I am watching Mythbusters (season 3, Outtakes). The episode is a few years old, but they say they are destroying old tapes from the program. Do people still actually use VHS tapes somewhere? Is there any advantage on using tapes instead of DVDs, digital storage or anything more modern? I am aware that people still buy Vinyls (I do!) because it has superior sound quality, but tapes… come on!
I think in the Mythbusters’ case it’s mostly just a figure of speech.
However, I do have it on good authority that the DOD still has a very large amount of data and legacy code on old reel to reel computer tapes, or at least they do as Los Alamos. Exactly what factors cause this (security, difficulty and cost of converting), I don’t know.
pop a tape in, hit record, stop, eject, and share with a friend. good luck finding a dvd burner that is so simple. all those bells and whistles come at a price.
There are still many moves and direct-to-video items that have not yet been legally reissued in any digital format. For years I had get my Adam West Batman fix from tapes I made in the late 1980s. Although, once the box set comes out this year, those tapes can go away.
Tape is still widely used to backup data. Google apparently buys 200,000 tape cassettes a year (the largest single buyer), and IBM developed a new tape format as recently as 2011. There’s apparently still a need for it. In terms of cost-per-byte, HDDs have been cheaper than tape for over a decade now. Might tape be more stable long-term than a hard drive?
Did anyone see last night’s “60 Minutes” episode where they went into some nuclear-missile silos? Some of the computers are older than the people who (wo)man those silos, and the DOD wants to keep it that way because they aren’t hooked up to the Internet, and probably can’t be, and are considered hacker-proof.
I have read the book mentioned in the story. There’s some SCARY stuff in it.
A true archivist will migrate as technology changes, but never destroy the original. Something may happen in the transfer; the transfer may not be as good as it might be in the future; and the original can serve as a backup.
There is a book about this, Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker. Although the book is mostly concerned with newspapers and printed book archiving, the concept applies to other media.
Baker points out that many big-city newspapers published full color pages in the late 1800’s. When microfilm first became available ca. 1950, libraries rushed to convert old newspapers to film, paying little attention to the quality of the conversion. The resolution was poor, color microfilm didn’t exist, and sometimes entire runs were lost due to bad chemicals or feed errors. Since the originals were destroyed, we can never recover what was lost, yet properly preserved originals are highly readable today.
So I would say if the original is on VHS tape and is irreplaceable, preserve it if you can.[sup]*[/sup] Of course, this might not make much sense if all you have is a Three Stooges show recorded from TV, one of a million copies. Let’s hope someone else closer to the source has one.
*We have city council recordings from the 1990’s on VHS. I pointed out to the mayor that these are irreplaceable, and a storage box of them per year was all the space they would occupy. Surely a corner of a warehouse could be found for them – think how historically valuable they will be in a 100 years if we can make them last that long. Since I have magnetic audio tape 60 years old that’s in perfect shape, VHS tapes might just make it to 100.
Come on, nothing. I have 13 inch TV/VCRs in all 3 of the bedrooms in my house.
They are all over 15 years old. but because of limited use they work terrific. The bedroom TV’s are hooked up to “regular” cable (so no DVR). VHS tapes are a buck at the Dollar Tree. Why wouldn’t I use the VCR function on those sets?
We’re not talking about buggy whips here.
The old story used to be that a videotape would last about five to ten years. But last year I pulled out some old TV shows I had recorded back in the mid-eighties and they were still in good condition. And these were tapes that had been stored in a cardboard box in my attic.
They’re better than a hard drive for backup/archive:
- Tapes are denser than optical media (and most hard drives) - One LTO6 tape can hold ~2.5 TB of data (uncompressed). This can increase to 6.25 TB if you get the rated 2.5x compression.
- Tapes are relatively cheap - an LTO6 tape costs ~$70.
- For archival, tapes last a long time (15 - 30 years in good conditions)
They are significantly slower to read/write (LTO6 maxes out at 160 MB/s) and wear out faster under continual use than a hard drive.
Television networks destroyed a fortune over the decades. They used to routinely wipe and reuse tapes - many of which were the only copies of a show. Nowadays some of the lost shows could be sold for millions of dollars.
To give a single example, the BBC planned on wiping the only copies of the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The only thing that stopped them was Terry Gilliam buying them new blank tapes if they allowed him to keep the copies.
I’m sure you mean, “pop a tape in, hit record, stop, rewind, eject, and share with a friend.”
People who didn’t rewind made me :mad:
Yes, it’s taking me a very long time to get over it 
In a similar vein, Desi Arnaz insisted that his show be filmed rather than just performed live-to-air as was the custom at the time (videotape had not yet been perfected), and when CBS balked at the extra cost, he offered to take a big salary cut provided that he had, among other things, full rights to the films afterwards. CBS readily agreed – after all, what possible market value could there be for reruns in an era when no one had ever heard of reruns, especially of a silly sitcom called I Love Lucy! The end result was that Desi and Lucy became very rich, and a big piece of television history was preserved.
Personally, i would save Beta tapes as the sound and visual quality on them is far superior to VHS. But I would probably not save VHS.
My SO has about 100 movies on VHS (she bought them from a video store which was closing) at the house but with the exception of Event Horizon ( 1998) we have never sat and watched any of them. The DVDs and streaming have far better quality and there’s no need to rewind when you are done.
VHS could be used if you were a low-budget filmmaker to give your production a cheesy 1980s look and “feel” to it. It’s actually better to film segments using a VHS camera than it is to use a digital camera and try to render it “retro.”
FWIW, I use VHS to record TV shows several times a week.
I don’t have a digital TV, and no DVR.
They have flash drives that do that. I don’t think I have any friends that have a VCR, they threw them out years ago.
Steven Allen’s 1960’s late night shows fall in this category; all were recorded to videotape (probably 1 inch) and almost all were erased after airing so the tape could be reused (the cheapskates). The list of performances that are now lost reads like a TV Golden Age Who’s Who.
I’ve been over this before, but it’s more than just the environment or the age that determines the longevity. I have 1/4 inch audio tapes from the 1950’s that are in perfect shape, but I also have some from the 1970’s that are too gummed up to play. In the case of the 1970’s tapes, there were some bad batches from Ampex that became junk out of the box, and others that are perfectly preserved. Ampex admitted this to me once, and replaced a wholesale box of pancakes (bulk tape), so I know it’s not just me.
The same thing seems to happen to DVDs/CDs. I have some 20 yo discs that are in pristine condition and some others that have peeling substrates. All have been stored in exactly the same environment (residential household room-temp). It appears to be a brand or formula difference much more than age.
Wasn’t the first Super Bowl broadcast destroyed in similar manner, and found in some private archive?
One thing that keeping VCRs around is that, as far as I can tell, DVRs seem to only come with Tivo, cable, or some other subscription service. Those of us who don’t have cable still need VCR’s to record programs.
Are there any DVRs that are completely independant of any pay service, where you just program the device like a VCR? (ie, record channel X from time A to time B).
Not so much VHS tapes as cassette tapes. If you yank off a couple of feet of tape, it makes excellent wind telltales if you tie them to the shrouds of a sailboat.