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I remember having a very cheap, imported DVD player of who knows what brand because those devices ignored region codes. I played DVD's from Europe every now and then, so this was important. It was even more of a pain in the rear end with VHS. The American video signal was NTSC while much of Europe uses PAL (and East Germany, the proud home country, used SECAM). While I still lived in Europe in the late 90's, I had a PAL/NTSC VCR just so I could watch newer American titles in the right language. That feature was expensive. It also had a jog-shuttle, which was just a wheel for forwarding/reversing at various speeds. I recall being very fascinated by that as a teenager. Do BDs have region codes?
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Aug 11, 2016 22:06
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Mak0rz posted:My mom used her VCR up until maybe a year and a half ago when they finally got satellite TV with a PVR and now it's just in the basement collecting dust. Probably still has a tape in it with a week's worth of Coronation Street episodes. My mom has begrudgingly accepted that her old life of recording recipes and things from TV and saving them on tape until the end of time for the one magical day where she organizes it all, is over. Luckily her hoarding stopped at VHS tapes and magazines. Used to drive me crazy to always have to lug boxes of that stuff when I would help her move.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:07
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i recall using childmath to justify getting a ps2 because they were only like 50 bucks more than the standard dvd player in 2001, mightve even been the same price
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Aug 11, 2016 22:10
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Yeah, rental stores had a 3 to 6 month window where VHS tapes weren't sold to the public. You could still get them if you really wanted, but you had to pay the price that the rental chains did, which was $80-$100 a copy. Ohhhhh ok so that's why i had to wait so long to see Aladdin
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Aug 11, 2016 22:11
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TotalLossBrain posted:It was even more of a pain in the rear end with VHS. The American video signal was NTSC while much of Europe uses PAL (and East Germany, the proud home country, used SECAM). I thought SECAM was a french thing ? e: I'm dumb, lots of countries used secam unpacked robinhood has a new favorite as of 22:14 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 22:11
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unpacked robinhood posted:I thought SECAM was a french thing ? It was (is?) but it was an Eastern Bloc thing, too.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:14
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Alan_Shore posted:You'll never see VHS make a comeback like vinyl or even cassette tapes have, right? They have no advantages, and a lot of them even cut off the picture for pan and scan. I just don't see it happening, not even for retro fun times. to me it seems much more interesting as a medium that low budget and commercial was distributed on no that vhs copy of independence day is poo poo and will be poo poo 30 years from now but Personal Defense with Dennis or Cassette Deck Repair for Dummies will always be good, forever
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Aug 11, 2016 22:15
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Yeah, rental stores had a 3 to 6 month window where VHS tapes weren't sold to the public. You could still get them if you really wanted, but you had to pay the price that the rental chains did, which was $80-$100 a copy. Fun fact - I worked at Blockbuster during their transition from VHS to DVD. Some of the old old tapes still had that ancient retail price of $150 bucks or whatever in the system. It also just so happened that when they went to "no late fees", you would eventually own your movie if you never returned it. Which... if you happened to keep a 20 year old VHS tape, might literally charge your account the $150 in the system.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:16
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the only old video medium that ive seen people take interest to collecting the same way audiophiles vacuum up vinyl and cassettes are CEDs, weird video records made by RCA which had big awesome art. the art itself might be why people show interest in them and not other old formats, idk. i have a friend thats into that stuff and CEDs are indeed kinda cool 
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Aug 11, 2016 22:24
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CubanMissile posted:My mom has begrudgingly accepted that her old life of recording recipes and things from TV and saving them on tape until the end of time for the one magical day where she organizes it all, is over. Luckily her hoarding stopped at VHS tapes and magazines. Used to drive me crazy to always have to lug boxes of that stuff when I would help her move. My dad still has a mega-hoard of VHS with first-run over-air stuff. It's somewhat cataloged, but I don't think he's ever actually gone through them more than once. His cataloging "system" was little bits of paper with descriptions and time markers, a good majority of those are just the arbitrary 4-digit counter numbers since early VCRs didn't give you actual time code, just a counter that you'd have to manually reset to 0 at the start of a tape. His VCR is long gone, but I'm sure the tapes still remain somewhere in his over-stuffed basement, along with newspapers and magazines that go back decades. By contrast, my VHS collection fits into about 3 medium sized boxes in my closet and consists mostly of shows I'd record over-air then watch later, many of which I've since purchased DVDs of or can find easily on youtube if I feel the urge to watch them again. Also, almost nothing is labeled, so for me to go through them and dig out any nuggets of gold, I'd have to actually go through the tapes one by one-- a project I've yet to really want to sit down and do for obvious reasons. I do, however, still have a working VCR and a video-capture device should the mood strike me. The nice thing about the death of the VHS market was that I was able to pick up a really sweet JVC S-VHS HiFi VCR for super cheap, and that bad boy still works (at least the last time I used it a couple years ago). It could probably stand a thorough cleaning before I'd take on any transfer operations though. The real bummer about my collection is that for a long while, I was very disorganized, and ended up losing some tapes I really wish I still had. Home movies that my friends and I made in our teens, and no other copies exist as far as I know. I only managed to convert one of them waaaaaay back when I had no idea what I was doing, so it's all blocky, low-res MPEG-1 garbage. Viewable, but terrible quality compared even to the worn-out VHS it came from. Time marches on, giving no fucks I guess.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:24
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Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:the only old video medium that ive seen people take interest to collecting the same way audiophiles vacuum up vinyl and cassettes are CEDs, weird video records made by RCA which had big awesome art. the art itself might be why people show interest in them and not other old formats, idk. This video goes into very good detail about that format. It's fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LrPe0rwXOU I'm actually surprised collectors would be that rabidly interested in them, actually, because they were fragile and actually wore out over time pretty significantly. My dad was an early adopter of the format, and got burned pretty badly when it all but disappeared like 5 years later. The few discs he'd actually purchased for himself didn't hold up very well, either-- some concert videos where whole segments would just skip and skip. Looked hilarious, but really ruined the mood if you were trying to enjoy the show.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:29
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Bonzo posted:I may have talked about these in earlier in the thread. i found one of these and sent it for yospos secret santa, p sure the movie was nothing special but hey id never seen one before or since
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Aug 11, 2016 22:35
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Song of the South isn't even racist Liberals just think it's racism if a black man is happy being a farmer
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Aug 11, 2016 22:40
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8 track betamax posted:Ohhhhh ok so that's why i had to wait so long to see Aladdin
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Aug 11, 2016 22:41
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Casimir Radon posted:I'm really surprised they've stuck to their Disney Vault bullshit all this time. With broadband and easy piracy it just makes more sense to make your products easily accessible. i may be wrong here and i have no actual reason to think this other than a hunch, but i bet that the people that pirate media and the people that are really into disney are basically 2 discrete circles on the venn diagram
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Aug 11, 2016 22:43
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5-Year-Old - "Mommy, nobodies seeding Toy Stowy. I WANNA WATCH WOODY AND BUZZ! MY TOWWENT IS GOING NOWHERE!"
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Aug 11, 2016 22:46
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Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:i may be wrong here and i have no actual reason to think this other than a hunch, but i bet that the people that pirate media and the people that are really into disney are basically 2 discrete circles on the venn diagram Ah but there's a growing element frequently ignored: late 20s/early 30s dads of young children. Every young dad I work with pirates kid shows and movies because gently caress paying any money for the eastern european uncanny-valley-CGI bullshit that's considered modern childrens TV.
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Aug 11, 2016 22:47
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Pham Nuwen posted:Ah but there's a growing element frequently ignored: late 20s/early 30s dads of young children. Every young dad I work with pirates kid shows and movies because gently caress paying any money for the eastern european uncanny-valley-CGI bullshit that's considered modern childrens TV. yeah that makes sense
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Aug 11, 2016 22:55
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Others have explained by yes, it was prices this way to keep rental stores in business. Let's say a movie like Indecent Proposal comes out on VHS and retails for $100. As a store owner I may by them for anywhere from $60-$80 a copy form my distributor depending on how many I buy and what kind of deal I have with the warehouse. Let's say I get 10 copies. For something big like Forrest Gump or True Lies, I'm going to order 30 or 40 because demand will be high. I rent my new releases for $3.50 for one night. If one copy is rented each night for 20 nights I've made $70 off one tape and get my ROI. Once the movie has been out 6 or 7 months I'll keep two copies in my back catalog and sell the rest as Previously Viewed for $10 or $15. The back catalog is basically pure profit. Something like The Thing would get rented out at least once a month for $2.25 (what I charged for older movies) and since the tape was paid for 10 years ago, it was basically money in our pocket. There was also a service that we used called RentTrack or something. This company would purchase the videos, ship them to me to put in the store and we would split the profits. When the movie s were no longer popular, I'd ship them all back or buy a few at a reduced price to sell in my store. I used this for lovely B movies or Indie films that no one ever heard of. One of those was Reservoir Dogs which I could not keep stocked once Pulp Fiction came out. Video games were a gold mine since they cost half of what I paid for VHS. One perk of running our own store is that you can watch any movie or play any game for free. When my shift was over I'd grab a few movies and head home. It made renting movies and pain late in life because I was so stingy about paying 2 or 3 bucks for a movie that I may not like. Bonzo has a new favorite as of 23:22 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 23:18
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Tell us more stories about the dinosaurs, grandpa
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Aug 11, 2016 23:29
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And not only did some stores dick you for not rewinding, most charged you a membership fee to get a card.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:46
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Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:the only old video medium that ive seen people take interest to collecting the same way audiophiles vacuum up vinyl and cassettes are CEDs, weird video records made by RCA which had big awesome art. the art itself might be why people show interest in them and not other old formats, idk. We used to rent laserdisc all the fuckin time just to watch Star Wars and some other movies. Never had a LD player though that wasn't a rental, there were just too few movies on the format. gently caress, that brings back memories though.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:53
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None of the video rental places we frequented ever had the hidden porn section. The independent (I'm assuming anyway) one didn't have one, VideoVision was a chain and did not, and Blockbuster didn't have one. Blockbuster did occasionally have stickers on certain movies to tell you they were "adult". The only movies I remember seeing that on were Akira and Nikita.Ein cooler Typ posted:Song of the South isn't even racist
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Aug 12, 2016 00:20
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I heard about this pre-CVD Selectavision format where you could rent tapes through the mail. The catch for rented tapes was you could not rewind them. You get one and only one play.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:43
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Casimir Radon posted:None of the video rental places we frequented ever had the hidden porn section. The independent (I'm assuming anyway) one didn't have one, VideoVision was a chain and did not, and Blockbuster didn't have one. Blockbuster did occasionally have stickers on certain movies to tell you they were "adult". The only movies I remember seeing that on were Akira and Nikita. My store had a curtained off area and you just took the movie from behind the box. Due to some stupid law we had to sharpie out all the dicks and bits event though no kids were allowed back there. Some stores in our chain had all the adult movies behind the counter so in order to choose the movie you wanted, we had these three ring binders that had all the box art and you wrote down the number of the movie you wanted and brought that the counter.
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Aug 12, 2016 00:47
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So I have to ask: were those videos softcore/"Cinemax" or fully-fledged porno films? (Guessing the latter based on the box graphics.)
Three-Phase has a new favorite as of 01:22 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 01:20
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VCDs are still a thing here in Hong Kong, and that's just insane.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:28
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Something we noticed for a long time was that on VHS tapes that seemed to be made in the very early-to-mid 80s there was a very odd thing where kids' tapes of cartoons and what not had extra stuff on them. If you let the tape keep playing after the credits and wait a few minutes, we'd see all this strange and unadvertised (and possibly unintended) extra material that had nothing to do with the actual we'd watched. Parts of other cartoons, mostly. It became sort of common for us to just fast-forward for a while past the end of the credits of the main feature, and you'd get it, eventually. I don't know if it was a situation of them reusing tapes in bulk of unsold product (so once the main new feature was done recording, old material still on the tape past a certain window would still be there) or if somehow if the master tapes they made their dupes from were being reused in a similar way and no one knew that they'd had stuff after the main program. There was a situation about 20 years ago where a tape of generic and public domain cartoons had something happen where after the main cartoon was over, the rest of the tape had porn on it. I think it was something about how they thought the company that was releasing it was just recording over old tape stock and relabeling/boxing them and selling them at discount stores as dirt-cheap cartoon collections and thought they'd been fully recorded over.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:41
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As a really young guy I was under the impression that you could flip VHS tapes like you could with audio ones. I certainly tried a few times. Audio cassettes contributed to abridged audiobooks which are a crime. Especially since publishers often won't go back and record an unabridged version since they already have one out.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:35
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I used to have an ancient VCR that had these long mechanical lever buttons. The tape door opened toward the top - pop the tape in and push the top closed again. It worked and never broke a tape. Something like this: 
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Aug 12, 2016 03:11
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TotalLossBrain posted:I used to have an ancient VCR that had these long mechanical lever buttons. The tape door opened toward the top - pop the tape in and push the top closed again. my parents had the same kind from the early 80s. they also had a camcorder (or whatever it was called) that recorded straight to vhs. it weighed about 10 pounds
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Aug 12, 2016 03:12
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I'm not even going to lie, I miss levers, switches and knobs. Touch screens are cool and I understand that they're cheaper and what not, but mechanical is real as poo poo.
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Aug 12, 2016 03:14
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:I'm not even going to lie, I miss levers, switches and knobs. Touch screens are cool and I understand that they're cheaper and what not, but mechanical is real as poo poo. get into vinyl. my receiver is from the 70s
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Aug 12, 2016 03:17
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TotalLossBrain posted:I used to have an ancient VCR that had these long mechanical lever buttons. The tape door opened toward the top - pop the tape in and push the top closed again. Yeah we had an old front loader with dozens of knobs sliders and switches for fine tuning the tracking and poo poo. Dad would get pissed if you messed with it
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Aug 12, 2016 03:18
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Three-Phase posted:So I have to ask: were those videos softcore/"Cinemax" or fully-fledged porno films? (Guessing the latter based on the box graphics.) Full on porn. We did have a section that was Russ Myers movies, Fritz the Cat, and basic soft core porn. However, thanks to the 80s and 90s, the horror and action section had plenty of B movies that had lots of nudity and sex. Lots of women in prison movies for some reason. TotalLossBrain posted:I used to have an ancient VCR that had these long mechanical lever buttons. The tape door opened toward the top - pop the tape in and push the top closed again. Ahh the old top loaders. Some had fancy wired remotes but the cords were only 8 inches long.
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Aug 12, 2016 03:24
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Bonzo posted:Full on porn. We did have a section that was Russ Myers movies, Fritz the Cat, and basic soft core porn. However, thanks to the 80s and 90s, the horror and action section had plenty of B movies that had lots of nudity and sex. Lots of women in prison movies for some reason. Our first VCR was a toploader with a wired remote of about six feet. Guess we went all out. I have a distinct memory of watching a copied cassette of The Muppet Movie and my older brother rewinding and replaying this section of video, to my considerable delight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCx5Kbe-Ja0 The time display was a brilliant blue-green vacuum fluorescent digital display. If you looked at it real close you could see some kind of hexagonal filter in front of it. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 03:39 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 03:36
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Sp1r0_Agn3W posted:get into vinyl. my receiver is from the 70s Oh, I am. Equipment is a bit newer though 
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Aug 12, 2016 03:38
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:Oh, I am. Equipment is a bit newer though thats not as big an issue as it sounds. i have a pioneer sx-780 which is pretty affordable. there are better pioneer models but theyre all reasonable if youre gonna spend a little money. theres a pretty good thread on audiophile bullshit in the gadget forum. 70s pioneer is a soild bet for receivers also, dont blow your wad on a technics 1200. the 1s and 2s arent worth the price in this day and age. i love my audio technica lp120
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Aug 12, 2016 03:58
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the lp120 doesnt have the worlds greatest cartridge, but its solid. anyway, point being its exchangeable if youre really into the audiophile thing (as is everything really)
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Aug 12, 2016 04:02
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I have a 120  I'm not into the whole audiophile thing, I just had 2 lovely belt drives and I think it was the best reviewed/priced direct drive in the range I was willing to spend
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Aug 12, 2016 04:08
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