[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.