Aw man, that was my childhood. I'm an 80s baby, so my childhood was in the 90s, and we used video tapes all the time! Heck, we loved recording stuff off of tv so we could watch it later. I became an expert at pausing the VCR so the machine wouldn't record commercials, which is one reason we LOVE watching older tv shows on streaming now :D. No commercials.
I will admit that our oldest VCR was noisy, and I really did not enjoy having to wait a few minutes to rewind the tape when we were done watching the movie or tv show that was on it. But then again, that was how things were done in those days.
There was actually something that was [kind of] illegal that we used to do back in the days of renting tapes. My parents found out a trick of running rented tapes on one of our tv's using one VCR, while recording it onto a blank tape with a second VCR that was also hooked into the tv. We saved a lot of money on movies that way, hehe.
It's true that video quality wasn't always that great, and tapes aged badly compared to DVD's. It wasn't unusual for us in the 90s and early 2000s to get out an older 80s tape that my parents had recorded some HBO movie feature on, and to find the picture was fuzzy, sometimes there was a line through it, lighting would slant off to one side, or there might be the dreaded static in the middle of the picture.
One thing I really don't miss from those days were the commercials on the pre-recorded tapes. Most sensible people fast-forwarded on those, but I thought it was a requirement to have to watch them (being a kid, I didn't know better) and I would get bored often, or be reminded just how old the tape was.
After spending over 18 years with DVD's I really don't miss VHS tapes. I especially haven't missed them since we got DVR.
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CinemaDemon989 (1286)
6 years ago
Recording movies and television was truly the only upside to VHS tapes. But I guess downloading movies off the web and burning them onto discs is basically the same thing. Actually, it's a quicker and easier process. I remember having to watch an entire movie, just for it to successfully record onto a tape. One time I was recording The Devil's Rejects off On Demand, and right at the end of the movie, the On Demand program cut out, because our cable provider lost a signal due to a system update. So basically, I spent all that time recording it for nothing. The process was completely ruined and all for nothing. Sure, I could've repeated the process and tried again...but still, it was too time consuming. But seriously, the absolute worst part about VHS players is when they would go haywire and eat a tape. That was the worst feeling ever. Especially if it was a movie you really cared about. Another annoying thing was the limited time duration on some tapes. For example, in order to watch Scarface, you literally had to own two different tapes of part 1 and part 2. We've come a long way since VHS players. That's for sure!
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AmeriGirl26 (15135)
6 years ago
I forgot to mention those two things: VCR's eating tapes, and time limit.
We actually only had one VCR do that, and it was a small TV/VCR hybrid. After refusing to give up 2 or 3 tapes, and me having to rescue them, I'd had enough and just used the screen part of it. That was around the same time we were beginning to change over, but it was a gradual one in the mid-2000s. That same tv was used to watch tapes or DVD's from a hybrid player that could play either one. Heck, that thing was great in the fact that you could use it to record stuff from VHS tapes over to blank DVD's :D. Such machines are rare now.
It's true, VHS tapes were limited in how long they could record based on the length of the film reels inside. I remember seeing inside one and noting the two reels of film, similar to older movie cameras and smaller cassette tapes. There were a few incidents I had as a child of crying because I was taping some kiddy show I liked, and the tape ran out of film and the recording stopped. I also remember my parents owning a few "epic" classic films that required two tapes, such as "The Sound of Music," because the movie was too long to put on just one cassette. They remedied that in the early 2000s, but by then, everyone was buying DVD's and it was a short-lived victory for the VHS industry.
But I would like to point out that even DVD's have their limits, they're just bigger. Case in point, our Lord of the Rings Extended Edition sets. I don't know why it takes two discs to watch 4.5 hours of film, but that's how they're set up.
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R_Kane (15828)
6 years ago
A VHS take set to slow record could record up
to 8 hours of crap video. VHS could record 2, 4 or 8 hours of video. People, so-called, want convenience and garbage, not quality. VHS won out over Betamax because VHS could record for longer, but do so much worse.
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