It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.
Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.
I miss the whole VHS "process." The whole "be kind rewind" at rental stores, the large plastic case(including the snapping sound), buying blank ones to record, forgetting to snap off the tab and recording over a favorite event.
I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes. I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.
Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.
The thing is, it wasn’t bad quality… just seems it now because we have the tech that we do. No way in ‘87 would I have said “I can’t watch this, quality is terrible”
@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.
@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.
I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.
@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!
They were never that bad, they just got outdated. Everything for the time was literally the best until the next best thing comes along then we get spoilt by it.
LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now
OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.
As a kid in the 80s just the fact that I could watch cartoons when they weren’t being broadcast on tv was a big thing. We didn’t care about picture quality, because most tvs were the same (the big fuss was if your friend’s folks had a big tv, which in those days might have had a screen somewhere in the mid 20 inches!). I have a handful of VHS for nostalgia but for me the leap to DVD was phenomenal. The picture was massively better, no rewinding, able to skip to any part of the film and all the extras! Sure, the piracy ads were a pain but you just did something else whilst they were on (and with how slow Blu ray can be it was preferable). I have found a lot of those ads can be skipped or fast forwarded anyway.
VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on
you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.
Not once did I ever think that vhs was bad growing up. When dvds came out I was only excited about the amount of space on the shelf they would save and not the boost in quality.
I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film
@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.
Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂
To think that all these artifacts and quality imperfections are now pretty much an aesthetic in its own league is so charming, yet so weird to think of.
I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays
You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.
I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^
Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.
just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.
As a parent now, and child from VHS days, I'm rather missing those darn things. They were so much more robust in surviving the antics of a 4yr old ruffian than dvd's and whatnot is today.
Looking back, VHS does look bad. But only because we are now use to better video. VHS was about the best we had for home use at the time. It is nice to have lived long enough to do the comparison.
There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)
I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.
Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes. Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.
I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :) The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed. Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.
i’m only in my very early 20s but still grew up watching vhs tapes and started collecting them a few months ago… the quality gives me such a nostalgic feeling
Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!
Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹
My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.
I remember VHS being pretty bad, but I usually recorded in SLP mode to fit three movies onto one cassette. Years later I dubbed a DVD onto VHS in short play mode using a combo DVD/VCR unit, and the quality was far better than anything I'd ever watched on VHS in the past.
1. No one thought what we were watching was “bad” in real time. It was revolutionary tech. Hindsight. 2. It’s amazing that you chose this film. When I talk about certain movies I’d PREFER to watch on VHS, BTTF is at the top.
Maybe I was just young in the 90's but as far as I can remember back in those days we weren't as obsessed with picture quality as we are now. I think the big obsession with picture quality came when DVD's came out and flat screens started showing up.
That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.
It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk. I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.
As child we had a guy come round every tues and fri nights in his van kitted out with vhs rentals. Jumping in the back and pick a film was brilliant and a fond memory from my childhood
5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!
It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack
As a kid in the 80s, growing up on VHS, as bad as they were at times, getting many from Blockbuster that people didn't rewind, especially the fuzzy while recording over them over and over and using the tracking, I still miss them. I still have a few tapes in 2021. They had charm, throw them around and wouldn't get damaged unlike Blu ray. They were bulky but loved them. It's a shame they no longer are seen much and world moved on from them mostly except finding them in thrift stores, yard sales, or select places. VHS will always hold a special place in my heart.
Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.
I still find vhs cool. I remember when I was a kid watching a movie was more like a ritual than todays routine of clicking a file or taping a screen. It was a special time
I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .
VHS were good. They gave people the ability to record off TV and rent movies. VHS didn't have the picture of DVD, but thank goodness for VCRs in the 80s and 90s
I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.
+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable. Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .
I remember the times when grandpa use to make me sit and manually rewind movies because he would say that the companies would intentionally make rewinders fast to break the film and ruin the VHS so u would have to buy more.
My brother used to record CDs to an 8Track tape recorder just to see how good they could sound. VHS was just OK for video but it was fantastic for music. With a VHS HiFi unit you could make a 6 hour party tape of non-stop music at reel-to-reel quality. The JVC units that solved the head switching noise issue were the all time best for reel-to-reel replacement.
I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope
That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime
we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.
VHS was awesome ! We cared about content not image quality. I miss the whole ritual of going to the videostore and having friends come over to watch movies.
I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.
Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?
You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment. 36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.
ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech. i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.
Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks
When i was 12 years old. A whole Universe of films opened up for me to be able to watch on both Betamax and VHS, any time i wanted to. My mother worked at a video rental shop and i was also allowed to go and sit up stairs in the shop and watch all the latest releases before they were even available for customers to rent. VHS played a huge part in my childhood.
@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.
@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.
They just take a lot of space. I still remember visiting a media lab in my college library, waiting for an attendant to walk into closed stacks, open a vertical drawer of tapes, pulling out my movie and assigning me and my friends to a room. Solo individual had a personal station. I'm so glad I got to experience that.
I also got to work in that same library a couple years later while we digitized and sent everything to storage while the lab itself was torn apart and redesigned as offices and study rooms.
The only bad memories I have about VHS are when the tape had finally gone bad. Apart from that, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "as bad as _we_ remember".
@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes. If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max. They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.
My brother had his first VHS player and we used to watch Wayne’s World over and over, the tracking used to go out so bad and we had to hit the machine to get it to work again. Great times.
My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.
Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.
I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.
You also need to consider that CRTs are fundamentally different from LCDs, so the original tapes you had were optimised for smoother displays with low colour gamuts. Also because your capture format uses interlacing, you are getting a lot of artifacts in your final results that wouldn't exist on the CRT. This video explains more: ruclips.net/video/V8BVTHxc4LM/видео.html
Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.
VHS machines were built like tanks when they first came out, by the time they were going out they were made incredible cheap as were the VHS cassettes. If you have old cassettes from the early 80's you'll be surprised at how heavy they are compared to cassettes from the early 2000's.
The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.
I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.
Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.
The halo around Marty's head in the "original 1985 VHS" is an epplied effect called edge enhancement. It was meant to make the picture look sharper. It probably looks better on a CRT.
I have no memory of it being bad at all. In fact, my memory is that it looked great. We always remember quality by what our impressions were of it at the time unless you're a certain comic book store owner.
I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.
The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures. I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.
Fun fact: PAL composite's signal is far more superior when it comes to color. MUCH less coloring artifacts, more detail and can even handle teletext. (just to add up, lol) Even we've got 50 FPS, it's just better looking through composite. What's up with NTSC colors? Most of old recordings has incredibly wrong colors.
PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.
ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.
I still love VHS and there’s a growing community of people that dub the new movies like The Joker and John Wick onto old tapes. They even make custom card sleeves with original artwork on them. Oddly, they can get pretty expensive but a lot of work goes into making them.
Nothing but love for VHS. It’s probably (well, almost definitely) nostalgia talking, but adore the watching a film on tape days. Also, recording live TV and making tapes of favourite shows was something that modern tech doesn’t capture - recording fave shows on a digital box isn’t the same as making compilation tapes.
In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!
I recently acquired a Samsung VCR/DVD-R combo that outputs at 1080i through HDMI (there's also a subsequent model that outputs at full 1080p). I'd be interested to see this comparison repeated with one of those machines. I have to say, while watching some of my old recorded broadcasts, I was shocked to find that it looked better than I remembered. It varied with the differences between SP and SLP a LOT more than I expected but overall I was surprised.
I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.
@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.
I still regularly work with VHS in 2023; capturing old analog recordings to digital format. That bit at 1:26 when you were cleaning the head drum with a Q-tip triggered me though; I was taught NEVER to clean the video heads like that. Not only do you risk damaging the heads (and you can't easily get new ones), but fibres from the Q-tip can lodge in the heads and be extremely difficult to remove! I had to trash my 1995 VCR after doing that...
I love my VHS tapes and machines. I still watch them and record shows to this day, mostly because certain shows you just can't get otherwise. And certain movies I can't find in their original forms on DVD, like the Original Star Wars trilogy.
Yea. Hell that's why I bought the Original Trilogy on vhs a couple of months ago. I rather watch Star Wars that way because that gives me a more warm nostalgic feeling plus all the cgi on my Blu Rays are complete eyesores
Had a lot of good times with VHS. More than the years with DVDs 📀. Recorded so much stuff in the 80’s-90’s and liked the boxes better. Was fun while it lasted!
One of the reasons the purchased tape looks worse is because the actual tape you bought would vary in quality, EVEN IF IT WAS NEW. Why? Because of how VHS tapes were made. (This was hinted at at the 8:55 mark) They literally have a master tape play and dupe that signal to thousands of other VHS recordings. But that master tape used to make dupes only has a finite amount of plays until the signal gets progressively worse. You would then toss that 'master' tape and replace it. If one of the VHS copies you bought was near the end of the life of the master... it would be even worse. As an example, I was an absolute NUT for the Lion King when it came out in 1995. I bought it three times on VHS. Each one of those copies had varying quality played back on the same equipment. Which is what you would expect, considering that was the most duped VHS title in history for mass production.
Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.
I have a collection of over 600 VHS, a roughly 2010 VHS player and a 2010 or maybe 2011 CRT TV that I watch it on, that has digital rabbit air antennas on it, sitting on the desk across from my 1996 compaq presario that I play the original Sims on. So to me I think VHS is still perfectly fine and sometimes better than DVD, and there's something just nostalgic about having to do the tracking I don't know just to me it's just something you don't do anymore and when you're watching a VHS and you got to do the tracking and whatnot or unstick the heads and clean it and everything it's just adds to the whole experience of it to me, and you get that kind of sound on some of the VHS players of the movie playing sort of like a quieter projector and I kind of love that
Back in the 80's and even 90's when you took a tape or DVD home, you were committed to watching it, and to some extent, more grateful and attentive to the content on screen. Now we can easily abandon ship if we don't like the way a movie is going in the first 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes cheat ourselves out of a good movie without knowing it. Also, with the digital workflow being much more accessible than film to video, everyone is making movies and the market is oversaturated with poor filmmaking. Just food for thought.
While I think I see what you're saying, I don't think I can agree. I had a lot of tapes that were recorded for me, due to not having cable, and they weren't just disposable content. In fact, sometimes we would watch the same recorded show or movie over and over, and FF through parts we didn't want. It was easier than when we would copy/bootleg/share music on cassettes! But maybe I just never had a great cassette player that would give me time marks! Loved VHS back then, but wouldn't trade it for streaming and saving shows/movies today!
It's the same situation with all digitally created, and shared entertainment content now. There's an insane excess of youtube videos, podcasts, and soundcloud rappers all with Patreon accounts.
As a TV broadcast engineer your presentation is quite good. Although there are some incorrect assumption which have been identified by other commentators. I would like to add that all helical tape formats including VHS have a severe timebase error. This means to record a color TV signal, some fudging must be done. Broadcast helical formats are highest quality and must use a costly (in the 1970's) digital timebase corrector to stabilize the chroma for playback. Cheaper Umatic, Betamax and VHS formats use a color under record methodology which means the luma and chroma are first separated. The luma is recorded on a conventional fm carrier and the chroma amplitude modulates the same carrier. The composite signal is reconstructed on playback. The separation of the luma and chroma is essentially S Video and may be interfaced appropriately. The S Video interface is therefore readily available on a few high end VHS machines which were used by broadcasters.
I have several SVHS decks which not only have s-video but also component outputs. These units have a TBC built in as well. These work great for capturing the old tapes directly to a hard drive using a capture card. The main drawback on the higher end decks is they only playback SP recordings.
Terry, thanks for that insight. Also, isn't it true that the professionals would having used Betacam, not pro-grade VHS tapes? I remember using pro-grade VHS for school projects, but when I interned at a local TV station (this was in 1995), it was all Betacam. Were there actually professional applications of VHS? If so, what would the rationale have been behind using them?
I love stuff like this but there’s a huge variable you left out: viewing them on a crt tv. Of course a low res analog source is going to look bad captured and converted to digital and put on a higher resolution display. All those edge artifacts and stuff get lessened in the scan lines of a crt. I know there’s really no way to accurately show this effect with a RUclips video but keeping the source analog all the way through yields results that aren’t as bad as this video here. It’s like how PS2 games on original hardware don’t look very good on an hdtv but are still gorgeous on a crt. Still an interesting video, I thumbs-upped :)
I actually never had any bad memories of VHS... only good ones. On my TV I had back in the day, watching cable or a VHS had no discernible difference. Good memories of going to blockbuster or Hollywood video, being able to pop a tape in and record anything I wanted, being able to connect camcorders to and transfer it onto a full sized tape to be played anywhere... and the list goes on. I actually feel there has not been any technology in modern times that could offer that much convenience as VHS tapes.
True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.
I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.
Once in a while i still use my vcr. For some reason i just love the old pixelated picture it gives off its more nostalgic than anything for me. Plus i love watching the old previews before the movie started and i love the physical feel of vhs tapes over dvds. I was using my vcr alot to watch the old Disney movies before disney + came out.
@@EveryoneElseIsWeirdImNormal I'm a part of that small percentage, too! Haha we had a car-shaped rewinder. I think it's "trunk" was where we placed the tape.
Kids these days will never know the pain of having to rewind a movie, because the last person was too lazy.
be kind, rewind!
superplough We didn't have this saying in Australia. We had "Don't be an a#$hole, rewind"
GOOD. That means I'll never have to experience that again either! It sucked.
Kano Animation We didnt have a saying, we had to pay for a "rewind service". We are Dutch, after all.
omg yes that was so frustrating !!!!
People in 2030: DVDs - Were they as bad as we remember?
May those unskippable intros, "piracy bad"-clips and overly animated menus rest in hell.
In 2030 we will have holodecks. We'll be part of the movie. You will actually be able to experience the hoverboard from BTTF2.
It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.
Netflix: Was as bad as we remember?
Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.
I miss the whole VHS "process." The whole "be kind rewind" at rental stores, the large plastic case(including the snapping sound), buying blank ones to record, forgetting to snap off the tab and recording over a favorite event.
Squeezing the vhs out of the box with the blockbuster plastic on it is the best feeling in the world
I loved recording over favourite content. 😎
Did you ever record over rented movies? 😆 I never did, but it was tempting.
Ahhh the good ole days. I understand jeff. As my buddy told me once: it's not the convenience that we miss necessarily... it's the nastalgia .
My man!
That sound of open the case with the cassett inside sparked so many memories. I haven't heard that sound in over 20 years
Yep 👍 Know what you mean
I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes.
I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.
In the classroom in elementary school we didnt care about quality. We only cared if we were going to do a free day of nothing
lol - so true!
Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.
I think kids still dont care. They just wanna see movies or bill nye in class
While giggling with your best buddy and making fun of virtually anything , which would eventually get you in trouble.
Amen.
The thing is, it wasn’t bad quality… just seems it now because we have the tech that we do. No way in ‘87 would I have said “I can’t watch this, quality is terrible”
We've gotten spoiled haven't we
@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.
I know... As if.
@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.
I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.
A friend and I have VHS Sundays. He's a collector of VHS so I still get to have that Blockbuster experience of walking about and picking a film lol
@Jeric White huh?
Good old days, renting VHS movies based on the covers 😂
@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!
Is it the Nerd?
@@mr.berardine1694 lol sadly not
They were never that bad, they just got outdated. Everything for the time was literally the best until the next best thing comes along then we get spoilt by it.
Streaming isn't higher quality that DVD/Blu-Ray/4K.
@@scottandrewhutchins Streaming is MUCH higher quality than DVD, what are you streaming 480p?
@@BatmanisBatman Most streaming sources don't have the lossless sound quality of BD (e.g. DTS MA); eventually this may change.
LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now
DVD was not clearly best: lines horizontal lines than VHS and first generation of videos were not that good.
We didn't know any better. It was fun as hell going to the rental store.
And finding that your movie was not there.
I completely agree ! It was so fun going to the rental store for VHS and video games! I was too young back then to go in the adult section lol.
Straight to the horror section! ;)
unless the person before you failed to rewind it
@@wannabeetiger i wish i could go back to those days again, back when there was no internet, wi-fi, Instagram and iphones
VHS didn't freeze or skip, and you could fast forward through the FBI warnings.
Try usenet no fbi warnings no commercials.
You had to manually rewind it every time. There were so many limitations to VHS-don't kid yourself into thinking it was any good.
A simpler time
OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.
lol, you guys are just lazy. When I was a kid I would let it rewind and choose the next movie to watch to pass the time.
Man I miss less efficient, lower quality, less perfect tech. Makes things much more fun
As a kid in the 80s just the fact that I could watch cartoons when they weren’t being broadcast on tv was a big thing. We didn’t care about picture quality, because most tvs were the same (the big fuss was if your friend’s folks had a big tv, which in those days might have had a screen somewhere in the mid 20 inches!). I have a handful of VHS for nostalgia but for me the leap to DVD was phenomenal. The picture was massively better, no rewinding, able to skip to any part of the film and all the extras! Sure, the piracy ads were a pain but you just did something else whilst they were on (and with how slow Blu ray can be it was preferable). I have found a lot of those ads can be skipped or fast forwarded anyway.
Screen have a lot to do with it, a small CRT across the room is miles away from massive 40+ inch LCD or a modern disk top monitor in terms of display.
Piracy advertisement?
@@DinoNuggies4665 They mean the FBI warnings about piracy before the movie.
VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on
you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.
Not once did I ever think that vhs was bad growing up. When dvds came out I was only excited about the amount of space on the shelf they would save and not the boost in quality.
@Ken Lompart They actually did have DVD recorders, but I don't think they were too common.
I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film
@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.
The only reason I don't still use VHS is because when our old TV broke (it was one that had the player built in) my Dad threw out all our old tapes.
True VHS takes up a lot of space but it’s still better than collecting DVDs.
It’s not really the quality being bad, it’s how my VCR would eat a tape. If you’ve never had your tape player EAT a tape, then you are fortunate
Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂
@@gjrrr2968 It might be a worthy investment to have it transferred and copied onto a DVD. You can still keep the tape.
I had a cheep player from 1989 for over 10 years and it never damaged a tape
That’s cause you were a poor. Just make more money. Duh
yep
To think that all these artifacts and quality imperfections are now pretty much an aesthetic in its own league is so charming, yet so weird to think of.
I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays
@@rorz999 it proves once again that more, isn't necessarily better
You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I actually kinda like the VHS look;
it has a sort of warm and smooth look.
Me too. I was not impressed with the whole DVD transition
Me too! It has that feel that DVD can't reproduce.
Me too, I like the old VHS quality.
They really could go the way of records, going by these comments!
@@le_plane I never liked DVD, it just felt worse. Bluray is what changed the game.
Considering we used to watch on such small screens, the quality was fine. I miss the VHS, it was so cooler than opening the netflix app.
Corona virus would have spread faster back then.
Hmm... 🤔 I'll keep my Netflix. 😂
Oh really?
Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.
I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^
I still use my VCR and collect VHS tapes when I find them, so it's still loved and used here.
Same here
Both my kids are growing up with VHS
Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.
just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.
@@andrewyi4477 I might have driven a couple family members crazy by playing old Leslie Nielsen movies over and over for days on end..
They weren't bad at all. In fact, I got way more excited to see a movie I like on tape than I do today loading a Netflix.
As a parent now, and child from VHS days, I'm rather missing those darn things. They were so much more robust in surviving the antics of a 4yr old ruffian than dvd's and whatnot is today.
Not if said 4 year old ruffian figures out how to get to the tape and gives it a good old yank! Like I did....my father was most annoyed.😆
Looking back, VHS does look bad. But only because we are now use to better video. VHS was about the best we had for home use at the time. It is nice to have lived long enough to do the comparison.
There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)
I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.
Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes.
Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.
I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :)
The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed.
Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.
Bad Blu-ray Disc, also 4K, is very fuck and is dead.
I don't remember VHS tapes as being bad. They suited me just fine.
Thats cause TVa were also bad . And let's be honest you didn't know what 4k was yet . You didn't actually see anything better until years later .
@Coo Chi lots of people care... hence the market for 4k tvs....
@Coo Chi oh dear... you have an extra chromosome don't you? You poor thing .
@Coo Chi You said something stupid I'm gonna tell you you said something stupid lol. Do you even know where you are right now ?
@@silvafox07
TVs were indeed bad back then. They were bulky and weighed as much as a bag of bricks.
i’m only in my very early 20s but still grew up watching vhs tapes and started collecting them a few months ago… the quality gives me such a nostalgic feeling
Welcome to the club. I snap up any decently priced tapes that interest me. You can find interesting things on old recorded tapes.
Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!
Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹
The quality of the videos didn’t have to be that good, since the quality of the TVs were on par.
Be kind rewind!!
& If you don’t it’s a $1.00 rewind fee!
YEP!
I had a dedicated rewinding machine!
$.50 in my area.
More like a fine.
My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.
What a remember was hours in video stores trying to pick a couple of films for that night, that was part of the fun
i hated it and now it takes even longer since there are so many more options streaming.
Yep, and getting 1 or 2 NES games while I was there. Lots of fun.
@@zipzip8239 Meditate. Get fresh air. Listen to birds.
@@BabeTheAstrologer why?
@Coo Chi its not about being lazy, its about wasting my life trying to decide what to watch.
I remember VHS being pretty bad, but I usually recorded in SLP mode to fit three movies onto one cassette. Years later I dubbed a DVD onto VHS in short play mode using a combo DVD/VCR unit, and the quality was far better than anything I'd ever watched on VHS in the past.
1. No one thought what we were watching was “bad” in real time. It was revolutionary tech. Hindsight.
2. It’s amazing that you chose this film. When I talk about certain movies I’d PREFER to watch on VHS, BTTF is at the top.
It was always a little worse than TV.
Maybe I was just young in the 90's but as far as I can remember back in those days we weren't as obsessed with picture quality as we are now. I think the big obsession with picture quality came when DVD's came out and flat screens started showing up.
That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.
LaserDisc was better, however the players cost too much for most people and very few places rented discs.
Some people certainly were, there is a reason Criterion Collection sold 100+ dollar laserdiscs.
Smoky Doggg Well the focus was just getting a copy of the movie. Even crappy tape copies would do.
It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk.
I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.
Back when switching to DVD's, I joked asking my wife if she rewound the DVD... she dang near did it the first time.
"Rewound" is not a word.
@@111highgh always someone tryin to be a RUclips spell cop. 😂
@Mr. A I'm not even going to acknowledge your existence.
So add it in the dictionary
Hold this L...
and sit on it. _I just gave you a chair, have fun._
As child we had a guy come round every tues and fri nights in his van kitted out with vhs rentals. Jumping in the back and pick a film was brilliant and a fond memory from my childhood
That sounds so unbelievably creepy.
@@Whiteboykun only a creep would think like that
Oh my goodness. A huge wave of nostalgia hit me when you pulled out that VCR. I had the exact same kind growing up!
“This is me in 87”, “this is me in ‘92” puberty hit like a rock
Well 5 years in teenage years is a LOT
5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!
87 - child
92 - full grown adult
😂
A 1985 VHS with a flyer for a 1993 movie in the package? Well, I suppose it is about time travel...
It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack
stoopidmonkeyful - You didn't get it...did you?
Olly Dean in the 1940s there where no vcr players
What? That has nothing to do with anything discussed here.
Ridj some of the Looney tunes VHS tapes are not cheap on eBay
As a kid in the 80s, growing up on VHS, as bad as they were at times, getting many from Blockbuster that people didn't rewind, especially the fuzzy while recording over them over and over and using the tracking, I still miss them. I still have a few tapes in 2021. They had charm, throw them around and wouldn't get damaged unlike Blu ray. They were bulky but loved them. It's a shame they no longer are seen much and world moved on from them mostly except finding them in thrift stores, yard sales, or select places. VHS will always hold a special place in my heart.
Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.
Many directors collect VHS tapes. They tapes are just as good as the master copy of the film. Could always be restored digitally. Great video!
I still find vhs cool. I remember when I was a kid watching a movie was more like a ritual than todays routine of clicking a file or taping a screen. It was a special time
Well you won't ever get to use VHS again anytime soon
@@stephensnell1379 except if they get their hands on a VHS player (which are pretty cheap nowadays)
What move title
I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .
Mk Amen
VHS were good. They gave people the ability to record off TV and rent movies.
VHS didn't have the picture of DVD, but thank goodness for VCRs in the 80s and 90s
when life was simple
I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.
@@michaelmartin9022 not all history is worth saving. I think we'll all get by without spacejam and Clinton trial commercials.
NO .. People were NOT recording Off of a TV .. They were recording OFF AIR
Stop it with that nonsense.
+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable.
Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .
I remember the times when grandpa use to make me sit and manually rewind movies because he would say that the companies would intentionally make rewinders fast to break the film and ruin the VHS so u would have to buy more.
I had a toy raceway that would rewind tapes.
My brother used to record CDs to an 8Track tape recorder just to see how good they could sound. VHS was just OK for video but it was fantastic for music. With a VHS HiFi unit you could make a 6 hour party tape of non-stop music at reel-to-reel quality. The JVC units that solved the head switching noise issue were the all time best for reel-to-reel replacement.
I heard some stories of people doing music masters on hi-fi vhss
@@TheWeirdAlley You could, and get a rich analog sound. Some late model JVC units had no head switching noise, those were fantastic.
@@frankcoffey I know right, it's like a budet reel to reel
I absolutely love VHS for audio. It has become my favourite medium! Really nice warm analogue sound
2:32 Who else felt the "new VHS cassette" smell watching this?
Still burned into my head
I couldn't smell anything because of my tears
Krzysztof Czarnecki Me!
I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope
Too young to remember the “new cassette smell”
I love seeing movies in HD but I had more fun watching movies in the VHS days.
That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime
we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.
Not necessarily, Michi, because we can get the physical copies in HD on Blu-ray Disc.
I remember watching Gremlins on my '98 tv set
A lot of that has to do just with younger age. Everything just seemed more fun :)
Brother, awesome video! Thank you. Very fun to watch and laid out very good!
Recently i watched a few of my old vhs and I was extremely surprised of how high the quality was
Same
VHS was awesome ! We cared about content not image quality.
I miss the whole ritual of going to the videostore and having friends come over to watch movies.
I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.
I don't think we stopped caring about this.
Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?
@@TombstoneChris You just interacted with two guys you don't even know. Not bad these modern days.
ChrisS82 if you just watch the video, there is a movie shown that will help get you back to the 90s if you go 88 mph.
I don't remember them being bad at all.
aperson22222 it's because they were the latest technology we had back in the day. I remember when vcr's were hundreds of dollars lol
You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment.
36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.
and the standard TV screen being 19"
ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech.
i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.
Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks
Don't know why but this is one of your best videos... loved it... lol
great channel...always come back to see the latest in old stuff :)
“Was VHS bad?”
*Several mid 70s-early 2000s kids are typing*
Early 70s too...
WerewolfLord VHS came out in the US in 1977.
NO It Came Out in 1976 in the US and Beta came in 1975
Chloie Kwirant hhhhjjhhdjdkdlksjhxzkxk"zkjhhxhgxgzgdhggxhzjkkskkzhbhzhzkzhxjjzjzvvjdjixhhffjjhdhhggdhxuixkcjhjjhdggxghxhhhdhxjjxxudkxxjcjcjjxkkxn xxnxnxmxmjxcnbv
Corinne Ininahazwe someone guide this blind guy
When i was 12 years old. A whole Universe of films opened up for me to be able to watch on both Betamax and VHS, any time i wanted to. My mother worked at a video rental shop and i was also allowed to go and sit up stairs in the shop and watch all the latest releases before they were even available for customers to rent. VHS played a huge part in my childhood.
You're so lucky mate
@@futuresocieties. golden days mate.
What happened to your mum?
@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.
@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.
They just take a lot of space.
I still remember visiting a media lab in my college library, waiting for an attendant to walk into closed stacks, open a vertical drawer of tapes, pulling out my movie and assigning me and my friends to a room. Solo individual had a personal station.
I'm so glad I got to experience that.
I also got to work in that same library a couple years later while we digitized and sent everything to storage while the lab itself was torn apart and redesigned as offices and study rooms.
i have never heard anyone remembering them as terrible
in fact i loved using them
The only bad memories I have about VHS are when the tape had finally gone bad.
Apart from that, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "as bad as _we_ remember".
All I remember is how bad every news broadcaster looked when they upgraded to HD quality, that much is for sure.
Cool pic,max headroom brings back memories
@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes.
If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max.
They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.
@@ShootAUT yeh i watched him recently and it doesnt look like its aged
@@robertmcmahon4549 Exactly.
My brother had his first VHS player and we used to watch Wayne’s World over and over, the tracking used to go out so bad and we had to hit the machine to get it to work again. Great times.
Party time, excellent!
Thanks for doing this video. I really enjoyed it
You got a lot of patience. I respect this. This is awesome
The thing is though...VHS was all we knew back then...it didn't bother us because we had nothing better to compare it with!
actually beta was better however way too expensive for consumers
@@mctv6486 Beta was indeed better, but vhs' aggressive marketing paid off
Laserdisc was a thing
Beta had better picture quality, but VHS blank cassettes had longer recording time, which was the seller for VHS....also porn went with VHS
My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.
I still watch my VHS tapes all the time for the simple nostalgia.
I have hundreds of VHS tapes that I still watch and most of them are 6 or 8-hour tapes, so that's a lot of footage!
Rusty Shackleford when did VCR where discontinued
Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.
Stephen Seehorn I check out a VHS tape from the library one time called wakko's,wish and it almost mess up my vcr player because the tape is old
I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.
You also need to consider that CRTs are fundamentally different from LCDs, so the original tapes you had were optimised for smoother displays with low colour gamuts. Also because your capture format uses interlacing, you are getting a lot of artifacts in your final results that wouldn't exist on the CRT.
This video explains more: ruclips.net/video/V8BVTHxc4LM/видео.html
Same for 8bit to 32/64bit videogames. Much better in CRT with no progressiva scan and with scanlines.
And that capture devices typically aren't that great. DVD recorders are generally pretty good for VHS captures though.
Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.
@@gavinp5940VHS doesn’t benefit from those higher quality connections (S-video / component) because it’s encoded in composite.
0:09 "Im pretty sure everyone remembers using VHS tapes"
People born after the year 2000:
I do
I used them in elementary school even though they were already outdated
VHS machines were built like tanks when they first came out, by the time they were going out they were made incredible cheap as were the VHS cassettes. If you have old cassettes from the early 80's you'll be surprised at how heavy they are compared to cassettes from the early 2000's.
Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player
The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.
I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.
Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player
Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.
The halo around Marty's head in the "original 1985 VHS" is an epplied effect called edge enhancement. It was meant to make the picture look sharper. It probably looks better on a CRT.
I have no memory of it being bad at all. In fact, my memory is that it looked great. We always remember quality by what our impressions were of it at the time unless you're a certain comic book store owner.
Great info. I’ve been digitizing old family videos. Sadly many of them won’t even play correctly anymore. It’s been a blast still.
"1985 VHS.." *Let me take this advertisement for a movie released in 1993 out of the package..*
That shrink wrap was a tell tale sign it was resealed... he bought a used copy
Remember designated tape rewinders? They went so much faster than your regular VCR
Yeah... sadly the DVD rewinders didn't really catch on, did they? ;)
(Yes... they actually made them. Even as dumb as it sounds)
Paddan You've got to be kidding... right?
I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.
The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures.
I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.
Playing tapes on a VCR dozen't cause much damage. It's the rewinding and fast forward that cause them to break down.
Being able to record cartoons and watch them later!!!! Screw the quality, it was the 80's and 90's man
It's crazy how the stuff we used to throw out as junk is now a fortune on ebay. Getting harder to find CRT Tv's.
Fun fact: PAL composite's signal is far more superior when it comes to color. MUCH less coloring artifacts, more detail and can even handle teletext. (just to add up, lol) Even we've got 50 FPS, it's just better looking through composite.
What's up with NTSC colors? Most of old recordings has incredibly wrong colors.
PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.
Also it's spelled "colour" in PAL regions
PAL is 25fps and NTSC is 29.97fps. There are 50 fields every second for PAL and 60 fields per second for NTSC.
Color was the reason NTSC dropped from solid 30 fps to 29.97.
ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.
I love VHS so much. I actually like seeing the imperfections. It brings me back to a simpler time.
I miss having to reset the tracking on VHS!
if you have a high end vcr and tape there won;'t ve imperfections. and yes it is simpler because it was well thought out
@@AlisonBryen high end vcrs did auto tracking so you always had great picture quality!
As a kid, I never really noticed. It was the "norm" back then. lol.
respects mr 8bit guy for making this prestigious video :)
Shit always remembered where I left off. So I could take the tape out, pop it back in later and I'm right where I was.
I don't see a problem with it.
I remember when auto tracking came out and how it helped get the fuzz/lines off the screen. We are so used to HD resolutions today.
No they were the best thing to ever happen in my life as a child.
It brought me joy during my childhood :) at least there was something to watch and I am glad it existed at that point of time. Grateful. 🥰
Back in the days, VHS wasn't about picture quality, it was about watching blockbuster movies in the comfort of your home!
I still love VHS and there’s a growing community of people that dub the new movies like The Joker and John Wick onto old tapes. They even make custom card sleeves with original artwork on them. Oddly, they can get pretty expensive but a lot of work goes into making them.
That's so cool
Nothing but love for VHS. It’s probably (well, almost definitely) nostalgia talking, but adore the watching a film on tape days. Also, recording live TV and making tapes of favourite shows was something that modern tech doesn’t capture - recording fave shows on a digital box isn’t the same as making compilation tapes.
In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!
I recently acquired a Samsung VCR/DVD-R combo that outputs at 1080i through HDMI (there's also a subsequent model that outputs at full 1080p). I'd be interested to see this comparison repeated with one of those machines. I have to say, while watching some of my old recorded broadcasts, I was shocked to find that it looked better than I remembered. It varied with the differences between SP and SLP a LOT more than I expected but overall I was surprised.
I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.
@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.
I still regularly work with VHS in 2023; capturing old analog recordings to digital format. That bit at 1:26 when you were cleaning the head drum with a Q-tip triggered me though; I was taught NEVER to clean the video heads like that. Not only do you risk damaging the heads (and you can't easily get new ones), but fibres from the Q-tip can lodge in the heads and be extremely difficult to remove! I had to trash my 1995 VCR after doing that...
I love VHS, the quality is great, still. But I do have to mention I live in a PAL region.
PAL is a little higher quality than NTSC.
vinnien Why do you have to mention that, exactly? Lots of people live in PAL regions. Is that supposed to explain your love for it?
and the chance is very high the cable between the vcr and tv was a RGB scart cable instead of composite.
Erik Bruijn Uhh, but the SCART still carried composite unless he lived in France.
nope, i'm from NL and even there scart had RGB (and I'm sure because I had a TV that indicated it's receiving a RGB signal.)
Damn, I can smell those VHS tapes!
Smells like a bad circuit.
Smelled like Radio Shack or Bestbuy
I love my VHS tapes and machines. I still watch them and record shows to this day, mostly because certain shows you just can't get otherwise. And certain movies I can't find in their original forms on DVD, like the Original Star Wars trilogy.
Yea. Hell that's why I bought the Original Trilogy on vhs a couple of months ago. I rather watch Star Wars that way because that gives me a more warm nostalgic feeling plus all the cgi on my Blu Rays are complete eyesores
Had a lot of good times with VHS. More than the years with DVDs 📀. Recorded so much stuff in the 80’s-90’s and liked the boxes better. Was fun while it lasted!
One of the reasons the purchased tape looks worse is because the actual tape you bought would vary in quality, EVEN IF IT WAS NEW. Why? Because of how VHS tapes were made. (This was hinted at at the 8:55 mark) They literally have a master tape play and dupe that signal to thousands of other VHS recordings. But that master tape used to make dupes only has a finite amount of plays until the signal gets progressively worse. You would then toss that 'master' tape and replace it. If one of the VHS copies you bought was near the end of the life of the master... it would be even worse. As an example, I was an absolute NUT for the Lion King when it came out in 1995. I bought it three times on VHS. Each one of those copies had varying quality played back on the same equipment. Which is what you would expect, considering that was the most duped VHS title in history for mass production.
They were also high speed duped.
VHS was fine! we didn't have anything HD to compare it to.
Capacitance Electronic Disk
Unless you saw the movie in theaters.
Exactly
Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.
Ben Jones I’ve been recording to VHS recently and it’s not even that bad.
I never cared about crystal clear quality. I was just grateful to have entertainment so readily available.
I have a collection of over 600 VHS, a roughly 2010 VHS player and a 2010 or maybe 2011 CRT TV that I watch it on, that has digital rabbit air antennas on it, sitting on the desk across from my 1996 compaq presario that I play the original Sims on. So to me I think VHS is still perfectly fine and sometimes better than DVD, and there's something just nostalgic about having to do the tracking I don't know just to me it's just something you don't do anymore and when you're watching a VHS and you got to do the tracking and whatnot or unstick the heads and clean it and everything it's just adds to the whole experience of it to me, and you get that kind of sound on some of the VHS players of the movie playing sort of like a quieter projector and I kind of love that
Back in the 80's and even 90's when you took a tape or DVD home, you were committed to watching it, and to some extent, more grateful and attentive to the content on screen. Now we can easily abandon ship if we don't like the way a movie is going in the first 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes cheat ourselves out of a good movie without knowing it. Also, with the digital workflow being much more accessible than film to video, everyone is making movies and the market is oversaturated with poor filmmaking. Just food for thought.
Yes, there are many movies now made ... and you wonder why?
While I think I see what you're saying, I don't think I can agree. I had a lot of tapes that were recorded for me, due to not having cable, and they weren't just disposable content. In fact, sometimes we would watch the same recorded show or movie over and over, and FF through parts we didn't want.
It was easier than when we would copy/bootleg/share music on cassettes! But maybe I just never had a great cassette player that would give me time marks!
Loved VHS back then, but wouldn't trade it for streaming and saving shows/movies today!
Oh I dunno, I remember bailing on some rented movies back in the day which were terrible.
I somewhat agree. At least on the premise that there are too many garbage movies these days.
It's the same situation with all digitally created, and shared entertainment content now. There's an insane excess of youtube videos, podcasts, and soundcloud rappers all with Patreon accounts.
As a TV broadcast engineer your presentation is quite good. Although there are some incorrect assumption which have been identified by other commentators. I would like to add that all helical tape formats including VHS have a severe timebase error. This means to record a color TV signal, some fudging must be done. Broadcast helical formats are highest quality and must use a costly (in the 1970's) digital timebase corrector to stabilize the chroma for playback. Cheaper Umatic, Betamax and VHS formats use a color under record methodology which means the luma and chroma are first separated. The luma is recorded on a conventional fm carrier and the chroma amplitude modulates the same carrier. The composite signal is reconstructed on playback. The separation of the luma and chroma is essentially S Video and may be interfaced appropriately. The S Video interface is therefore readily available on a few high end VHS machines which were used by broadcasters.
I have several SVHS decks which not only have s-video but also component outputs. These units have a TBC built in as well. These work great for capturing the old tapes directly to a hard drive using a capture card. The main drawback on the higher end decks is they only playback SP recordings.
Terry, thanks for that insight. Also, isn't it true that the professionals would having used Betacam, not pro-grade VHS tapes? I remember using pro-grade VHS for school projects, but when I interned at a local TV station (this was in 1995), it was all Betacam. Were there actually professional applications of VHS? If so, what would the rationale have been behind using them?
People in the year 2090: RUclips Videos- were they as bad as we remember?
Nice unboxing 👍🏻 wasn’t expecting that 👍🏻
I love stuff like this but there’s a huge variable you left out: viewing them on a crt tv. Of course a low res analog source is going to look bad captured and converted to digital and put on a higher resolution display. All those edge artifacts and stuff get lessened in the scan lines of a crt. I know there’s really no way to accurately show this effect with a RUclips video but keeping the source analog all the way through yields results that aren’t as bad as this video here. It’s like how PS2 games on original hardware don’t look very good on an hdtv but are still gorgeous on a crt. Still an interesting video, I thumbs-upped :)
PS2 games look fantastic when emulated in higher resolution. PS3's upscaler sucks but PCSX2 looks way better.
I actually never had any bad memories of VHS... only good ones. On my TV I had back in the day, watching cable or a VHS had no discernible difference. Good memories of going to blockbuster or Hollywood video, being able to pop a tape in and record anything I wanted, being able to connect camcorders to and transfer it onto a full sized tape to be played anywhere... and the list goes on. I actually feel there has not been any technology in modern times that could offer that much convenience as VHS tapes.
Brandon Ly Don’t need to record stuff, when you can just search it up on the internet.
True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.
Not everything is on the internet.
I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.
how the heck did you come up with such an awesome opening!?
I rock a JVC HR-S5912U player and it has S-Video. It's hard to find on most players but that model has it. Great video!
Once in a while i still use my vcr. For some reason i just love the old pixelated picture it gives off its more nostalgic than anything for me. Plus i love watching the old previews before the movie started and i love the physical feel of vhs tapes over dvds. I was using my vcr alot to watch the old Disney movies before disney + came out.
Cool, gotta love Disney plus, it’s the best thing out there! 👍
I miss their smell when they came out of the VCR :)
I like the warmth after rewinding them and taking them out cause I'm part of the 0.01% who rewinds them after Thier done
That smell... *pops open plastic VHS movie case* *sticks nose in*
*inhales deeply*
Instant happy. 🥰
What I don't miss from the vcr my family had was it trying to eat the tape at least once
I liked how hot the tape was when I got done recording them
@@EveryoneElseIsWeirdImNormal I'm a part of that small percentage, too! Haha we had a car-shaped rewinder. I think it's "trunk" was where we placed the tape.
I honestly wish I had the experience to have to rewind VHS tapes every single time I finish watching them.
this. was. AWESOME. add one more to your current 1.33M subscribers!