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RIP VHS FINALLY DIES
by Christian Milsom on Oct 30, 2008 at 07:26 PM Published at gadgetell.com
In much the same way Blu-ray hopes to eventually ‘kill’ the inferior DVD, DVD has finally buried VHS. “Old news!” I hear you cry, and yes, I appreciate that the VHS has been facing this impending doom for a while, but the day has finally come where we can officially say that it is a thing of the past.
Up until now JVC, the developers of VHS, have been the only major company to still make standalone VHS players, with companies like Panasonic blaming the obviously empty market for them stopping production. The last film to be released on VHS, “A History of Violence,” was released in 2006, completing 30 years of VHS dominated home visual entertainment, which started with “The Young Teacher.”
But as of Monday they have stopped any further manufacturing and are moving their production towards camcorders for the Chinese market. Although this will take a while to filter through the shipping and sales process, another chapter in the illustrious history of the VHS book has ended. You can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia when you remember the VHS days of old.
It is true that they were of limited quality, and that the DVD and Blu-ray are far superior, but its introduction in 1976 was one of the great advances for technology in the home and it will take in important part in the history of technology.
I think one of the main points that this demise demonstrates is how quickly (and exponentially) technology is growing. In the 70’s we had VHS, in the 80’s we had VHS, for 70% of the 90’s we had VHS, and in the 00’s we have had video, DVD and Blu-ray. Does anyone think that DVD’s will still be around in 2027? I doubt it.
But all is not lost for the VHS, various models combining VHS with DVD, hard drive and Blu-ray are still in production, and will continue for a while; but I don’t know about you but it’s just not the same! So, make the best use of your VHS while it still works, for its days are now well and truly numbered.In much the same way Blu-ray hopes to eventually ‘kill’ the inferior DVD, DVD has finally buried VHS. “Old news!” I hear you cry, and yes, I appreciate that the VHS has been facing this impending doom for a while, but the day has finally come where we can officially say that it is a thing of the past.
Up until now JVC, the developers of VHS, have been the only major company to still make standalone VHS players, with companies like Panasonic blaming the obviously empty market for them stopping production. The last film to be released on VHS, “A History of Violence,” was released in 2006, completing 30 years of VHS dominated home visual entertainment, which started with “The Young Teacher.”
But as of Monday they have stopped any further manufacturing and are moving their production towards camcorders for the Chinese market. Although this will take a while to filter through the shipping and sales process, another chapter in the illustrious history of the VHS book has ended. You can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia when you remember the VHS days of old.
It is true that they were of limited quality, and that the DVD and Blu-ray are far superior, but its introduction in 1976 was one of the great advances for technology in the home and it will take in important part in the history of technology.
I think one of the main points that this demise demonstrates is how quickly (and exponentially) technology is growing. In the 70’s we had VHS, in the 80’s we had VHS, for 70% of the 90’s we had VHS, and in the 00’s we have had video, DVD and Blu-ray. Does anyone think that DVD’s will still be around in 2027? I doubt it.
But all is not lost for the VHS, various models combining VHS with DVD, hard drive and Blu-ray are still in production, and will continue for a while; but I don’t know about you but it’s just not the same! So, make the best use of your VHS while it still works, for its days are now well and truly numbered.
VHS finally dies a death – how long until DVD does the same?
by Dave Parrack Published at tech.blorge.com
VHS (Video Home System) may have been dead for most of us for many years but until now it hadn’t officially died. With the news that the last big supplier of VHS tapes is ditching the format, that death can now be officially announced. R.I.P. VHS.
What the VHS video format did for movies cannot be understated, both good and bad. It gave people the power to watch movies at home, affecting theater sales terribly, but also giving studios a second bite at the profit cherry thanks to rental and buying markets for their wares. It also brought movie piracy into the mainstream, a business that is bigger now than ever thanks to the Internet.
VHS came to prominence in the 1980s after originally launching in 1976. After a bloody battle with the rival Betamax format – a battle with many parallels to the recent Blu-ray vs DVD format war – VHS became an integral fixture in most people’s homes. The humble videotape not only allowed the viewing of the latest Hollywood blockbuster but also gave people the opportunity to record programs off the TV for the first time.
But now, according to The Los Angeles Times‘ Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of VHS videotapes, is ditching the format in favor of DVD, effectively killing the format for good. There will, of course, still be a market for the tapes amongst collectors and people too far behind the times to have even upgraded to DVD let alone Blu-ray, but that’s all that’s left for this once great format.
Hollywood ditched VHS back in 2006 when A History of Violence became the last big movie to be released on the format. But Kugler says his Distribution Video Audio Inc. company managed to sell over four million videotapes in the last two years, proving there was still a demand, however much it was shrinking.
The world has, of course, now moved on a great deal. DVD is now the format of choice for most but even that looks outdated compared to Blu-ray. And both physical formats probably face their toughest test from the emergence of digital downloads as a true force in the movie industry.
Kugler himself may be a fan of old formats but he thinks even DVD has a limited life left, stating that “the DVD will be obsolete in three or four years, no doubt about it. Everything will be Blu-ray. The days of the DVD are numbered. And that is good news for me.”
Whether that prediction rings true or not remains to be seen, but one format is now officially dead. Will VHS be missed? Not when compared to what we now have, with videos being brittle, clunky, and rather user-unfriendly. But they ushered in a new era that was important to get to where we are today. And for that reason, the death of VHS is rather sad. Almost as sad as the people still using it.
The Vanishing : The Demise of VHS, and the Movies Disappearing Along With It
by Anthony Kaufman posted February 26, 2009 - Published at movingimagesource.us
Like the Hawaiian crow and the Chinese river dolphin, Costa-Gavras's 1972 Uruguayan political thriller State of Siege is effectively extinct. While it survives in a few, used VHS versions (you can get one through Amazon.com at $159.99) and presumably somewhere in 16mm or 35mm film prints, it is among hundreds of important and critically acclaimed films no longer readily accessible for home viewing.
In the wake of video-store shutdowns across the country, and a move toward DVD-only subscription services modeled after Netflix and digital download initiatives, the non-digitized movie is becoming an endangered species. The death of VHS has long been foretold. In November 2006, Variety published an obituary headlined "VHS, 30, dies of loneliness." But the industry appears to have overlooked the films themselves. VHS-only masterpieces like Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, Sam Fuller's Underworld U.S.A., and Alain Resnais’s Providence have always been difficult to find, but with the decline of the format (not to mention U.S. repertory houses), the chances of seeing them are only getting slimmer.
At least, legally and in pristine form. A number of the films mentioned in this article can be found as downloadable files on peer-to-peer-sharing BitTorrent sites. And diehard cinephiles have not always bothered with copyright law. That’s what made Kim's Video famous. One of the few centralized places in the world where one could find rare classics, bootlegs, imports, and various oddities, Kim's Video was like a BitTorrent site in the flesh. The recent collapse of the Kim's empire and owner Yongman Kim's decision to ship the company's esoteric, 55,000-film collection to the small Sicilian town of Salemi are among the latest disasters to befall the auteur-film rental market.
According to former Kim's Video clerks, the library included such obscure VHS titles as Werner Herzog's documentary on televangelist Gene Scott, God’s Angry Man; a bootleg of Robert Frank's never-released Rolling Stones doc, Cocksucker Blues; Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water; Penelope Spheeris's The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, and several Andy Warhol titles, along with all sorts of little-seen and eccentric Asian and European imports. "They also had bootlegs of all these bizarre Turkish knockoffs of Hollywood movies," recalls Kim's-clerk-turned-critic Matt Singer. "Turkish E.T., Turkish Star Wars, and so on. I have never seen those anywhere else."
Other independent video stores exist, but for how long and with what stock? Two Boots Video, in New York’s East Village, recently conducted a fire sale of their entire VHS collection. "No one rents the videos," a clerk said. "We can’t carry VHS anymore, because we don’t have the space." New Yorkers may still be better situated than other cinephiles. A recent stop at Greenwich Village's World of Video yielded such VHS-only sightings as Kenji Mizoguchi's Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, Herzog's God’s Angry Man, Andrzej Wajaa's Fury Is a Woman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's I Only Want You to Love Me, and Margarethe Von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg, among others. The Greenpoint-based Photoplay also has a rich selection of foreign and classic VHS titles.
But video stores will always remain at the mercy of what's available. The Criterion Collection, home video's most promiment savior of art-cinema orphans, has been steadily catching up with sought-after titles, issuing remastered editions of films previously only available as VHS imports and bootlegs. Among its upcoming releases are Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Made in U.S.A., neither of which has been available on DVD domestically, as well as Last Year at Marienbad, a Fox Lorber title that has gone out of print. The company also has the rights to Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.
But there's only so much rescuing they can do. With every new shift in media technology, from 16mm to VHS, from traditional broadcast to cable TV, from VHS to DVD, huge numbers of films are lost, says Facets Multi-Media executive director Milos Stehlik, who includes such titles as Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend’s House?, Glauber Rocha's Antonio Das Mortes, and Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT among the films he fears will disappear in a post-VHS culture.
"What irritates me is that with each technology comes all this promise—that you’re going to be able to watch whatever you want, whenever you want. But then it turns out not to be true," he says. "Because most art films are marginal, financially, to the mainstream culture, they will always get pushed out."
"I never understood how this myth that 'everything is available on DVD' got started," agrees critic Dave Kehr, the DVD columnist for The New York Times. As evidence, he points to Turner Classic Movies' database of U.S. feature films—of the 157,068 titles listed as of late February, 2009, fewer than 4 percent are available on home video. TCM also includes a reader's list of the top 200 films not on DVD. While many of the titles are available as imports—for example, there are South Korean versions of John Huston's The African Queen (#2) and Elia Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (#67) and Spanish versions of René Clair's I Married a Witch (#11) and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (#100)—many others are not available at all, including René Clément's This Angry Age (#1), Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (#4), and King Vidor's Northwest Passage (#7).
Kehr, and others, lay most of the blame on studios that own the rights to the films. "The worst offender is Universal," he says. "They don’t have any idea what they've got in their library. They were releasing a number of films on VHS that you can’t get in any form today." In the switch from VHS to DVD, he explains, "we lost a tremendous amount of stuff, because they had to remaster them and no one wanted to spend the money."
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who writes a DVD imports column for Cinema Scope, says U.S. home video distributors can’t simply claim "rights issues" as an excuse for not releasing films. "They always say it’s about rights issues, but people don’t care enough about these things to get the rights," he says, noting the glaring DVD omissions of Jacques Tourneur's films Stars in My Crown and Wichita. "What becomes canonized is what's available, which has always been the case," he adds.
Kehr worries that the movies of important little-known American auteurs—for example, Lew Landers and André De Toth—are simply "vanishing into the ether," he says. "They’re just gone from the conversation and that’s unfortunate. The younger critics haven't seen this stuff, but how could they?"
As the entertainment industry focuses on improvements in quality, in the move from DVD to Blu-r ay, for example, cinephiles will ironically face increasingly restricted viewing options, because the technology requires pristine 35mm negatives. "Concentrating on technical quality eliminates 90 percent of American film history," says Kehr, who notes that a film like Frank Borzage's Man's Castle could never come out on DVD, because only a dupe negative exists in studio vaults. (Someone has, however, posted the entire film, in seven parts, on YouTube.)
An all-digital future, where consumers will be able to download films directly to their computer, will only continue to curtail availability, says Kehr. "They still have to make those masters," he says. "It still costs $30,000 to digitize a film. And how many De Toth films is MGM going to digitize?"
The disastrous state of the economy, and specifically, the unsteadiness of the DVD market—which dropped roughly 6 percent in 2008—is only making matters worse. Frank Tarzi, formerly Kim's head film buyer and now an executive at Kino International, says lower advances for DVD rights may prevent some rights holders from going through with deals. And the recent shuttering of New Yorker Films, home to a rich library of VHS-only titles such as Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, and Von Trotta's Marianne & Juliane, may delay or prevent these films from ever getting a proper DVD release.
On the brighter side, some industry observers are quick to point out that, in some ways, the current moment is incredibly fruitful for movie lovers, what with multi-region DVD players, torrents, and lots of obscure films still somehow finding their way into the world—if you look hard enough.
Rosenbaum likens what’s happening now in the home video market to the film industry in the teens, with its ongoing patent wars and litigation. "There’s this chaos, but it has positive possibilities, because things haven’t been nailed down yet," he says. "It’s particularly confusing if you don’t have agendas or if you like your choices made for you. But as a cinephile, if you have an agenda, it’s a good period."
Bruce Goldstein, repertory programmer at Film Forum and co-founder of Rialto Pictures, even complains that today's climate isn’t challenging enough. "Cinephilia is not as exciting as it used to be, because so much is readily available," he says. "I think there’s always got to be something unobtainable—the thrill is in the chase!"
RIP VCR
Published at blog.cyborg5.com
This is the first in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets.
There are currently four VCRs in my home in addition to a DVR/cable box in my living room. You would think the loss of one VCR wouldn’t put a crimp in my style. After all there are still three other VCRs and the digital recorder in the cable box can record two different programs at once. The VCR in the living room we rarely use anymore because we have the DVR/cable box. The living room VCR is mostly used these days copy things off of the DVR on to tape so that I can watch them in my bedroom. The VCR in my office is used for transferring things from my computer to tape. It’s connected to the computer using a Pinnacle Studios Dazzle 150 analog video converter box. In my bedroom I watch a lot of tape in bed at night but sometimes there’s something I want to record while I’m watching so I really need two VCRs in the bedroom. It’s also nice to have two VCRs in the same room connected to each other so did you ever wonder copy something from one tape to another it is easy to do so. Also there have been times when I needed to record as many as four shows while watching a fifth one cy do really need several VCRs.
The living room, office, and one of the bedroom VCRs are all JVC which is really handy because my multifunction remote control can handle all of them using just one device on my a device remote. The other VCR in the bedroom was a Toshiba and it was probably my favorite one in the house. It seemed to handle old crinkly tapes or poorly recorded tapes better than any machine in the house. I liked the fact that every time you hit play, stop, rewind, or fast forward it would briefly display the tape counter onscreen. You did not have to hit a display button to get the tape counter to show. It was the VCR in the bedroom that I used while watching TV in bed and the JVC model was a backup.
So the other day it started making funny noises and it ate up a tape and refused to eject it. Dad tried to take apart and figure out what was wrong but it kept eating tapes and jamming the eject mechanism. So I decided to go online to BestBuy.com to pick out a new one.
They didn’t have any!
Neither did Circuit City… or H.H.Gregg… or anywhere else I looked.
I couldn’t believe it but nobody makes just plain VCRs anymore! You have to buy a DVD/VCR combination. In fact there are very few models that are just DVD/VCRs. Most of them nowadays are DVD recorders with a built-in VCR. It used to be you could get a really nice 4-head hi-fi stereo VCR for about $50. The VCR/DVD combos cost as much as $100 and the ones with DVD recorders are as much as twice that.
I think the signs are very clear that the VCRs days ar e numbered. That amazing old friend of ours the VHS VCR is going the way of BetaMax, and 8-track audio tapes… and come to think of it regular audiocassettes have pretty much disappeared as well. It’s not just good by VCR… it’s goodbye to tape in general!
This horrifying revelation has prompted me to reflect on my personal history of VCRs. In the next installments we’ll talk about my passion for recording and my first VCR. Then we will discover an even more amazing secret about VCRs and even DVD recorders that are losing one of their greatest features. Stay tuned as the mystery reveals itself!
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