special config for ones I've used), reader mode, (or even certain links, feeds?)
You can usually get a lot of useful and interesting information from the comments on HN submissions even if you don't or can't read the article.
Often, top level comments aren't even really about anything in the article. The article reminds the commentator of some tangent and they comment on that tangent. That top level comment and its comment subthread are in effect a separate article and its comments.
It's often these tangents that make HN comment threads worth reading.
> Does the average person here actually have a NYT subscription?
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect, unless there happens to be someone on HN who has already surveyed the readership of HN to know their subscription habits.
If you are actually polling, then I'll answer that yes, I do have a subscription. Also, I have never submitted a link.
NYT is the only news outlet I subscribe to - and I'm not American, not in the US, and have never lived there. Frankly, I love their business, finance, and international coverage.
Also at $3 per month it's well worth it - and least for me.
what i want to know is who is still buying tape backups? lto-8 tapes are $85 for 12TB. that's not actually that stellar- you might not believe what good enterprise hard drives sell for!- but it's still 2 log2 orders of magnitude cheaper. it's throughput is faster than hard drives too! latency, alas, well, yeah, not so good. ;)
alas tape is just so niche. sadly. because it's so economically awesome & sensible. there's something so excellent about offline media, not-so-near-line media, endless reams of tape, bought cheap. endless storage, deep backups. and durable, easy to ship off.
vhs? meh. i see no reason to have any interest in vhs. tape drives though: i still just imagine a hard drive platter, endlessly unwinding. magnetic storage space, endlessly unfurling.
To my knowledge, there is still no alternative to tape backups that comes close in terms of price per TB, size/capacity, resilience and safety/security. Even for a smaller or mid-sized business, if you want to make sure you have a copy of your files that you can keep 100% safe in a ransomware attack, or that you can get out in a jiff during or before a disaster, a small tape loader for 3-5k that can keep up to 8 tapes in automatic rotation will get you there and is money well spent.
End of each day (or work week) you let the little robot inside the loader drop one tape drop into the "mail slot" and remove it, quick and easy. You now have a full offline backup that won't even be destroyed if you drop it (usually). I think, if every company did that, we'd see a lot less impact from ransomware attacks.
(There are also WORM tapes for archival purposes that can't be overwritten, so if you don't want to remove tapes every so often, you can just use these.)
The only thing that bugs me is that there is very little innovation in that field, it's basically one or two companies that manufacture tapes, drives and loaders and they have some clever practices that force you to upgrade every 5 years or so (new drives are only backward-compatible for one generation usually). The market is really geared extremely towards large enterprise only. The loaders have ancient web UIs from the 90s, the connection ports are also legacy or datacenter-only (SCSI usually), unfortunately you won't find a tape drive with USB3/Thunderbolt (I'd probably buy one for my home if they existed, I'm imagining them in a nice form factor similar to the old Zip Drives).
I've never understood why tapes as storage and backup media aren't more popular. In practice, they really don't have many downsides that I have noticed. That whole technology is incredibly mature and therefore very reliable.
Sure. I like the Tandberg NEOs StorageLoader for smaller deployments. It has slots for 8 tapes which it can automatically change and spit out as you want.
It's pretty small as far as tape loaders go in that it only takes up a single rack unit (but it's still very deep, so you need a full-depth rack to properly store it).
It's currently sold with drives for LTO generations 6 to 8 built in (the drive comes with it and is mounted in the back but it can be removed and you can upgrade it after some years; the loader itself basically only does the job of feeding the tapes from the magazines into the drive and unloading them again after, or putting them in the mailslot for removal). It's like a tiny robot living in your server rack which I think is neat.
If you need to back up 4 TB of data, I recommend you go with LTO-7 tapes whose native capacity is 6 TB (uncompressed). LTO-6 only has 2.5 TB native capacity, so that might not be enough for you, also it's a bit old (LTO-6 was released in 2012). Note that you'll always find the compressed capacity in the marketing material but that's not very useful to calculate with unless you know the data that's to be backed up very well.
Tape capacity usually doubles every four years (more or less) when a new generation is released (to an extent it's a scheme, but technical progress does play into it as well). Backwards compatibility is limited as I said, usually drives can read two generations back and write one generation). Due to some shenanigans this does not currently hold true for LTO-8 drives (the latest gen that's widely available), which can only read back LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes but not the older LTO-6 tapes. So you have to remember that if you have very long archival cycles to consider (thinking in decades).
LTO-8 is still somewhat more expensive, as it is the latest available gen. While LTO-9 was technically released late last year, I haven't seen it anywhere in the wild yet. They're pretty slow on the uptake, last generation it was the same and there weren't enough LTO-8 tapes for almost two years after "release" which is why they "invented" a stop-gap standard called LTO M-8, iirc, which used LTO-7 tapes but you could write 9 TB on them when using LTO-8 drives).
Long story short, LTO-7 (drive and tape) is probably your best bet in terms of economics and availability (although, if you're sure you'll be fine with LTO-6 for the foreseeable future, you might be able to save maybe $1-2k that way).
The NEOs series devices (incl. the NEOs StorageLoader) come with SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces, I recommend you use SAS, as it's cheaper and easier to get HBAs (adapter cards for your storage server) for SAS. If you use ESXi/vSphere, get an HBA that's on the compatibility list and you can pass it through to a VM to host the backup software on there and control the storage loader (not officially supported by all companies but works very well in my experience).
You do need a server to "control" and "feed" the StorageLoader and this can be pretty much anything you can put a SAS card in (as I said, incl. a VM).
I recommend you combine it with Veeam Backup & Replication which is the best backup software currently out there imo, works beautifully with VMs and a diverse range of endpoints and natively supports backing up on a tape loader as the ultimate target (you can get creative there, do hourly backups to disk and send one batch to tape every evening for example).
One caveat: Tapes must be fed at constant speed while writing or they do something called "shoe-shining" which isn't good for the longevity of the tape. You'd have to look up the exact numbers but feeding the tape directly over 1 Gbit Ethernet via iSCSI from a backup appliance with the server as a proxy... that's probably going to be too slow (if you use Veeam, it will show you what the bottleneck is during the backup process). 10 Gbit would be better but you ...
It does, thanks a lot! I'll look at the price of used LTO-6 or 7 - a used 5 1/4 unit could easily go in a server that has a LSI 9223 8i SAS with only 4 drives connected. (so the second SFF 8087 is empty).
If not, a NEO will be great!
About Veem, do I absolutely need it? Can't I just tar/untar or zfs send to the tape?
You don't need Veeam of course but you should definitely try it out if you really want to manage your backups properly.
It works really well and is pretty sleek, also for restore processs and when working with VMs or endpoints. You should certainly use it instead of any other commercial backup software like BackupExec (most of which are just... bad in comparison). Veeam offers a free Windows agent but I don't think that one works with tape drives (I might be wrong, especially in combination with LTFS, see below).
You can't generally use tape like a USB stick, that is, write and delete files to and from it willy-nilly ;-) As tape is linear, that would require a lot of going back and forth. Imagine random I/O when you can just go forward or backward with the read head: That's annoying and slow at best, at worst it could destroy the tape or machine quickly.
HOWEVER: They have come up with something called the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) which does in fact allow you to access a tape in a way that looks (from the outside at least) pretty similar to any external storage device. In fact, sustained read speeds can be much faster even than traditional storage in the right circumstances. There are some tricks they use, obviously, to get around the physical limitations I mentioned above. One of them is, I believe, that space is not freed up if you delete a file (it is simply marked as deleted in meta data - but that's the "modern way" to delete things anyway, right? :-D).
Also, your drive has to support it and the tape also has to be formatted in a specific way. It might only work with new tapes (again, I might be wrong or this may have changed). I've actually never used LTFS in production, so I can't help you with the details or tell you what this means for the lifespan of the tape if you use it in this fashion. I also don't know what software you need to use this under Linux.
Feel free to report back if you go down this route, I'd be curious to hear whether you get it to work and whether you like it for everyday use.
This is what is wrong with Disney and why they'll struggle with the upcoming creator economy. They double down on their IP, and never stray too far from the familiar.
Yes, it's a successful equation when single films are expensive to make. Increasingly, you can satisfy audiences with less expenditure and a more tailored experience.
One thing going for big franchises is merchandising, but I'm not so sure micro merchandise won't find just as large a market. YouTooz, etc.
Disney owns some of the most successful producers of new content and franchises in recent years - Pixar and Marvel Studios.
And, say what you will about the terrible Star Wars sequels they just cranked out, I've heard rave reviews of The Mandalorian from everyone I know who's watched it. Also Rogue One, which actually did feel like a tragedy set in the classic Star Wars universe.
In ten years more content will be produced per year than in the past 50 years combined. New methods will make this dead simple for people to create at home. It will achieve the same photo realism that today's high budgeted, high production value projects have.
Clutching onto franchises doesn't work in this new paradigm when kids can make their own Star Wars movies in their basement.
They won't be making "Star Wars" remixes due to copyright but they can blather on about it on YouTube. Internet mass media will dominate screen time and eventually dollars spent. Netflix's CEO bragged their greatest competition is Fortnite and sleep.
I agree that the explosion of mass media content means there's never been a better time to be a couch potato.
I don't gamble, but I am tempted by the long bet suggestion.
I have a hard time seeing how we'd define a shared criteria for what constitutes "skilled actor", as well as "good writing".
I wouldn't be surprised if you could automate things like soap operas pretty convincingly.
I would be shocked if software managed to produce something as compelling as The Expanse without extensive, nuanced human control of it.
Just how automated are you aiming for? What level of literary quality is your goal here?
At heart I'm a musician and minor lit nerd who learned to program instead of following my passions because it was a good career that used creative skills. That means I have Opinions on literature and artwork. I love generative algorithmic stuff like procedural C64 demos and generative compositions but don't see a way to achieve great automated storytelling without cracking general AI, which I see as likely unachievable.
It's most likely a pirate tape that contains a completely different film.
I remember getting a pirate copy of Harry Potter 5 back in the day, before it came out in cinemas. The actual content of the DVD was a completely different German film called "Bibi Blocksberg". It happens.
I just did this summer. I am raising my granddaughter right now. (Son got sucked into meth, and yeah. Nuff said.)
I am having fun showing her tech. She is 5 and uses touch and buttons well. A family down the road had basically a full kids movie and Disney collection for $20. 50 some odd tapes in respectable condition.
Total steal, and modern sets display the VHS surprisingly well. Seems at least some of the processing helps. Kind of unexpected, but welcome. Totally watchable. I remember it being worse not too long ago.
She loves the VCR. The media is big. She can handle it. Hearing all the little noises and watching it take the tape, or give it back seems interesting to her, and the first time was hilarious!
"Papa, papa, it gave the movie back to me! Do I say thank you? Is it all done now?"
"Yeah baby, put it in the box and you can start another one."
"I don't like rewind" (lol, who does kiddo?)
Another family member has a couple real little ones. When mine moves past this experience, I will take it to them to enjoy.
Overall, a nice 4 head player delivers. (Got that for a song at a yard sale same weekend)
We have some nostalgia associated with many movies first seen on VHS. In my view, VHS looks best on a great analog CRT, but does not look bad on our rando Roku, kid room TV.
I can certainly understand people seeking out titles they can't get otherwise. The whole thing remains enjoyable enough.
Do the tapes still look okay? I remember when I was a child near the end of the VHS era, my parents tried to show us a copy of Back to the Future they'd bought when that movie had come out. The color had noticeably faded, to the point where I remember it almost looked black-and-white at first.
Overall, yeah. And it may be changes in the settings too.
More and better content driving chroma harder = lower setting.
On a reasonable VCR, and a good display, noise tends to come up more than color loss accumulates.
Also, people would back off on the color some anyway. The resolution was not all that great. Driving it hard, like we are used to now may well wash away some detail.
This all improves on a CRT with good analog circuits.
I have a large collection of commercial tapes from the 1980s and have not noticed any degradation. I have picked up degraded tapes from the thrift store, though. I suspect it depends on storage conditions.
Another thing to mention is that the VHS tapes generally give a much nicer image than DVD. Tapes have better tonal range and lack other compression artifacts.
I've digitized my family video VHS tapes using an old computer and a tv-card, but apparently there are some 8mm tapes from before my time that could use digitizing as well but I don't know how I would go about doing it.
There is a review of VHS, Laserdisc and Blu-Ray on this very movie. So I think this is of relevance here :) I think it also talks about screens the different media is made for as a factor in how it looks.
I never understood the big deal. The rental stores all had super fast rewinding machines, it couldn't have taken the teenager staff more than 30 seconds to do it themselves.
The rewind machines ranged from less than a minute to a couple, depending on where the tape was. Many rental places had multiple machines too.
That adds up real quick. Rental place moves a few hundred movies an evening. Not rewinding made life hell for the staff.
Most VCRs will do it at the end of tape. So the "was not kind, did not rewind" case was largely people stopping the movie part way through, or right at end credits, and just not pressing rewind.
I made sure my fam rewinded. And my little one has already made her stand on this clear. "Always rewind papa." I had explained the bright green sticker we have on one tape.
She short cut her own self!
Wants to watch a full movie, bot have to manage the tape at the start of the experience, lol!
On that note, stickers work! Little ones notice them big. They seem to get that they matter some how and want to know why.
Anyway, from our point of view, being the renter, it is someone else's problem.
As soon as people get a collection, the tables turn. It is who ever enjoyed the tape denying the next person their sweet experience.
In the touchscreen era it's interesting to see physical interfaces as an interesting thing and not a chore.
As a kid I'd marvel for hours on players front panels. Tablets have the benefit of making you interact with just about everything in an absolute generic fashion that objects probably can't replicate but they still have wonder and complexity to enjoy I believe.
> Hearing all the little noises and watching it take the tape
Last time I used a backup tape drive, I had the same feeling. The slick mechanism and motor sound was even more beautiful to me 20 years after we got it.
I recently bought an old Denon 3-head cassette player for my HiFi, as I still have cassettes but have had nothing to play them on for several years. The machine would have cost about £600 in 1983 (~£2k in 2020) when it was first introduced to the market, but cost me about £160 on eBay.
When it's operating the whole machine just screams precision, with its clicks and whirs and still bright VFD info screen and vu-meters. It's truly a beautiful thing, and very satisfying to use.
In electronic music I've also noticed a trend back away from DAWs, and everything being virtual or emulated, to real physical devices. I think there's really something in many of us that loves a properly tactile interface with dedicated controls.
Also analog devices, I mean even light bulbs, have a very particular flavour of colours. The blue, the yellow.. they're somehow more .. i don't know .. interesting than the most precise IPS or OLED panel.
Oh yeah! I love listening to music on cassette and vinyl. Using good gear is all part of the experience.
Edit: And tactile has mental connotations. "A little bit" on a physical dial is a target one can feel and compare in ways that are immediate, thought is action ways.
Then deploy my backup one I have at my work bench. (It is connected to a great CRT. Reasons.) Edit: Honestly, when I am in flow, I sometimes put a classic from my youth on. Raiders of the lost ark, or Wrath of Kahn. It is just nice to glance over at the CRT and muse. Brings back good vibes.
Then, probably just clean and fix the contaminated one.
Assumptions are the mother of all screw ups - I'd recommend changing your attitude, as that path of assuming negatives will not lead you to anything positive
This article raises an important point about the fragmentation of content across different services (with many movie production houses starting their own streaming platforms, like Lionsgate for example).
This fragmented streaming landscape really is a far cry from the idealistic "all content under one roof" posturing that steaming services generally took when launching their platforms. Another victim of the 'walled garden' problem plaguing the tech world.
The worst thing is, the more streaming services you buy the more scrolling you do. The less watching is done. Recently my TV melted and it took 2 months to get a new one. I had no choice but to watch what was on cable (in Poland) with only a select few channels showing movies in EN. The lack of choice actually made me enjoy what was given to me and aside from the ads, I didn't get FOMO thinking this was the wrong movie.
So essentially, tech has broken up cable companies dominance by fragmenting the industry.
I'm going to call it here first - there's a startup coming that will combine all streaming services into one package for a low-low cost of $30/month.
I never thought it but to be fair some of the documentary content is pretty solid on Youtube. A silent video of a street food vendor preparing a meal is more than enough to keep me occupied for hours on end.
I unfortunately fell for one of those 'exclusive' docu streaming services and within minutes wanted to get a refund.
I'm asking mostly because they make me real curious, and their prices aren't all that high for a year. It is a miracle I haven't yet gone down that path.
I have been considering these also and would like to know. I was considering MagellanTV, which I heard about from one of my youtube history channels, History Time.
Curiosity Stream. I will give it another go but honestly, the level of quality on Youtube doc's is incredible.
However, it looks like the going trend is to create a streaming version for the Youtube channel so I assume the quality and content will become more of a gateway to more content than the full deal.
Out of curiosity: why did it take two months to buy a TV? I am asking because when I was in Poland the choice was top-notch, with stores everywhere (not to mention Internet).
On what were you watching the cable tv?
And I agree about the choice, I also like this forced few selection when I am at a hotel, it is actually quite exciting to see what is available and be forced to be on time and everything.
Purely from a laziness perspective. There is not much need for a TV as it's just used to watch something in the evenings to take a break from the small screens. Plus, I tried to take advantage of the 0% interest rates that everyone has at the minute as well but it was a mission to get it done.
Nothing to do with the choice as your are right Poland has amazing choices. From high end brands to low-cost, high quality brands too.
But op, but I have been mulling over getting a tv for 6 months. I want a big one but no spyware or built in ads. That didn’t seem to exist. Have been using an old 720p projector, maybe I’ll just replace that one instead of getting a tv.
I probably would have stuck with the 720p historic LCD sony flat screen but I can't use a chromecast or plug my Xbox in either. So new screen was needed.
I've been watching lots of regular morning TV after years of barely watching any at all, and freedom from choice can really be great sometimes. Even if the TV programming never is optimized to my specific needs, just watching it unfold is comforting and you realize there are valuable skills involved in curation for thousands or even millions of people.
Is that not the same with Youtube? I'm looking at your Monday.com with the incessant pre-roll ad's over and over again. Scrolling through movies feels like the new-era of watching ads sometimes.
Is this not a perfect example of our endless thirst for dopamine? During ads what's the first thing we do - grab our phones to fill that ad time with dopamine.
A 5 minute ad could actually provide some respite from that dopamine hit by allowing you to get up and move around, make a tea and grab a bit of fresh air.
The article fails to mention the reasons I love VHS: it’s so resilient: the gentle degradation (instead of brittle digital media), doesn't require the internet, doesn’t have distracting notifications/social integrations built in. It’s easier to pick what to watch. It feels nice to physically hold an object.
I was about to say, what about dvd and blu-ray? I don't plug in to the network...
But then I remembered pausing a blu-ray the other day, and it had this popup showing a thumbnail and the chapter name, something like "Point of No Return". Gah. It pulled me out of the movie.
Blu-Ray is unforgivable. It is a straight-up anti-consumer technology. The Stranger Things season 1 Blu-Ray contains an unskippable, 5 minute long trailer for season 2 which contains spoilers for season 1:
Generally I'd consider any pre-MKBv68 Bluray pretty userfriendly if it doesn't use BD+. Fully liberated playback thanks to the internet. Don't throw in a newer disc though, it will chain your drive again.
Unfortunately I think AACS 2.0 has moved to always online. That's a shame because it basically means you're getting sold a disc of bytes noone can use ever again, once the servers go down...
If you refer to the first part of "thanks to the internet": for basic BDs, keys to decrypt are available up to the end of 2019 (depends on the release profile). For newer/4k movies, these keys are not supposed to be used offline and as such have to be checked out (with your client verified) online...
As for your latter part: yes, I guess that's the aim, but piracy generally works just fine for streaming. And as long as China is not the cultural hegemon, some way to grab the bytes off the transport will be available.
Blu-ray elevates it quite poorly. I recently bought a Terminator set where it forced a 3 minute spiel on the blu-ray format on several discs (I couldn't know about it's AMAZING quality after having bought a whole set of them /s).
I just buy to rip/collect, but sometimes I have to navigate menus on a physical player to match features and titles. Lots of releases out there force previews, anti-piracy warnings, ridiculous menu sequences, and a whole host of other content that detracts from the experience.
Ironically, one of the several reasons I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay was because I've had the Netflix interface spoil far too many shows for me, with the spoilery episode summaries that pop up automatically whenever a video is paused.
I wasn't aware of that trailer though, because I don't actually have a BluRay player. I popped the BluRay into my computer and ripped the episodes with MakeMKV. :)
The biggest hurdle became finding a good quality VHS player. My dad had one that worked flawlessly for about 20 years. I gave up on VHS because everything brand off the shelf kept destroying tapes, within months of purchase.
Back in the day, if you bought a commercial film on VHS, in most cases it was recorded at SLP (super long play, 6 hours to a standard tape) and then they would just put 1/3 of the normal amount of tape inside, to save money.
If you wanted to same movie recorded at SP (Standard play, 2 hours per tape) you usually had to pay extra, often double, and you couldn't find them in stores, you had to order them.
My dad was a bit of an audiophile, so for movies where quality mattered, he'd special order the SP versions. One that I remember was UHF (the Weird Al vehicle) and another was Indiana Jones. Which we ordered again on SP SVHS once we got an SVHS player.
So of you're planning to collect VHS, make sure you look at the recording speed. You might find a great deal if you find an SP tape.
Ya. Adjacently: pre-DAT, my musician, audiophile, hacker friend would use higher end VCR gear and tapes for audio production. Some kind of DIY homemade multitrack (8?) setup. Back when professional recording studios had 16+ track gear and very expensive tapes.
Coming from the USA, I don't remember seeing anything outside of the budget video range that used LP or SLP. Most of the prerecorded tapes I ever saw were always SP. Your different experience interests me. VHS SP mode video can actually be quite decent quality. In the early days of digital cable, I used to record things to VHS using an SVHS deck connected via S-Video. Those recordings, while not quite broadcast quality obviously, were some of the highest quality VHS recordings I ever saw, with a quite similar "feel" to the look of U-Matic.
Believe it or not, there are even VHS and DVD rental places still out there, yes the kind with a wall lined with shelves of VHS cassettes and another with DVD cases.
The margins may be slim, but there are still takers. Just because a technology is a generation or two behind doesn't mean it's not in use.
There used to be one near me that managed to survive - until a few years ago - several decades through a lot of changes in the industry. What finally killed it off were four or five Redbox kiosks being placed within a 10-15 minute drive, at various foot traffic commercial locations. That wiped out a lot of the new releases disc rental business for the store and that was enough to tip them over (certainly the huge gains by Netflix, Prime, Apple, Roku in streaming since then might have done it just the same regardless).
Something I'm surprised wasn't brought up is the demand for recordable tapes. There's quite an active collector's scene for tapes that might contain old TV airings, commercials, bumpers, etc. Often these end up archived online, as a sort of civic duty of preservation. In addition, blank tapes are useful for creating a specific lo-fi visual style for videos and images.
I have tons of these that i keep picking up from free boxes in the street, i rarely have the time to digitize them but they really are some beautiful time capsules and i should...
I have like 3 vcrs, a capture device and a pretty big collection for my tiny apartment. In my city (Berlin) putting free boxes in the street is common practice and between that and the abundant junk stores I can always find new material. Sometimes i find a full collection that feels like getting the login details to someone's pre-internet "accounts" - i recently found a box obviously belonging to a GI stationed in Germany, it had a good cross section of American pop culture, military aviation stunt videos, family home videos and the crown jewel, a tape called "Thank you america!" made by the German army for the GIs.
I also cherish very much the boatload of random tapes i got from the closing of a video rental place in Japan... The tapes cost 50 cent each, ended up costing me a good $300 in excess weight at the airport (plus a bit of a sweat as i entered another store and they set off the alarms, causing an army of employees to cover them with alarm defusing bags!), but that stuff is actually priceless and you can't find it anywhere in the internet.
My son once grab on the street a huge crate of 80s movies on VHS next to a trash bin. He regularly uses them with his friends for ""80s nights" where they watch 80s action movies (a full set of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme movies), on VHS, on my CRT TV (bought in 2000, still going strong). Huge success among the youth.
The VHS tapes are actually more robust than DVDs are. A single scratch or scuff can render a DVD useless. A VHS will just soldier on if the tape gets creased and straightened, etc.
VHS only looks bad if it is put on a big screen.
Another thing great about VHS is you can get high end players for $5 at the thrift store !!
I'd rather have the option for simulation of certain aspects of CRT displays, which at 4K and 8K should have a lot more room to work with to make it look as accurate as the technology actually allows.
PSA: scratched and scuffed DVDs can almost always be restored with a few seconds of buffing on a machine ( or a long time by hand).
The reflective layers are in the middle of the medium, so unless it's a very deep gouge, it's probably fine.
I've also noticed that laptop (and by extension, slim usb units) DVD and Blu-ray drives are much less capable of reading marginal media. I had one disc completely unreadable in a slim drive that played just fine in my set top, and also read out with a modest number of retries on my desktop.
Interesting. I don't have a buffing wheel, but my friend does and he buffed a few for me. I don't remember what compound he used, but I think it was for buffing clearcoat on cars.
IIRC, Mitsubshi VCRs were the later good ones in the 80's/90's. The rewind speeds were insanely fast. Earlier, Panasonic units were good in the mid 80's.
I recall inheriting a 3-piece Panasonic VHS VTR-type camera (not a camcorder) system that had a separate camera, recorder/player, and control/tuner unit. It was roughly a VHS consumer analog of the Sony SL-F1 Betamax camera system. The tape unit was silver w silver buttons, bulky, and had a shoulder strap. It had a slow rewind speed.
Super VHS (S-VHS) players weren't good enough to justify their costs.
All recordings of me as a kid were made on a similar 3 piece unit. The camera was much easier to use than integrated units because it was so much lighter.
There was something about the era vhs was a part of that caused people to release stuff you just wouldn't see today. Small batch releases from small town churches of heavy metal laden clips interspersed with grainy pastors warning people of the devils hold on our youth. Hillariously cheesey square dancing tutorials with fully permed men and women. Strange and obscure indie animation that oozes with the grit and unabashed honesty of unfettered creativity.
I love checking out the vhs section at thrift stores, and will often pick stuff up that seems like it'll give me an interesting porthole view into the past.
I think it was the combination of cheap technology (at least the blank tapes), and a low tech threshold. No reliance on software - you could just chain together VCRs and splice together a film.
RedLetterMedia on YouTube is still buying VHS tapes, for their 'Best of the Worst' series, where they watch old awful VHS tapes and point out what's hilarious about them (and pick the best ones).
Especially when they do stuff like 'Wheel of the Worst', you can see everything from 'How to Carve Pumpkins' to 'Let's Rap About Fire Safety' to 'American Flatulators'
I am currently decluttering my house, which means getting rid of old books, board games, etc. I have a GIGANTIC box filled with DVDs. It is a big clunky and heavy box and I find the prospect of having to cart it around during my next move to be very unappealing.
I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I just dump the whole thing at the good will, cherry picky only the best ones and get rid of the rest or maybe throw the cases away but store the disks in a binder?
Going through this process of decluttering has made me seriously rethink the unbridled accumulation of stuff that I have been doing for the past few years.
Hoarding a bunch of VHS tapes seems unthinkable to me.
A coworker, about 15 years ago, was telling me about bringing out some old VHS tapes for his kids. They were absolutely amazed at one particular feature: you could put the tape in and it would be at exactly where you left off! This was a great advancement, in their minds, compared to DVD/BluRay that always started at the beginning.
I suppose that time has passed though. My own kid knows basically nothing but streaming (which also has that feature). We still have a BluRay player hooked up but I bet it's been used less than 5 times in the past half decade.
Ironically, there's a bin full of old VHS in the basement somewhere, but I'm pretty sure we don't even have a player anymore. It would be fun to see the reaction though.
since I can't get past the paywall, I'm guessing its the government and military. They have lots of legacy systems running on ancient hardware and the cost to upgrade is too high.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadNot really a direct response to the article, but just because someone threw it up with a 45k price tag on Etsy isn't really a good sign these are actually "worth" that much. Anyone can set an arbitrary value for these, and jumping from $200 (which is pretty "absurd", but well within reason for collectors) to almost $50k without any other stepping stones seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
I really wish people would learn to look at sold comps instead of what the listing prices are.
But there's wasting money on a hobby and, well, spending tens of thousands of dollars. The union on a Venn diagram of people with tens of thousands of dollars of disposable income who are fanatical collectors of obscure Disney VHS tapes and shop on Etsy has to be vanishingly small. :)
> “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,” said Matthew Booth, 47, the owner of Videodrome in Atlanta, which sells VHS tapes in addition to its Blu-ray and DVD rental business.
If you're in the area, you owe it to yourself to check out. Some of the local filmmakers will stock their own films on VHS and only have them available for a short time. It's super indie and incredibly cool. [1]
[1] https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/viva-v...
Teams responsible for backlinks would post on established social media in a very transparent way (from official accounts, etc.)
Besides everyone here has JS disabled, four ad blockers installed and uses a text-based browser. If I personally made the call they would never have employees (or paid contractors) post here of all places.
Sometimes the trick is to tell Safari to always use reader mode for this domain, and then it kicks in before the JavaScript messes with the content
Often, top level comments aren't even really about anything in the article. The article reminds the commentator of some tangent and they comment on that tangent. That top level comment and its comment subthread are in effect a separate article and its comments.
It's often these tangents that make HN comment threads worth reading.
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect, unless there happens to be someone on HN who has already surveyed the readership of HN to know their subscription habits.
If you are actually polling, then I'll answer that yes, I do have a subscription. Also, I have never submitted a link.
Also at $3 per month it's well worth it - and least for me.
:P
alas tape is just so niche. sadly. because it's so economically awesome & sensible. there's something so excellent about offline media, not-so-near-line media, endless reams of tape, bought cheap. endless storage, deep backups. and durable, easy to ship off.
vhs? meh. i see no reason to have any interest in vhs. tape drives though: i still just imagine a hard drive platter, endlessly unwinding. magnetic storage space, endlessly unfurling.
I don't know, maybe there are hard disk changers too, that electrically and physically remove hard disks from the system?
End of each day (or work week) you let the little robot inside the loader drop one tape drop into the "mail slot" and remove it, quick and easy. You now have a full offline backup that won't even be destroyed if you drop it (usually). I think, if every company did that, we'd see a lot less impact from ransomware attacks. (There are also WORM tapes for archival purposes that can't be overwritten, so if you don't want to remove tapes every so often, you can just use these.)
The only thing that bugs me is that there is very little innovation in that field, it's basically one or two companies that manufacture tapes, drives and loaders and they have some clever practices that force you to upgrade every 5 years or so (new drives are only backward-compatible for one generation usually). The market is really geared extremely towards large enterprise only. The loaders have ancient web UIs from the 90s, the connection ports are also legacy or datacenter-only (SCSI usually), unfortunately you won't find a tape drive with USB3/Thunderbolt (I'd probably buy one for my home if they existed, I'm imagining them in a nice form factor similar to the old Zip Drives).
I've never understood why tapes as storage and backup media aren't more popular. In practice, they really don't have many downsides that I have noticed. That whole technology is incredibly mature and therefore very reliable.
If you need to back up 4 TB of data, I recommend you go with LTO-7 tapes whose native capacity is 6 TB (uncompressed). LTO-6 only has 2.5 TB native capacity, so that might not be enough for you, also it's a bit old (LTO-6 was released in 2012). Note that you'll always find the compressed capacity in the marketing material but that's not very useful to calculate with unless you know the data that's to be backed up very well.
Tape capacity usually doubles every four years (more or less) when a new generation is released (to an extent it's a scheme, but technical progress does play into it as well). Backwards compatibility is limited as I said, usually drives can read two generations back and write one generation). Due to some shenanigans this does not currently hold true for LTO-8 drives (the latest gen that's widely available), which can only read back LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes but not the older LTO-6 tapes. So you have to remember that if you have very long archival cycles to consider (thinking in decades).
LTO-8 is still somewhat more expensive, as it is the latest available gen. While LTO-9 was technically released late last year, I haven't seen it anywhere in the wild yet. They're pretty slow on the uptake, last generation it was the same and there weren't enough LTO-8 tapes for almost two years after "release" which is why they "invented" a stop-gap standard called LTO M-8, iirc, which used LTO-7 tapes but you could write 9 TB on them when using LTO-8 drives).
Long story short, LTO-7 (drive and tape) is probably your best bet in terms of economics and availability (although, if you're sure you'll be fine with LTO-6 for the foreseeable future, you might be able to save maybe $1-2k that way).
The NEOs series devices (incl. the NEOs StorageLoader) come with SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces, I recommend you use SAS, as it's cheaper and easier to get HBAs (adapter cards for your storage server) for SAS. If you use ESXi/vSphere, get an HBA that's on the compatibility list and you can pass it through to a VM to host the backup software on there and control the storage loader (not officially supported by all companies but works very well in my experience).
You do need a server to "control" and "feed" the StorageLoader and this can be pretty much anything you can put a SAS card in (as I said, incl. a VM). I recommend you combine it with Veeam Backup & Replication which is the best backup software currently out there imo, works beautifully with VMs and a diverse range of endpoints and natively supports backing up on a tape loader as the ultimate target (you can get creative there, do hourly backups to disk and send one batch to tape every evening for example).
One caveat: Tapes must be fed at constant speed while writing or they do something called "shoe-shining" which isn't good for the longevity of the tape. You'd have to look up the exact numbers but feeding the tape directly over 1 Gbit Ethernet via iSCSI from a backup appliance with the server as a proxy... that's probably going to be too slow (if you use Veeam, it will show you what the bottleneck is during the backup process). 10 Gbit would be better but you ...
If not, a NEO will be great!
About Veem, do I absolutely need it? Can't I just tar/untar or zfs send to the tape?
You can't generally use tape like a USB stick, that is, write and delete files to and from it willy-nilly ;-) As tape is linear, that would require a lot of going back and forth. Imagine random I/O when you can just go forward or backward with the read head: That's annoying and slow at best, at worst it could destroy the tape or machine quickly.
HOWEVER: They have come up with something called the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) which does in fact allow you to access a tape in a way that looks (from the outside at least) pretty similar to any external storage device. In fact, sustained read speeds can be much faster even than traditional storage in the right circumstances. There are some tricks they use, obviously, to get around the physical limitations I mentioned above. One of them is, I believe, that space is not freed up if you delete a file (it is simply marked as deleted in meta data - but that's the "modern way" to delete things anyway, right? :-D).
Also, your drive has to support it and the tape also has to be formatted in a specific way. It might only work with new tapes (again, I might be wrong or this may have changed). I've actually never used LTFS in production, so I can't help you with the details or tell you what this means for the lifespan of the tape if you use it in this fashion. I also don't know what software you need to use this under Linux.
Feel free to report back if you go down this route, I'd be curious to hear whether you get it to work and whether you like it for everyday use.
lol. the sequel....on VHS.
Yes, it's a successful equation when single films are expensive to make. Increasingly, you can satisfy audiences with less expenditure and a more tailored experience.
One thing going for big franchises is merchandising, but I'm not so sure micro merchandise won't find just as large a market. YouTooz, etc.
Disney owns some of the most successful producers of new content and franchises in recent years - Pixar and Marvel Studios.
And, say what you will about the terrible Star Wars sequels they just cranked out, I've heard rave reviews of The Mandalorian from everyone I know who's watched it. Also Rogue One, which actually did feel like a tragedy set in the classic Star Wars universe.
Suffice to say I think you're wrong here.
Clutching onto franchises doesn't work in this new paradigm when kids can make their own Star Wars movies in their basement.
I agree that the explosion of mass media content means there's never been a better time to be a couch potato.
I do see your point that the tech may eventually make writing skills the only crucial element in filmmaking, though.
... actually, I'll put acting / characterization on the crucial list.
I doubt software will ever be able to read a script then infer and depict a character's emotions and motivations as well as a skilled actor can.
Read? It'll be writing too.
Long bet 10 years?
I'm working on building this.
I have a hard time seeing how we'd define a shared criteria for what constitutes "skilled actor", as well as "good writing".
I wouldn't be surprised if you could automate things like soap operas pretty convincingly.
I would be shocked if software managed to produce something as compelling as The Expanse without extensive, nuanced human control of it.
Just how automated are you aiming for? What level of literary quality is your goal here?
At heart I'm a musician and minor lit nerd who learned to program instead of following my passions because it was a good career that used creative skills. That means I have Opinions on literature and artwork. I love generative algorithmic stuff like procedural C64 demos and generative compositions but don't see a way to achieve great automated storytelling without cracking general AI, which I see as likely unachievable.
I am having fun showing her tech. She is 5 and uses touch and buttons well. A family down the road had basically a full kids movie and Disney collection for $20. 50 some odd tapes in respectable condition.
Total steal, and modern sets display the VHS surprisingly well. Seems at least some of the processing helps. Kind of unexpected, but welcome. Totally watchable. I remember it being worse not too long ago.
She loves the VCR. The media is big. She can handle it. Hearing all the little noises and watching it take the tape, or give it back seems interesting to her, and the first time was hilarious!
"Papa, papa, it gave the movie back to me! Do I say thank you? Is it all done now?"
"Yeah baby, put it in the box and you can start another one."
"I don't like rewind" (lol, who does kiddo?)
Another family member has a couple real little ones. When mine moves past this experience, I will take it to them to enjoy.
Overall, a nice 4 head player delivers. (Got that for a song at a yard sale same weekend)
We have some nostalgia associated with many movies first seen on VHS. In my view, VHS looks best on a great analog CRT, but does not look bad on our rando Roku, kid room TV.
I can certainly understand people seeking out titles they can't get otherwise. The whole thing remains enjoyable enough.
Optical was not forgiving enough. I setup to rip and burn kid editions. They damaged them frequently.
More and better content driving chroma harder = lower setting.
On a reasonable VCR, and a good display, noise tends to come up more than color loss accumulates.
Also, people would back off on the color some anyway. The resolution was not all that great. Driving it hard, like we are used to now may well wash away some detail.
This all improves on a CRT with good analog circuits.
Another thing to mention is that the VHS tapes generally give a much nicer image than DVD. Tapes have better tonal range and lack other compression artifacts.
In the last couple months I've just been digitizing my old VHS tapes from late 80s to early 90s. (As well as my 8mm tapes from late 90s.)
Happily, all of them have been in great condition.
I've digitized my family video VHS tapes using an old computer and a tv-card, but apparently there are some 8mm tapes from before my time that could use digitizing as well but I don't know how I would go about doing it.
https://youtu.be/hUQvnxxTuM4
The rewind machines ranged from less than a minute to a couple, depending on where the tape was. Many rental places had multiple machines too.
That adds up real quick. Rental place moves a few hundred movies an evening. Not rewinding made life hell for the staff.
Most VCRs will do it at the end of tape. So the "was not kind, did not rewind" case was largely people stopping the movie part way through, or right at end credits, and just not pressing rewind.
I made sure my fam rewinded. And my little one has already made her stand on this clear. "Always rewind papa." I had explained the bright green sticker we have on one tape.
She short cut her own self!
Wants to watch a full movie, bot have to manage the tape at the start of the experience, lol!
On that note, stickers work! Little ones notice them big. They seem to get that they matter some how and want to know why.
Anyway, from our point of view, being the renter, it is someone else's problem.
As soon as people get a collection, the tables turn. It is who ever enjoyed the tape denying the next person their sweet experience.
That's beautiful!
Months later the video screen had been replaced with an interactive touch screen.
As a kid I'd marvel for hours on players front panels. Tablets have the benefit of making you interact with just about everything in an absolute generic fashion that objects probably can't replicate but they still have wonder and complexity to enjoy I believe.
> Hearing all the little noises and watching it take the tape
Last time I used a backup tape drive, I had the same feeling. The slick mechanism and motor sound was even more beautiful to me 20 years after we got it.
When it's operating the whole machine just screams precision, with its clicks and whirs and still bright VFD info screen and vu-meters. It's truly a beautiful thing, and very satisfying to use.
In electronic music I've also noticed a trend back away from DAWs, and everything being virtual or emulated, to real physical devices. I think there's really something in many of us that loves a properly tactile interface with dedicated controls.
Edit: And tactile has mental connotations. "A little bit" on a physical dial is a target one can feel and compare in ways that are immediate, thought is action ways.
Then deploy my backup one I have at my work bench. (It is connected to a great CRT. Reasons.) Edit: Honestly, when I am in flow, I sometimes put a classic from my youth on. Raiders of the lost ark, or Wrath of Kahn. It is just nice to glance over at the CRT and muse. Brings back good vibes.
Then, probably just clean and fix the contaminated one.
Patrick Bateman probably.
Jokes aside that was a really good read.
This article raises an important point about the fragmentation of content across different services (with many movie production houses starting their own streaming platforms, like Lionsgate for example).
This fragmented streaming landscape really is a far cry from the idealistic "all content under one roof" posturing that steaming services generally took when launching their platforms. Another victim of the 'walled garden' problem plaguing the tech world.
So essentially, tech has broken up cable companies dominance by fragmenting the industry.
I'm going to call it here first - there's a startup coming that will combine all streaming services into one package for a low-low cost of $30/month.
Honestly, I find it all super noisy and more or less abandoned TV. I am happy to watch a movie, or binge something good.
But I am not gonna chase it all.
My family is happy to, so it is their department now. And I get a nice benefit:
When I do want something, I need only ask. They will set it right up and I am good to go. Perfect.
I unfortunately fell for one of those 'exclusive' docu streaming services and within minutes wanted to get a refund.
I'm asking mostly because they make me real curious, and their prices aren't all that high for a year. It is a miracle I haven't yet gone down that path.
I honestly feel like the over abundance of choice is what puts me off.
However, it looks like the going trend is to create a streaming version for the Youtube channel so I assume the quality and content will become more of a gateway to more content than the full deal.
On what were you watching the cable tv?
And I agree about the choice, I also like this forced few selection when I am at a hotel, it is actually quite exciting to see what is available and be forced to be on time and everything.
Nothing to do with the choice as your are right Poland has amazing choices. From high end brands to low-cost, high quality brands too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968
A 5 minute ad could actually provide some respite from that dopamine hit by allowing you to get up and move around, make a tea and grab a bit of fresh air.
It's just usually not worth it for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that the code would probably need to be domain specific.
But then I remembered pausing a blu-ray the other day, and it had this popup showing a thumbnail and the chapter name, something like "Point of No Return". Gah. It pulled me out of the movie.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/crqx8r/the_s...
FYI, an archived post on Reddit means that it's older than 6 months and can't be commented on.
Unfortunately I think AACS 2.0 has moved to always online. That's a shame because it basically means you're getting sold a disc of bytes noone can use ever again, once the servers go down...
Maybe its just a planned phase-out so they can sell movies to you again and again.
As for your latter part: yes, I guess that's the aim, but piracy generally works just fine for streaming. And as long as China is not the cultural hegemon, some way to grab the bytes off the transport will be available.
I gave up on it, and went back to DVD.
I’m in the same boat. I like dvds because I could rip them and watch anywhere. Though streaming killed a lot of my physical digital media use.
I just buy to rip/collect, but sometimes I have to navigate menus on a physical player to match features and titles. Lots of releases out there force previews, anti-piracy warnings, ridiculous menu sequences, and a whole host of other content that detracts from the experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_operation_prohibition
I've always been able to tell where the real content is in MakeMKV by looking at the durations. Not working for you?
I wasn't aware of that trailer though, because I don't actually have a BluRay player. I popped the BluRay into my computer and ripped the episodes with MakeMKV. :)
If you wanted to same movie recorded at SP (Standard play, 2 hours per tape) you usually had to pay extra, often double, and you couldn't find them in stores, you had to order them.
My dad was a bit of an audiophile, so for movies where quality mattered, he'd special order the SP versions. One that I remember was UHF (the Weird Al vehicle) and another was Indiana Jones. Which we ordered again on SP SVHS once we got an SVHS player.
So of you're planning to collect VHS, make sure you look at the recording speed. You might find a great deal if you find an SP tape.
The margins may be slim, but there are still takers. Just because a technology is a generation or two behind doesn't mean it's not in use.
in Bellingham, WA
I love the one-day cycling races (Paris-Ruoubaix, etc.)
would you have time to change that by uploading some (e.g. to archive.org) ?
VHS only looks bad if it is put on a big screen.
Another thing great about VHS is you can get high end players for $5 at the thrift store !!
For me the big things are speed and the color gamut glowing phosphors in tubes can deliver. Plasma and CRT displays have great color and are fast.
Scan lines are cool too.
Other things, blooming on super bright, or high contrast are less desirable, but yeah. I would enjoy seeing things in that way myself.
The reflective layers are in the middle of the medium, so unless it's a very deep gouge, it's probably fine.
I've also noticed that laptop (and by extension, slim usb units) DVD and Blu-ray drives are much less capable of reading marginal media. I had one disc completely unreadable in a slim drive that played just fine in my set top, and also read out with a modest number of retries on my desktop.
It would play literally anything. Seriously, I found a Bare Naked Ladies CD on the ground. Scuffed to a point of doom.
For grins, I put it in the SONY, and it took a bit longer to buffer up, but just worked!
That same disc would not play in any other device I had.
I get the feeling the more robust error correction was not implemented on most devices.
That Sony would play very badly scuffed discs. Both side scuffed.
It did so with remarkably few skips. No pops.
Just about everything else I have owned would either refuse that media entirely, or play a mess.
But I've also found that trying it in various players means maybe one of them will play it.
The only problem I have with VHS is I have to clean the heads now and then with alcohol.
I recall inheriting a 3-piece Panasonic VHS VTR-type camera (not a camcorder) system that had a separate camera, recorder/player, and control/tuner unit. It was roughly a VHS consumer analog of the Sony SL-F1 Betamax camera system. The tape unit was silver w silver buttons, bulky, and had a shoulder strap. It had a slow rewind speed.
Super VHS (S-VHS) players weren't good enough to justify their costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiu0LPeLQPE
surprisingly nice
I love checking out the vhs section at thrift stores, and will often pick stuff up that seems like it'll give me an interesting porthole view into the past.
Especially when they do stuff like 'Wheel of the Worst', you can see everything from 'How to Carve Pumpkins' to 'Let's Rap About Fire Safety' to 'American Flatulators'
I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I just dump the whole thing at the good will, cherry picky only the best ones and get rid of the rest or maybe throw the cases away but store the disks in a binder?
Going through this process of decluttering has made me seriously rethink the unbridled accumulation of stuff that I have been doing for the past few years.
Hoarding a bunch of VHS tapes seems unthinkable to me.
I suppose that time has passed though. My own kid knows basically nothing but streaming (which also has that feature). We still have a BluRay player hooked up but I bet it's been used less than 5 times in the past half decade.
Ironically, there's a bin full of old VHS in the basement somewhere, but I'm pretty sure we don't even have a player anymore. It would be fun to see the reaction though.