Tonight, I put in a movie on vhs to watch. The Green Mile.
As soon as the FBI warning screen came up I knew something was wrong. Slightly grainy, lacking color and distorted, the picture was bad.
Hopeful, I fast-forwarded to the Warner Brothers splash screen, thinking maybe the tape was wound to tight or otherwise damaged a little. After all that vhs/dvd combo player was a tough old thing that would never die, so strong with the force it was.
With a horrid grinding noise and a puff of smoke, it showed me that like Yoda, it was not that strong with the force. Residing as it did, in my castle, it of course took my tape with it into the nether regions of the force when it went.
So, now I have to shop for a dvd/bluray player. I will also have to replace many of thw movies in my library, the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns, Innocent Blood, Stigmata, several Star Trek movies and at least one X-Men among others.
I am going to take this opportunity to winnow out the movies I never watch though. All told probably a little under half movie library has been affected.
How about you? Do you still have a vhs player? How deeply will your video library be impacted when it goes? How about dvd, since it seems that it is approaching the vhs horizon also.
I have a handful of VHS tapes and a working VCR. Many of the tapes I’ve managed to find digital copies (DVD, BR, mp4, etc.) in the past 10 years or so; the rest I hang on to until I find 'em or decide my crappy digitizing is as good as it’s going to get and do 'em myself.
<sigh>
A certain kind of cool is gone now that it isn’t hard to see, hear or read anything anytime anywhere.
I owned a VHS player until the end of 2003, so I’ve been VHS-less for 15 1/2 years now, I guess. Never got around to owning a DVD or Blu-Ray player. (I just didn’t watch movies for the longest time. I had DVD on my computer, of course, but I don’t remember watching anything but a free instructional video on it.) I did get back into movie watching with streaming services, though.
We own a CRT/VHS combo unit but it’s in my kid’s room and only ever gets used with one of those retro “Ten games in one” controllers so he can play Pac-Man and Mappy. I haven’t actually watched something on VHS in probably close to a decade.
I still have a VCR that I had not used in a long time. A year or two ago I was asked to review some old VCR tapes for possible conversion to DVD/mp4 for a project I was working on. I put the first tape in & it spit it right back out at me. I tried again, same result. I put the second (of three) tapes in & again, it spit it right back out at me. Maybe they’re bad tapes (despite not seeing anything wrong with them), so I got one of my old VCR tapes & put it in; same result. Somewhere along the way it must have gotten fried with a electrical surge/spike.
I still have it for two reasons.
It’s the only clock in the den
It’s a bitch to move the wall unit to get at the socket to unplug it.
I bought a VHS/DVD combo machine a few years ago. I had a tape that I wanted to put onto DVD and it served that purpose. So I can now also watch my VHS tapes if I feel like it, but I rarely do.
I have a DVD/VHS player, but some time ago I went through the VHS collection and tossed about 90% of it. What i did was put every VHS in the discard pile and then I went through the pile to pick out the irreplaceable ones to keep (for instance, the original “Han shot first” Star Wars trilogy). As for others, I told myself that if I really missed a movie, I’d purchase another copy on DVD. And then I took the whole pile of VHS to Half Price Books, where they gave me a laughably small amount of money for them.
Most of those VHSs weren’t that great, I guess, because I’ve replaced very few of them with DVDs.
Yeah, my original original Star Wars Trilogy (from before the re-release heralding the premier of the prequels) I will have to have digitized onto a disc as I do not want to lose those. actually, most of my vhs titles I could lose with no heartache what so ever, but not those. Well, Innocent Blood as well, I’ve never seen it anywhere else, and I find it to be a funny, charming dumb vampire flick.
We used a VCR to bounce a few audio drum tracks back and forth about a year ago on the album my band is about to release. The fidelity of a VCR’s left and right audio channel made for a really fat kick/snare sound with good compression.