Is VHS Obsolete?

[The Doctor]

The only VHS tapes I have left are the 3 Doctor Who Trial of a Timelord tapes which live in the tin they came with.

-Ralph

[Pinwig]

I had thousands, but am now down to several boxes in my parent's loft. Slow process of digitizing material that hasn't made it to commercial DVD.

[Jim]

The last time I was anywhere near any storage stuff at my parent's they still had a few of mine; my first VHS tape, which was Death to the Daleks, a few TNG tapes (Captain's Holiday / Tin Man was my first, I think, and it was still there), Star Trek VI, DS9: Emissary and the first four or so Voyager cassettes.

The Voyager tapes had beautiful covers in comparison to the other series, but much like Voyager's beautiful title sequence that was pretty much it. I remember almost nothing about those episodes.

[Andy Turnbull]

I have a Beast Wars II vhs (currently at the Kaptains) and a GoBots - Battle of the Rock Lords and Batman Forever VHS still left from the mountains I once owned.

Andy

[primenova]

Do you want to watch Beast wars series 1 in the UK - you need a video player. We still have no dvd release apart from the 2 for series 3.

[Hero]

For the last couple of years The VHS has been hooked up to the PC mainly for capturing now and again (TV gold, toy commercials, old TMUK meets etc). Still have some old movies too.

[drmick]

Sept 15, 2011 10:52:18 GMT Philip Ayres said:

Moved in from elsewhere

Sept 15, 2011 8:56:45 GMT Nigel said:

Actually, I do have a VHS player. It's a very good machine and even plays NTSC tapes. Which leaves me with an unfortunate dilemma of whether to bid against Ken....


(Incidentally, I do not consider VHS to be obsolete nor DVD to be superior to it.)

It blatantly is in both cases.

Of the 576 lines in a standard definition UK TV picture (usually labelled as 625 line: the remaining 49 are used for things other than picture) a VHS machine records & plays 250 of them, so less than half. DVD by contrast uses all 576 lines so the picture quality is far better for a start.

You can argue about which is the more physically durable format both: there are pluses and minuses on both sides.

So VCR is then kept just as a recording format. I don't think there's anyway you can argue that a VCR is superior to a PVR (Sky+/Tivo/Freeview+) except that it's more obvious portable between machines. Even then most equipment now has some sort of export facility to allow you to move the raw files to a computer.

VCR is effectively dead. It's sole surviving function is to play back material that you have on VHS that isn't yet on DVD.

Wasn't VHS obsolete many years before 2011?

Sept 9, 2017 7:27:12 GMT primenova said:

Do you want to watch Beast wars series 1 in the UK - you need a video player. We still have no dvd release apart from the 2 for series 3.

In 2017- wasn't DVD region locking obsolete?

[Benn]

I've still got a load of VHS. Old F1 stuff, obscure comedy shows, Godzilla films, music videos... Player isn't connected to anything at the moment though.

[Hero]

Were the Godzilla films from when Channel 4 did a Friday evening Sci-Fi film slot?