Rest in peace, my old friend, the VCR

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Profile Gordon Lowe
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Message 1804736 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 1:04:11 UTC

I sadly heard about this on the Sunday morning CBS News program, and I'm still very unhappy about it, and worried about what to do. I have over 100 home-made time-shifted VHS tapes going back to 1982, when we got our first VCR, an RCA model, and it was a great machine that was easy to program with on-screen displays(something fairly novel back in those days). We also have a couple dozen commercially made VHS tapes.

Our current VCR is a 2008 Panasonic model that records to both tapes and DVD's, and I guess I better start dubbing over those VHS tapes to DVD asap. The problem is of course some of the commercial tapes won't copy to DVD due to copyright protection.

I am thinking about getting another VCR, just to have on-hand as a back-up.

Gosh, I never thought the VCR would go away when we got our first one in 1982. I thought it was as permanent a new fixture as the console tv on which it sat.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/07/21/486889433/so-long-vcr-we-hardly-knew-you-were-still-around
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Message 1804740 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 1:23:33 UTC

I guess I am somewhat surprised. I didn't even realize they were still being manufactured at all.
750,000 of them sold in 2015? I never would have guessed.
"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

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Message 1804745 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 1:59:45 UTC

A few companies started (or continued) producing phonographs/record players
(again) once they realized that people would not give up their vinyl record
albums. Now some artists are even putting their new stuff on vinyl.

This may happen to the VCR as well. Maybe not, but don't take the first thing
you hear as gospel.
~Sue~

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Message 1804746 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 2:01:43 UTC

Of course, transferring your old stuff to a more long-lasting format is a
good idea, too. Videotape won't last forever.
~Sue~

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Message 1804747 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 2:08:02 UTC

I didn't think anyone was making VHS machines anymore, let alone blank tapes,
which I can't find locally at all anymore, I have a Magnavox VHS recorder/DVD
player, it works ok, I do have a few tapes, but it's been ages since I played
one, but then I'd have to give away the machine to get rid of them.
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Message 1804783 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 7:02:08 UTC

Two years ago I had a yard sale. Had over 350 VHS tapes That I only asked .50 cents a piece for. Everyone stated they didn't have a VCR anymore. I took the tapes to the local salvation army place.
[/quote]

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Message 1804788 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 7:20:23 UTC - in response to Message 1804783.  

Two years ago I had a yard sale. Had over 350 VHS tapes That I only asked .50 cents a piece for. Everyone stated they didn't have a VCR anymore. I took the tapes to the local salvation army place.

I'm surprised that they took them.
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Message 1804800 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 11:52:13 UTC

I can't imagine giving my tapes away. Probably what I'll eventually do is dub them onto DVD, and then transfer the DVD's to a hard drive.

As for Funai, they may be just trying to scare people like me into paying top dollar for the "last" machine made.
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Message 1804807 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 12:52:52 UTC

I still have hundreds of both VHS and DVD's I am in the process of converting them all to MP4 format and storing on hard drive. There are programs for getting past the copy protections and even hacks for getting past Disney copy protection which turns out to be the best one at the moment. Blue Ray are still a problem. But I still have 3 VCRs, one with a built in DVD and one that reads both NTSL and PAL formats.
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Message 1804814 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 13:24:40 UTC - in response to Message 1804807.  

I am in the process of converting them all to MP4 format and storing on hard drive.


What is a good basic program for me to use?
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Message 1804852 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 18:35:15 UTC - in response to Message 1804814.  

WinX DVD Ripper. It's not free but it works well and great interface. Much easier to use that others. There is a free version but it only works on a 5 min sample.
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Message 1804873 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 20:58:31 UTC - in response to Message 1804852.  

WinX DVD Ripper. It's not free but it works well and great interface. Much easier to use that others. There is a free version but it only works on a 5 min sample.



Thanks Carlos. I have Handbrake and Seashore and a few other oddities on my Mac, but they're all kind of limited, and I'll be using a Windows computer for this, anyway.

I just wish there was a gizmo that you could plug into a computer, pop a VHS tape into, and press a button, and voila you have a nice compressed digital version of the video.
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Message 1804888 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 22:20:48 UTC

Many new technologies are born with a bang: Virtual reality headsets! Renewable rockets! And old ones often die with a whimper. So it is for the videocassette recorder, or VCR.

The last-known company still manufacturing the technology, the Funai Corporation of Japan, said in a statement Thursday that it would stop making VCRs at the end of this month, mainly because of “difficulty acquiring parts.”

The Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported on the impending demise earlier this month.

The news represented the death rattle of a technology that was considered revolutionary when it was introduced in the 1950s. It took several decades for VCRs to make their way into consumers’ homes, but in its heyday it was ubiquitous and dominant.

According to the company — which said in the statement, “We are the last manufacturer” of VCRs “in all of the world” — 750,000 units were sold worldwide in 2015, down from millions decades earlier.

In 1956, Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company introduced what its website calls “the first practical videotape recorder.” Fred Pfost, an Ampex engineer, described demonstrating the technology to CBS executives for the first time. Unbeknown to them, he had recorded a keynote speech delivered by a vice president at the network.

“After I rewound the tape and pushed the play button for this group of executives, they saw the instantaneous replay of the speech. There were about 10 seconds of total silence until they suddenly realized just what they were seeing on the 20 video monitors located around the room. Pandemonium broke out with wild clapping and cheering for five full minutes. This was the first time in history that a large group (outside of Ampex) had ever seen a high-quality, instantaneous replay of any event.”

At the time, the machines cost $50,000 apiece. But that did not stop orders from being placed for 100 of them in the week they debuted, according to Mr. Pfost. “This represented an amount almost as great as a year’s gross income for Ampex,” he wrote.

The first VCRs for homes were released in the 1960s, and they became widely available to consumers in the 1970s, when Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS formats began to compete. VHS gained the upper hand the following decade; but Sony stopped producing Betamax cassette tapes only in 2016.

By the 1980s, the VCR was catching on with ordinary Americans. In June 1984, The New York Times wrote that analysts expected 15 million homes to have the machines by the end of the year, up from five million in 1982.

A consumer guide published in The Times in 1981 — when the machines ranged in price from $600 to $1,200 — explained the appeal:

“In effect, a VCR makes you independent of television schedules. It lets you create your own prime time. You set the timer and let the machine automatically record the programs you want to watch but can’t. Later, you can play the tape at your convenience. Or you can tape one show while watching another, thus missing neither.”

But only a decade after the technology became common in American households, the introduction of the DVD, in 1995, sounded the older technology’s death knell.

A Times article in 1997, when DVD players were first released to consumers, did not disguise its excitement for a new horizon: “Sound the trumpets, and roll the drums. The digital video disk, or DVD, is here.” Within five years, sales of DVDs had surpassed those of video cassettes.

But less than a decade after DVDs began their reign, the shadow of streaming video loomed. A 2011 headline in The Times made the decline of the hardware explicit, as technology’s circle of life continued its churn:

“Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/technology/the-long-final-goodbye-of-the-vcr.html


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Message 1804890 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 22:33:53 UTC - in response to Message 1804888.  

Thanks, J. Mileski. It's weird to me that people nowadays don't seem to be concerned about keeping things that are recorded with a DVR. Once that DVR gets filled up, you have to start deleting things. Yes, I have a VCR connected to our DVR so we can offload some shows, but the quality suffers. I wish there was a way to tether the DVR to an external hard drive so the capacity could be increased.
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Message 1804893 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 23:09:49 UTC - in response to Message 1804890.  

But that would possibly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
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Message 1804895 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 23:22:41 UTC - in response to Message 1804893.  

But that would possibly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...


Lol, I don't know anything about that.
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Message 1804896 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 23:38:23 UTC - in response to Message 1804895.  

But that would possibly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...


Lol, I don't know anything about that.

It refers to the quality issue you mentioned, that's why there is no DVR that has inputs and outputs like on a VCR, the rights holders made a new version of the VCR illegal, but then they'd lost against Sony years before, so they made sure no repeat would happen, so from time to time in the past I've been buying DVD's, My VHS collection is not very big, maybe they will be worth selling one day, maybe.
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Message 1804898 - Posted: 25 Jul 2016, 23:48:49 UTC - in response to Message 1804873.  

WinX DVD Ripper. It's not free but it works well and great interface. Much easier to use that others. There is a free version but it only works on a 5 min sample.



Thanks Carlos. I have Handbrake and Seashore and a few other oddities on my Mac, but they're all kind of limited, and I'll be using a Windows computer for this, anyway.

I just wish there was a gizmo that you could plug into a computer, pop a VHS tape into, and press a button, and voila you have a nice compressed digital version of the video.



There is look at the ION Tape to PC deck.



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Message 1804904 - Posted: 26 Jul 2016, 0:21:58 UTC - in response to Message 1804898.  
Last modified: 26 Jul 2016, 0:22:25 UTC

WinX DVD Ripper. It's not free but it works well and great interface. Much easier to use that others. There is a free version but it only works on a 5 min sample.



Thanks Carlos. I have Handbrake and Seashore and a few other oddities on my Mac, but they're all kind of limited, and I'll be using a Windows computer for this, anyway.

I just wish there was a gizmo that you could plug into a computer, pop a VHS tape into, and press a button, and voila you have a nice compressed digital version of the video.



There is look at the ION Tape to PC deck.




Interesting, but the link took me to an audio cassette to pc converter machine.

There's also apparently a converter comprising an rca connection from the vcr and a usb plug going to the computer you can get:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/transfer-vhs-tapes-to-your-computer/
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Message 1804905 - Posted: 26 Jul 2016, 0:24:49 UTC - in response to Message 1804896.  

But that would possibly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...


Lol, I don't know anything about that.


It refers to the quality issue you mentioned, that's why there is no DVR that has inputs and outputs like on a VCR


Well, our DVR has rca outputs, and that's what I have inputted into the VCR. But yes, the quality suffers.
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