back to article No, the VCR is not about to die. It died years ago. Now it's VHS/DVD combo boxes' turn

Japanese company Funai will stop making VHS devices this month, marking the end of the road for the venerable video tape standard. But the company has told The Register that low demand is not the reason for VHS' demise, despite being cited widely based on a brief Japanese language report. Funai told us it sold 750,000 VHS …

  1. Youngone Silver badge
    Flame

    Tape?

    I'm not really sure tape of any kind is the answer to a problem in 2016.

    I suppose I could be convinced, but with discs being so cheap why bother?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tape?

      Maybe not for saving new content, but what about playing old content? I saw a Facebook post from a friend of mine yesterday who was moving and said she found a box with a whole bunch of old Disney movies on VHS she forgot she had. She thought it would be nice for her young son to see them, and wondered if anyone had a VCR they didn't need anymore. I have had one gathering dust on a shelf for over a decade, not needed since I got a Tivo in 2003 or so, so I am going to drop it by her new place sometime next week.

      I know some of her Disney movies have never been released for streaming, and while they might be on DVD, why should a single mom who works as a teacher (i.e. not a lot of money to throw around) want to buy movies she already has, when she could play the ones she has?

      1. BebopWeBop
        Trollface

        Re: Tape?

        Or they have 'awkward' moments subsequently erased from distribution. Living in the US while my children grew up, I still have a copy of Aladin, where the street trader (for anyone who knows the film) has the immortal line 'where they cut of your hand if they don't like your face' in the song introducing his home. Deleted from the US version and I presume not released outside the US I believe. Priceless.

        Can't imagine why they decided to delete it :-)

    2. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Tape?

      For exactly the same reason tape has always been useful, just go read the whitepapers :

      low price : a 15TB LTO tape (6TB native) is a lot cheaper than either 15TB or 6TB of hard disk, although granted, the upfront cost of an LTO 7 drive is high

      resilience : whilst tape isn't designed to be abused, it is a removable media. Hard disks are not.

      encryption and compression by default

      WORM capability

      Long term storage : Any drive above about 3TB is helium filled. I'd have to check the lifetime on this, but wouldn't want to bet much on a drive that's been sat on a shelf for years.

      Archival and storage. At the really high end, thousands of tapes available for retrieval by robot, with truly staggering amounts of storage.

      1. Lennart Sorensen

        Re: Tape?

        No, there are lots of 4 and 6TB and even 8TB drives that are not helium filled.

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: Tape?

          So there are, thanks for the heads up. I see that HGST is now going helium only for future drives, and some of the larger devices are 'mostly read' but yes, there are large capacity non helium drives.

  2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Stop making me feel old

    Helical scan digital storage tape did exist. It was based on Digital Audio Tape, and the computer storage version was informally known as DAT as well.

    Kids today... don't even remember DAT. Time to practice shouting "Get of my lawn!"

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: Stop making me feel old

      Ah DAT. I used it for its intended purpose - 8-track audio (plus timecode).

      Or rather 7-track audio because track 8 was the click track for the band.

      1. Fuzz

        Re: Stop making me feel old

        I don't think DAT was ever 8 track certainly the only DAT tapes/drives I ever saw were stereo.

        There was ADAT which used a full size S-VHS tape to record 8 channels of digital audio. You could chain loads together to get more tracks. The optical interface they used for the digital audio signal lived on long after the tapes were forgotten about.

    2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Re: Stop making me feel old

      Yup, DAT was like a little VCR... and I think I still have a HP tape drive in an external SCSI box and some tapes still in shrink wrap lying around somewhere... At that time the very first CD-ROM burners were on the market, but the blanks were so costly that DAT was a sensible backup solution even for relatively small amouts of data.

      There also were boxes (some of which you could assemle yourself from a kit) that would turn any old VCR with a SCART plug into a tape drive for data storage. Looked great on paper... Let's just say that it did work better than a C64's Datasette.

      1. Martin an gof Silver badge

        Re: Stop making me feel old

        turn any old VCR with a SCART plug into a tape drive for data storage

        In the days before DAT and HDD recording, a similar device made by Sony was used by some recording studios to record digital audio onto VHS. We had one at the radio station I worked at. If I remember correctly it could do 16bit / 2 channel / 32KHz or 14bit / 2 channel / 48kHz. It worked well enough if you used good quality cassettes and stored them sensibly, but was obviously an evolutionary dead end right from the outset. Looked pretty on the monitor though :-)

        We had people using tape right up to the moment the machines were retired, and long after HDD recording had become affordable - we had one of the first Soundscape machines, which was a 2U box containing some electronics and 2x IDE hard drives which used a bog-standard PC ('286 or higher I think) for control. It was a small fraction the price of competing systems which relied on fast computers with specialised sound hardware and SCSI discs.

        The problem with VHS is that it is analogue. I had an interesting discussion with my 14 year-old just yesterday who had dug out some old Thomas the Tank Engine tapes (first series) and tried to play them. Yes, the VHS player is still working, yes I have connected it up correctly to the new TV we bought last Christmas, yes the sound works but no, the TV won't sync to the slightly wobbly signal off tape - the sound continues but the picture blanks every few seconds. Feeding the VHS output through an external re-sync device sorted that, but now he's talking about buying DVDs of all the tapes he has, and what I want to know is why can't a modern multi-standard TV lock on to a slightly wavery signal from an old VHS tape?

        I think it's time I started transferring all those old Hi8 tapes to the computer. I have enough storage now, and I still have a working camera. What I don't have is a video capture device for my Linux machine. Any recommendations? My boss at work has a Blackmagic H.264Pro I could borrow, but it only comes with Windows and OSX software and as far as I'm aware it doesn't work under Linux, though I have only spent 30 minutes testing it.

        At least my DV tapes are easier. With a working camera and a Firewire connection, it's as simple as an incantation to dvgrab.

        M.

        1. Jon Massey

          Re: Stop making me feel old

          That and ADAT tapes which were (IIRC) basically just S-VHS

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Stop making me feel old

          "the TV won't sync to the slightly wobbly signal off tape - the sound continues but the picture blanks every few seconds. Feeding the VHS output through an external re-sync device sorted that...what I want to know is why can't a modern multi-standard TV lock on to a slightly wavery signal from an old VHS tape?

          That sounds similar to the effect produced when doing a simple tape to tape copy of a copy protected tape. Macrovision??

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Stop making me feel old

      DAT

      It was the major storage medium in a lot of applications in the late '80s/'90s. HP made a 6 slot changer. Combined with a bit of scripting that was the way to do unattended overnight backups.

    4. Lennart Sorensen

      Re: Stop making me feel old

      Yes DDS tape. And it was total shit for reliability as one would expect from helical scan. About 10 writes and the tape was dead, and you had to do a read verification pass after the write to try and see if maybe it was a good backup.

      1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

        Re: Stop making me feel old

        "total shit for reliability as one would expect from helical scan"

        Old Exabyte 8mm helical scan format (up to 5 GB) was OK in reliability terms. But yes, later Mammoth format drives were awful, quite on par with DDS-4. Might just as well have used /dev/null for a backup - much faster & about the same chance of recovery.

        1. Down not across

          Re: Stop making me feel old

          Old Exabyte 8mm helical scan format (up to 5 GB) was OK in reliability terms. But yes, later Mammoth format drives were awful, quite on par with DDS-4.

          I had (ahem, still have few) quite a few Exabyte 8mm drives (EXB-8500). Never has any issues with them (unlike 4mm DDS which never really worked reliably). In fact even the EXB-8500 XL was better although the 160m tapes were bit iffy. Sticking to 112m tapes and all was well.

    5. Jan 0 Silver badge

      Re: Stop making me feel old

      You've forgotten Metrum drives that used a VHS style cartridge. I used them for high bandwidth data transfers (air courier) in the '90s because the transatlantic ISDN line wasn't up to the task. There were also Ampex and Sony digital drives, also in the '90s, that used 1" tape cartridges. What else have el Reg readers come across?

  3. Blofeld's Cat
    Coat

    Ah...

    Ah yes I remember those days - you would look up the program you wanted to record in TV Times, lie on the floor to set the clock, spend five minutes getting the cellophane wrapper off a new E120 cassette and finally press "timer".

    Later you would return to find that:

    a) You had recorded the programme you wanted*

    b) You had recorded a completely different programme

    c) The TV station was running late so you got 20 mins of snooker and the recording ended just as Miss Marple was about to expose the murderer.

    d) That was last week's TV Times

    * In this case you would usually overwrite the tape before remembering to watch it

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Ah...

      To be fair, b-d could just as easily apply to one of those DVD recorder gizmos.

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Ah...

      VideoPlus numbers, eh? Jumpers for goalposts...

    3. Paul Shirley

      Re: Ah...

      I remember buying a smart VCR with teletext programme guide programming. And the half day it took to decide it was quicker and easier just entering the time manually! When plus codes turned up programming got a lot easier and the machine was quite good at noticing time changes by itself, something the teletext version was supposed to do but never quite got right.

      1. Martin an gof Silver badge

        Re: Ah...

        When plus codes turned up programming got a lot easier and the machine was quite good at noticing time changes by itself

        That was down to the broadcaster though - they had to transmit a matching code for every programme, which the VCR looked for and used to start / stop the recording. Generally speaking the BBC got this right, ITV sometimes did (I used to wonder if the codes had to be triggered manually at their end because they were often late or early or just didn't happen), but I had problems with S4C and Channel 4, though the latter was almost certainly down to a weak signal; you couldn't reliably get teletext from C4 either. Don't know about Channel 5; didn't get that until digital TV came along.

        M.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge
    4. stucs201

      Re: snooker

      Unless I was setting timers for multiple programs at once I generally used to set the time manually to record an extra half hour or more to allow for overruns.

    5. tin 2

      Re: Ah...

      e) you put in all the details correctly but forgot to press timer.

  4. Christian Berger

    Actually VCRs still exist

    In the professional realm VCRs still exist, particularly as an archival and programme exchange format.

    VHS, which originally stood for "Victor Helical Scan", was just one of the low cost consumer formats in the 1970s. Apparently the big point why it existed for so long is that the licensing was rather open and the build quality was OK.

    The obvious successor to the VTR in home use is something I like to call "computerized television". Essentially you have a computer with an array of DVB-S2 cards. You enter search words into that computer and whenever a show which matches one of those words, it'll record it and present you with a video file of the recording. You can then do anything you want with that file.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: Actually VCRs still exist

      The VCRs in profrssional use were Beta though, never VHS.

      And disappearing fast, as HDD based video archives are now so cheap that it's just not worth dealing with large numbers of tapes.

      I don't think any UK broadcaster now uses Beta for new programming, though they probably still have a large library of tapes sat in storage.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: Actually VCRs still exist

        U-Matic for professional use, actually. Betamx is U-Matic's little bastard brother, so to speak.

        1. David Paul Morgan

          Re: Actually VCRs still exist

          The other industrial derivative was Hawkeye or M-Wrap.

          While the Hawkeye uses the same size cassette as VHS, it incorporated new circuit technology, etc. The wrap had at times been referred to as “M” wrap.

          Also, VHS is short for "Video Home System"

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS

          hence, "I'll record that on the VHS"

          (in the USA, they seemed to use VCR - Video cassette Recorder?)

          1. MJI Silver badge

            Re: Actually VCRs still exist

            Video home system came after Vhs like the BASIC thing.and beginners

            Definately something Helican Scan

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Actually VCRs still exist

        "they probably still have a large library of tapes sat in storage."

        And at some time in the future they'll have a big panic because they find they've got a large library and nothing that can read it. How many times has that happened?

        1. CommodorePet

          Re: Actually VCRs still exist

          >And at some time in the future they'll have a big panic because they find they've got a large library and nothing that can read it. How many times has that happened?

          Here's the most famous one that I know of... 1500 tapes, no working tape drives, so took many years to find and repair them, even after they were stored in a Chicken shed.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project

      3. MJI Silver badge

        Re: Actually VCRs still exist

        Betacam not Betamax, similar mechanisms but different tapes

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Actually VCRs still exist

      "Essentially you have a computer with an array of DVB-S2 cards."

      Or one DVB-T card with a couple of tuner modules on it. As it can take several streams from a single physical tuner you'd be hard pushed to find enough simultaneous watchable programmes to exceed its limits. In fact, I'm not sure mine uses the second tuner very often.

      1. Gio Ciampa

        Re: Actually VCRs still exist

        I never did understand why Freeview boxes never seem to have been intelligent enough to figure out that a "clash" on the same multiplex wasn't actually a barrier, given it ought to be able to extract mutilple channels from a single stream.

        From memory, using a single PCTV nano tuner and Me-TV, I did once manage to record 5 channels simultaneously - admittedly only as a proof-of-concept - none of the shows I actually wanted to watch...

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: Actually VCRs still exist

          I presume the actual limitation is decoder or HDD bandwidth.

          The Humax ones I've used will happily record two channels while watching any third that's in the same mux as either of the others.

      2. Christian Berger

        Outside the UK

        Well outside the UK there is virtually no DVB-T, so DVB-S(2) is the way to go. And yes you can get cards with 4 tuners allowing you to record 4 transponders simultaneously. There's an advantage of recording "everything": You can just get any programme from the past. For example recently there was a German comedian sued by Erdogan. There was lots of discussion about what he said, but nobody published the video of his show. If you recorded it yourself, you could form your own opinion on what exactly he said. You would also find out that most of the people talking about it obviously have never seen it.

    3. MJI Silver badge

      Re: Actually VCRs still exist

      Thought it was vertical helical though

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Many moons ago

    there was this computer called the "Amiga" and there was a cracking little bit of kit that allowed you to back up onto VHS. A small circuit board costing a few pounds, a bit of software and you could back up your amiga HD to it in a few hours. Yes, by modern standards its laughable but THEN it was the bollocks and i made a decent income making and flogging them....

    1. aui

      Re: Many moons ago

      I had one of those.

      1. tin 2

        Re: Many moons ago

        this? http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Many moons ago

          Thats the daddy.

          I remember i "hacked" the hardware and copied it. Making my own PCB with a permo marker.

          Think it was just an op-amp and a few passive components.

          Miss those days........

    2. Pedigree-Pete

      Re: Many moons ago

      Ah! Amiga and Elite. Still have mine. PP

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Many moons ago

      I had one too. I don't think I ever got it work reliably.

  6. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    For extra horror, look up DVHS/DTheater

    Yes, you can play back and record high definition sources to/from tape.

    Whilst tape is great for data storage, and perhaps it has some advantages in certain broadcast applications, for home usage? Shudder.

    1. Piro Silver badge

      Re: For extra horror, look up DVHS/DTheater

      No horror, the D-Theater titles I've seen look.. great. Really great.

      In fact, there are still a handful of films that, if you want a copy in HD, are still only available on D-Theater.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: For extra horror, look up DVHS/DTheater

        Oh, I'm sure they do, their bitrate is far higher than DVD and should be comparable to most Blurays.

        Given bluray is here, however, and supports random access and 1080p, I think I'd rather not use tape unless absolutely necessary.

  7. MJI Silver badge

    Sanyo

    Hmm just like Sony then, bought in their Vhs rubbish rather than make their own.

    As I have a few Sony and Sanyo made decks, the build quality of the 1980s decks was so much higher.

    I managed to avoid the Vhs era, I did have one, but only for duplication. My work horse was a Sanyo M40 (still working) a Beta Hifi deck, my special machine a Sony SL-HF950 Superbeta deck.

    Timeline was, watched Beta rentals, lost job, new job, mortgage, got some money, oh look brand new format called DVD. All along recording TV using those 2 Beta decks.

    I have no pleasant memories of using Vhs, it was always that crappy format other people bought.

    I still remember seeing someones edit master Vhs-Vhsand wondering why it looked worse than my final copy Beta->Superbeta->Beta

  8. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Happy

    Danmere Backer

    Anyone else had one of these?

    An ISA card with video composite in and out sockets on it. Used a standard VHS recorder to store data.

    It was a fine idea, and incorporated a load of error correction to deal with grotty VHS recording. However, I found that it was only 2D error correction, so while data errors in each data frame were corrected, the loss of a complete frame stuffed the data. And of course, a crease in the tape would produce an interference band that passed up the picture, which when it reached the sync pulses would kill the frame.

  9. David Paul Morgan

    I think I was waiting for the VHS to be invented!

    I remember when I saw a demo of the Philips 1500 in Mackross (sp) Cardiff when I was 11 - 1972

    http://www.rewindmuseum.com/philips.htm

    When I asked my dad when we were getting one, he said "no chance".

    Fast Forward (see what I did there?) to very early eighties and I was home for christmas - either Dec 1980 or 1981. My cousin worked for DER and my dad had managed to 'borrow' a Fergusson 3v22 from him (purple clock, big piano keys, tapes £15/E-180.)

    We liked it so much, we went shopping at the weekend and came home with an Hitachi VT8000 vhs. It had nice silver touch-solenoid controls and the air-damped eject tray 'sighed' when you ejected the casssette.

    so, for a while, we had 2 VHS recorders! the bees knees or what - one in each lounge.

    You had to leave a £50 cheques as a deposit when you rented a film from one of the VHS rental boutiques. I think the first one we rented was Carrie! happy days

    1. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Re: I think I was waiting for the VHS to be invented!

      Mackross (sp) Cardiff

      Maskreys on Whitchurch Road?

      Image on Google Streetview (never tried to send such a link before - not sure if it will work).

      I remember going in there in the late 1980s or early 1990s to buy a carpet with my mum only to find that the carpet salesman was the original owner of my mum's house. We had to be very careful speaking to him because the carpets he had fitted were absolutely dire 1960s turquoise/black/purple "Paisley" type pattern. Mum and dad had got rid of those as soon as they could afford to.

      M.

      1. David Paul Morgan

        Re: I think I was waiting for the VHS to be invented!

        Mackross was off queen street - became Allders? Sort of where Halifax BS/Queens Arcade entrance is now.

        defo not Maskreys - now also recently gone, I think.

  10. Alan J. Wylie

    Philips Video 2000

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_2000

    I briefly contracted to PYE TVT in on Coldhams Lane, Cambridge in 1984 (a real-time video editing suite for the 1986 Mexico World cup). Pye was a sub-division of Philips and the company shop sold Video 2000 recorders at a substantial discount, so there was a significant number in the area. Later I heard tales of the stock management system of e.g. Dixons sending equal numbers of cassettes to each branch, and the manager of the Cambridge branch having to call around to get them sent on to his.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    VHS - many fond memories.

    Top loaders - learning to dismantle them to align the heads that so often fell out of alignment long before they put the tracking on the back. If you can take one of those apart and put it back together you had the skills to dismantle anything.

    Remote controls - On a wire, it was the future.

    Nicam VCR - Getting excited plugging it in through a sound a system.

    Piracy - Working out that if you put your VCR through the TV and back out again to another VCR it removed copy protection. RGB through scart also had the same effect if I remember correctly.

    Renting - The blokes that used to come round once a week in vans with loads of films.

    Setting the timer - Something nobody above the age of 16 at the time could accomplish.

    1. Down not across

      Piracy - Working out that if you put your VCR through the TV and back out again to another VCR it removed copy protection. RGB through scart also had the same effect if I remember correctly.

      Yes, been a while but as I recall Macrovision messed with the AGC and was present in composite and S-Video and going via RGB worked fine.

      There were also quite a few hobby and commercial solutions for filtering out Macrovision.

      1. MJI Silver badge

        Another Beta advantage, it stripped out Macrovision, I used to use it to copy rental DVDs pre burners

      2. Martin an gof Silver badge

        going via RGB worked fine.

        But you don't get RGB out of a video recorder.

        The best way to get rid of Macrovision IIRC (where it did interfere with AGC) was either to find an old VCR which had manual gain controls, or to invest in a "Syncblaster". Or those into home video might have had a video mixer with a digital frame store which had the same effect.

        M.

        1. David Paul Morgan

          later models had rgb/s-vhs connections

          I had this:

          "There was a Philips Matchline S-VHS machine (VR813) from the early nineties that could be set to output RGB in the setup menu. The picture in RGB wasn't that great as it tended to enhance the flaws in the VHS format (such as poor blue colour reproduction and dot crawl etc).

          It was quite a feature packed machine in its day, as it also had an on-board Fastext decoder, which meant it could record and play back subtitles and teletext pages from S-VHS recordings. You could even use it to set timer recordings via Ceefax by selecting the desired program with a cursor"

          which was able to supply RGB to my Philips TV

          It also had the 'S' connector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Video

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        There were also quite a few hobby and commercial solutions for filtering out Macrovision.

        Still are! I'm in NTSC world, and converting a boxload of VHS tapes (recently acquired) to MP4.

        Using an XDIMAX GREX to strip the Macrovision

  12. Tezfair
    Unhappy

    Transfer those tapes

    Earlier this year I finally got around to converting VHS to digital. It was a real eye opener. Most of the 3hr tapes had stuck together so I was having to wind the tapes end to end before I could play them back, but quite a few snapped.

    The small camcorder ones I was able to recover most of the kids when they were little. School plays, holidays, birthdays etc, however due to the age of the tapes and the VHS machine, the quality is somewhat lacking but at least I have something.

    So, if you have old tapes, get them transferred asap.

    1. wx666z

      Re: Transfer those tapes

      Have an up vote! And I second that emotion.Went through that last year, 7 VHS tapes (mostly from the '80s or early '90's to computer then on to dvd. Then sent to kids/grandkids. PITA, but worth it.

    2. MJI Silver badge

      Re: Transfer those tapes

      I transfered about 20 or so camera tapes to PC, quality was not that bad, well it was good enough for some to be used on a retail DVD of a preserved railway a couple of years ago.

      All played back on a 1982 portable

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