[larvaetron]

> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.

I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.

[alnwlsn]

Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart the broken one - I recall taking apart around a dozen, but some of those were already broken and found in the trash.

Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.

[grishka]

The previous owners of my apartment left a VCR behind. I think it's from the mid-90s, but I'm not sure. It didn't work very reliably, taking time to turn on and sometimes shutting off when e.g. spinning up the video head. But my hands were itching to fix something, so, after all these years of putting it off, I replaced the capacitors in the power supply section, and now it works about 98% of the time. The remaining 2% is the mechanism sometimes locking up when switching between playing and rewinding. Still proud of myself, heh.

My own impressions after taking it completely apart (you have to, to get the main board out) and putting it back together, is that the engineers who made it definitely did so with repairability in mind (the service manual is very detailed and way above my level of understanding of electronics), but it was also made to a price point. A high one admittedly, but it's still not nearly "no expense spared" level of robustness.

https://mastodon.social/@grishka/114564170158500297

[nicolaslem]

I vividly remember the day when at age 10 my grandfather let me disassemble a broken VCR. It is the day I learned to treat electronics with large capacitors with respect.

[tiagod]

My lesson was a disposable film camera... The flash cap gave quite a jolt

[Lio]

I had this “great” idea to build a stun gun out of an old camera flashgun as a young teen.

Got jolted across the room and decided to quietly give up the idea, luckily before anything serious happened.

[wkat4242]

Not a bad idea though. And a stun gun is more to use on bad people that deserve it anyway :) unless it's your kink

[TheAmazingRace]

All of our VCRs lasted a very long time. My parents had a Toshiba VCR from the late 1980s as well as a Sony Hi-Fi model VCR from 1995, both of which lasted for years and years, even in spite of damage and neglect from use (and misuse) by young children.

[seabass-labrax]

That is unfortunately my experience. My household between ~2005 and ~2015 acquired a VCR every year or so, keeping pace with the rate at which they would pack up. These were second-hand machines at the end of their life, so although I wouldn't say we "didn't care" when disposing of them, it was with a sense of resignation as we knew that repairing them was beyond our collective skill and equipment.

At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.

[hakfoo]

My father recorded the news every night so he could watch it when he got home from work, so we had a VCR pretty close to the end of NTSC broadcasting.

I can recall at one point the last generation of rubbish units-- I think they were all basically the same basic Funai model with different badges by then Funai-- I had to open the lid and bend back some metal piece that was preventing operation, because they were so flimsy.

[PaulHoule]

Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.

[ahartmetz]

Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics) are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would be to try to get the best picture quality possible by throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction + compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the better.

We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8)

Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).

[aspenmayer]

Check out Domesday Duplicator, LD-decode, and VHS-decode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU

https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator

https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

https://www.domesday86.com/

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

[skeeter2020]

why not DVD, wtih hardware & movies that are just as cheap and better in almost every way?

[PaulHoule]

On some level I don't see them as obsolete.

But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV, Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which version of Superman II I wanted to keep!)

Lately it seems like the market for used Blu-Ray players has been flooded with awful Sony units which take more than 30 seconds to boot even if all you want to do is eject a disk. I donated one of those and my NVIDIA Shield and got a used PS4 because even if the boot time is way out of the "consumer electronics" range at least it is a freakin' game console and unlike the Shield I can leave the controller plugged in and expect it to be charged when I want to use it... And the Plex client is great.

[ethagnawl]

Oh, you're spot on about the slow boot times on Blu-Ray players. Also, the copyright notices and previews you're forced to sit through are unbearable. The entire experience is just awful.

In comparison, my kids and I recently watched Jurassic Park on Laserdisc and I was floored by how quickly we were into the movie itself -- it was a handful of seconds.

Also, unrelated, I think we may have worked together a few years ago at a ... "quiet" ad/interactive agency. :)

[PaulHoule]

Nah, I never worked in advertising. For someone with an unusual name I share it with a number of colorful characters such as: another person who wrote papers on semiclassical mechanics, a bodybuilder from Toronto, a neurosurgeon with a hole in his head, and a motorcycle assassin from Quebec who tried turning Montreal into Belfast in the 1980s.

[ethagnawl]

I think this is plausible as we got into the late 90s and they became cheap enough to not warrant repairs. Prior to that, though, it definitely was not the case. I had a neighbor who made quite a comfortable living repairing VCRs in the 80s and early 90s. I also saw the web for the first time in his shop in 93/94.

[linsomniac]

In the range of 1984-1992 ISTR my family went through around 4 VCRs, ISTR a Sharp, a Toshiba, and a couple of Sonys. I was particularly annoyed with one of the Sony failures because it was a fairly high end unit and it died with a particularly hard to find extended cut of Dune in it.

[Spooky23]

I’m you were a heavy user it wasn’t uncommon. I bought one in 2000 for $30. The thing had to be garbage at that price point.

[ahartmetz]

Yeah, my family didn't even have one and I wasn't too sad about it, but what I remember from people who had them is that - whether it was an early expensive one or a late cheap one - they lasted long, like 5 to 10+ years.

[dylan604]

I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the kid's DVD player could be replace at will.

Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.

[mattl]

Yeah, any VCR purchased in the early 90s was still doing just fine when the late 90s and DVD players rolled around.

But I’ve never heard of a “VHS player” —- always a VCR or a VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.

[cush]

It's all survivorship bias. Of course the top-of-the-line built-like-a-tank tech from 50 years ago still works. It doesn't mean the good enough tech from 50 years ago didn't last 20+ years

[protocolture]

My grandparents had the same 3 VHS units in their house until they moved to digital tv.

We only ever replaced ours once.

A mate of mine had 4 in a stack for the purpose of duplicating and distributing VHS tapes illegally. I think 1 of them stopped working.

Another mate had one that wouldnt rewind faster than playback speed. But they just returned the tapes in dickhead mode rather than paying for a new VCR.

[outofpaper]

Same. It's either that the author had quiet a different life than us or they wrote it using an LLM