This got me to thinking, how superior the VHS (and come to think of it the cassette) tape is to the DVD (or CDs). Anyone with a child, or are themselves carelessly destructive with discs, can attest to this. I regularly get interrupted with jumped or frozen frames whenever I attempt to watch a movie with my niece or nephew (much thanks to them taking out/replacing the DVD themselves). VHS tapes were indestructible in comparison. Sure, you don't get to skip to and from scenes effortless and you don't get all of those special features, but INDESTRUCTIBLE! (No one watches those Special Features anyway).
However, even DVDs and CDs are dated now, what with electronic files. How n00bish of me to even write this rate (Did I use that term correctly? I think I need to lose my geek card.)
P.S. All this nostalgia got me to thinking of other dated entertainment products. Anyone remember those old school cable boxes? The one with the slider-thingy to get to the channels? No? Well, while Googling "Old School Cable Boxes" I found this:
Remember now? Ah childhood memories. Now I am off to watch my NKOTB concert VHS tape, but not before I rock out to my Ace of Base cassette tape.
3 comments:
I remember those cable boxes. Funny how things change in what seems like such a short time.
Fortunately, there are few new movies that I wish to own, but all of them are DVDs. Unquestionably, everyone in the household prefers the VHS tapes. The quality is better; the music is original, the sound is better. One can actually relax and watch a VHS movie without worry, save for the extremely rare tape foul-up.
As for extra, and special features? This is not why we want to watch and own a movie.
It looks like we just won't buy any more DVDs. (And, how horrid that movie theaters are now stuck with "advanced technology." Why go when it's all so sterilized.
I'd say that it'd be pretty easy to modify a single track DVD player to have the DVDs in non-removable "Jewel Cases" BUT it is more profitable to have a disk that destroys itself faster than VHS.
Blu-Ray is basically a scam. A SD Card has the capacity you want and is SIGNIFICANTLY SMALLER as well as being more resilient. The transfer rate is likely to be an issue here, but SDXC and UHS2 are EASILY contenders for all but the top end players. The cards are far more expensive but you have even more options here, since an external 2TB drive (not even SSD) AGAIN beats bluray hands down. And is STILL smaller than the average bluray disk.
Somewhere along the lines, we changed from buying movies because we enjoyed watching them, to buying them to show off how rich we are for being several thousand dollars in debt creating a high def entertainment center.
The idea of getting data from nothing is absurd, yet people believe it and we see "HD rerenderings" of old films. Most of this is lossy conversions, or stupid-people improvements (i.e. removing motion blur). Fractals are used (again stupid people improvements) to double pixels at the cost of making already sharp edges softer and making the lack of detail more noticeable; okay just add in some procedural noise here and there; go butcher the film... and sell it for big moneys.
Heck, sometimes all you have to do is create high contrast darks and lights and people will think it is "HD".
In the same manner of the widescreen de-evolution (Widescreen is a 4:3 screen with the top cut off... A widescreen has to make a significantly smaller picture to become 4:3 again, but a 4:3 with the length of said widescreen has an IDENTICAL widescreen representation) we've created a market where people are focused on "newest and greatest" rather than just being entertained. Sure, you can notice a difference between 720 and 1080, but if you were watching the MOVIE instead of watching the expensive TV you took a second mortgage to pay for, you wouldn't care.
VHS would do us good, it is a great format, it does have significant flaws, but the "I paid more than you" crapwars and the inflated price of movies as well as the whole tampering with classics is wrong.
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