End of The VCR

I can't wait for the upcoming Aphex VHS release.

I just had a 4 hour VHS digitzed this past weekend in NY. came out to $50 :/ but they did provide me with an 80GB version and a compressed version (that i have to return for). Quality is good but the audio is kind of bad, maybe i just forgot what VHS sounds like. company is called digifi.

might be a good time to buy another brand new VCR to sell later hehe. but i remember trying to go to walmart and other departemt style stores to find VCRs in 2007 and all any of them had were the VCR attached to small TV thing.

The thing that got me hooked on DVDs was the interactive menu. The film itself didn't matter so much it was the fact I could jump incrementally from scene to scene through the sleek menu, so satisfying.

I'll always have nostalgia for the sound of a VCR fast forwarding, reminds me of my care free yoof.

I love my VCR

Me and g/f have VHS collection of 600-ish, maybe more

I'm not a retro-fetishist at all but the vibe of VHS is fucking awesome

  On 7/26/2016 at 5:26 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I love my VCR

Me and g/f have VHS collection of 600-ish, maybe more

I'm not a retro-fetishist at all but the vibe of VHS is fucking awesome

yep, my friend has at least 1000 vhs tapes. no one wants them anymore so they're easy to get your hands on.

Wish I knew where my Drunken Wu Tang VHS tape was. That movie's got some badass analog bass synths in certain parts. And of course, the Watermelon Monster.

  On 7/26/2016 at 12:07 AM, Lewps said:

The thing that got me hooked on DVDs was the interactive menu. The film itself didn't matter so much it was the fact I could jump incrementally from scene to scene through the sleek menu, so satisfying.

one of the first experiences I had with this was with a Spooks season 1 DVD that I rented from the lib'erry. anyone ever have one of these? Spooks is a spy show, so there was this whole elaborate dramatic intro video leading up to the actual menu screen in which a balaclava'd black ops dude sneaks into some office complex and does some hi-tech hackery... and then the video loops on him standing in front of a bank of screens, which is the actual menu screen. like, each screen, if you were to hover over it, was a menu option, as black ops guy mulls over the screens.

except I never moved my mouse during this whole time because I thought there was a video still playing. it was seamlessly looped. I sat there for 5 fucking minutes wondering when the menu would appear, watching this guy just mulling over the bank of computer screens. I thought the DVD was broken or something.

  On 7/25/2016 at 8:10 PM, Salvatorin said:

It's not the end of the VCR. Urban Outfitters will be selling bespoke craft VCRs next month

Stranger Things Season 1: VHS Double Pack!

I experienced the vast majority of my favorite movies on VHS: Empire of the Sun (a copy my dad got from a 'free' bin at a hotel in Korea), Right Stuff (so long it was on two tapes), Raining Arizona, Willy Wonka, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and countless Disney films. My parents still have a VCR at home. They never got into Laserdisc even though they sold them often at BX stores on the air force bases we lived on.

The quality is quite blurry in retrospect. I recall as a kid I watched Top Gun so many times I noticed that Goose's character actually has the same last name as me. My dad was shocked I was able to even read the name on the jet plane in the scene where he ejects, especially on a VHS being played on a 20 +/- inch tv.

One of the most unique things about VHS tapes was the fact that they created home libraries of taped television. My grandma used to tape soap operas during her workday, watch them in the evening or weekend, then tape over it again. (IIRC there was a woman who taped every news broadcast for decades and never dubbed over tapes, so it's this giant archive of nightly news that rivals even the best archives available at major studios.)

But for many it was a It's unlike DVR'ing in the sense that you would watch them over and over again and the commercials and extra stuff you had to fast forward was part of you nostalgic memory. We had a tape of CBS, ABC, and NBC Xmas specials: Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty, Pee-Wee's Christmas special, etc. from 1989 that had a news blurb about Panama and a bunch of commercials only from that year.

Same with the previews on commercial VHS movies. It's funny seeing people upload these to youtube. A great example is the TMNT home VHS, every kid who had that will remember this pre-movie commerical as much as the movie itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA6Zsxicrc8

  On 7/25/2016 at 4:24 PM, mcbpete said:

One of my earliest VHS memories is a rented copy of Willy Wonka that'd always eject on the scene when this guy appeared saying this:

It was like my VCR telling me: "Pete - you're too young for this, it's scary. I'll stop it before you get to the tunnel scene when the chicken gets its head chopped off.

I love that movie. Besides my parents instilling a good sense of right or wrong I can attribute being a good kid from watching this over and over again. Charlie behaves well and tells the truth and gets a candy factory, all the other kids die off-screen in bizarre fashions. Noted.

Haha possibly ditto - maybe my parents just let me watch stuff that was all wholesome and morale and that !

VCRs also revolutionized the porn movie industry. Can you imagine going to a movie theater to see a porn movie?

A have some good memories of decent adverts from TV recorded tapes we had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MaifD8lK_0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9aORSroAkU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LvLn9PWln8

always smiled at the cute stupid parrot in this ad, back in the day had dozens of these tapes with mainly John Carpenter/Stephen King films on

I have loads of old MTV on tape. commercials and all. I really want to rip them but this experience ripping a personal VHS was too much$

heres a playlist i made of some cool old MTV stuff from VHS

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8xNbcVL4NTxJAeg6yHw0Wc9e5nhhlGLD

(a lot of the stuff thats gone is the stuff im trying to get.(someone add me to a privatetvtracker ihavegoodratio)

  On 7/26/2016 at 5:50 AM, usagi said:

 

  On 7/26/2016 at 12:07 AM, Lewps said:

The thing that got me hooked on DVDs was the interactive menu. The film itself didn't matter so much it was the fact I could jump incrementally from scene to scene through the sleek menu, so satisfying.

 

one of the first experiences I had with this was with a Spooks season 1 DVD that I rented from the lib'erry. anyone ever have one of these? Spooks is a spy show, so there was this whole elaborate dramatic intro video leading up to the actual menu screen in which a balaclava'd black ops dude sneaks into some office complex and does some hi-tech hackery... and then the video loops on him standing in front of a bank of screens, which is the actual menu screen. like, each screen, if you were to hover over it, was a menu option, as black ops guy mulls over the screens.

 

except I never moved my mouse during this whole time because I thought there was a video still playing. it was seamlessly looped. I sat there for 5 fucking minutes wondering when the menu would appear, watching this guy just mulling over the bank of computer screens. I thought the DVD was broken or something.

 

Yeah I remember some sequences leading into the menu would take a long ass time. At least you were provided with hacking tips.

My brother once rented a Jack Kerouac documentary on VHS from our local library. The tape got stuck in the VCR, but the library still demanded the tape be returned on time or he would have to pay a fee.

So he brought in the VCR and left it on the front desk.

My best film experiences were all on VHS. My relatives would rent so many shitty movies from the local joint - sometimes they were taped over with shit like the national test TV image by some schmuck. A lot of 90's action comedies went through that VCR, everything Jackie Chan, Leslie Nielsen, etc. The out-of-tune string score on overwatched films was a core aspect of the experience. I think the last VHS I rented was the Matrix, it looked pretty good. I remember Saving Private Ryan in letterbox format, lol. The last VHS I saw was Blast from the Past, the contrast and color were cranked to the max in a ghastly way.

  On 7/27/2016 at 8:59 AM, Braintree said:

My brother once rented a Jack Kerouac documentary on VHS from our local library. The tape got stuck in the VCR, but the library still demanded the tape be returned on time or he would have to pay a fee.

 

So he brought in the VCR and left it on the front desk.

That's awesome!

It's weird that camcorder type pirated videos in general are "unwanted", but they're some of the most intimate views of the modern cinema experience. In that sense they're actually first-person documentaries.

Tangentially...has anyone seen those new Super 8 cameras?

I don't miss having to manually change the tracking with that little wheel under the front panel.

I remember when we got our first VCR. My dad had rented some movies from his youth to give it a go, I think they were Bullitt and Papillon. Guess he was a Steve McQueen fan. Later when I got to go to the rental store, I think it was Ghostbusters and Alien that I chose, must have been 10 or 11 at the time. It was exciting a few years later when we got one of those TV/VCR combos and I could start copying rented movies.

Before we got our own VHS player we would rent the player too. It was something like this:

Also lol at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaOiMDzxxz8

wubwubwubwubwubwubwubwubwubwubwub

  On 7/28/2016 at 8:39 AM, Goiter Sanchez said:

 

  On 7/27/2016 at 8:59 AM, Braintree said:

My brother once rented a Jack Kerouac documentary on VHS from our local library. The tape got stuck in the VCR, but the library still demanded the tape be returned on time or he would have to pay a fee.

 

So he brought in the VCR and left it on the front desk.

That's awesome!

 

"Here's your broken tape inside a broken VCR. Good luck, assholes."

  On 7/25/2016 at 9:49 PM, mokz said:

I can't wait for the upcoming Aphex VHS release.

I still have Come to Viddy, Windowlicker, Artificial Intelligence I, and others on VHS.