Reminiscing about the old Video days.

[Johnno]

Streaming Netflix, Stan etc etc is definitely convenient, but i kinda miss those days when you could go to your local Blockbuster and rent out a Video.
If your under 18 you probably can't relate but I enjoyed it.

Looking through all those isles for a movie was a big thing for me & the kids. Used to go most Friday Nights and grab a pizza on the way home.

The staff always knew their movies and recommended the ones to watch. You always enjoyed the movie knowing you had to return it in 24/36 hours.. lol
Late fee's were a mongrel.

Kids today will never know that feeling of driving all the way there for One movie to find it's out of stock.. LOL

There were times you were just overwhelmed about which movie to watch that you ended up picking the same movie for the 10th time...lol

because of covid isolation you start to remember all those great times including the record stores.

And don't forget to rewind.

[trash]

Consider how long it too you to get your photos developed?
Wait for you roll of film to be used and then send it away to be developed and waiting a week to get it back.

[mtv]

Consider how long it too you to get your photos developed?
Wait for you roll of film to be used and then send it away to be developed and waiting a week to get it back.

Then came the Polaroid camera... you then only had to wait 90 seconds to find your photos didn't come out.

[mtv]

It was a shame VHS won the 'tape war' as Betamax was the superior format.

[shred]

It was a shame VHS won the 'tape war' as Betamax was the superior format.

Yes. I have a couple of massive late 1970s Sony betamax VCRs in my garage. Both worked the last time I powered the on - about 20 years ago. The mechanism is inherently more simple and less prone to failure. Gotta love the high tech remote controls that are about the size of a small paperback book!

[Johnno]

Yes. I have a couple of massive late 1970s Sony betamax VCRs in my garage.

Yep, Sony versus JVC back then and JVC won because of the sleekness of their models compared to the bulky Betamax..

[trash]

It was a shame VHS won the 'tape war' as Betamax was the superior format.

False Dichotomy! What about Video2000?

LOL. Were you the one always sneaking off into the XXX section of the video store.. naughty boy

Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits. (Because normal people would just rewind the tape as soon as the credits hit).


And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.
Some idiot thought it would be funny to put some equlising pulses in the vertical blanking interval and then add in a burst of ver short blacker than black false sync pulses about line 16.
A TV flywheel circuit would just ignore pulses that weren't ~64uS but a VCR cracked the shits. It was easy just to tell the epal decoder to blank anything that wasn't horizontal snyc.

Hire a video, copy it and share it with your mates for $1 a hit.

[Uncle Fester]

False Dichotomy! What about Video2000?


Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits. (Because normal people would just rewind the tape as soon as the credits hit).


And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.
Some idiot thought it would be funny to put some equlising pulses in the vertical blanking interval and then add in a burst of ver short blacker than black false sync pulses about line 16.
A TV flywheel circuit would just ignore pulses that weren't ~64uS but a VCR cracked the shits. It was easy just to tell the epal decoder to blank anything that wasn't horizontal snyc.

Hire a video, copy it and share it with your mates for $1 a hit.

Yep what I indicated in my post #7.
Later you could just buy a "stabilser" box for a few bucks. I think even Conrad sold it later officially but as a kit. I don't know how they got around the legality issues but nobody seemed to care much about that back then.

Video2000 was a bit of a disaster. I was there when it was introduced in the Funkaustellung Berlin late 70's as some great new wonder machine.
I was given one later but it never worked properly and I honestly didn't know what to do with it. Mechanically very tricky.
That old Sony portable Betamax I mentioned earlier, I think I might still have it, was built like a switch watch and never failed no matter how bad it was knocked around. It even survived the 18V when the regulator of my DIY 12V supply crapped up.

[Johnno]

Pfft... what's wrong with you old satellite pirates? Did none of you hire a video and then on the last 20 seconds record that snippit of porn before rewinding the tape and sending it back to the video shop? That shit never got old. You'd always wait until the end of the tape to see how many other people were doing it after the credits.

Hehe... So that was you ? I was too busy dating a BIG M Girl back then.. Do you remember them ? I liked the Egg Flip Big M.

[Mr 672A]

And then there was macrovision. Yeah that shit was fun to break. Repurposed my old EPAL decoder after it had already been modified for vidiplex and galaxy MDS and later optus cable tv.

They were the good days when on the Weekend Channel 9 would run movies from there uplink on the west coast of the US and around 4 to 5 pm they will switch to vidiplex and change to NBC CBS feeds with Willard Scott. Yes had a Epal decoder for Ch 7 + the Vidiplex fixer integrating in my Ecostar 8000. They were the hard days.

[Johnno]

Hehe..arrh, yes the old photo development days.. I was never good at taken photo's, always missing half the scene that I wanted to snap. but you couldn't tell till they were developed and paid for. lol

[alpha0ne]

Looking through all those web page torrent listings for a movie was a big thing for me & the kids. Used to go most Friday Nights and grab a pizza on the way home.

Fixed that for you M8...............as it is in todays family movie night

[Johnno]

Fixed that for you M8...............as it is in todays family movie night

LOL. Were you the one always sneaking off into the XXX section of the video store.. naughty boy

[enf]

Late fees...bum tapes...unstable VHS machines with cord remotes (remember them?)...

Still, they were a godsend for shift workers like me....actually being able to WATCH something after midnight.

[Uncle Fester]

VHS good riddance.

PITA to fix because back then everybody smoked and that stuffed up all the rubber rollers and mechanics that were hard to replace.
Even though I smoked myself some machines were so disgusting with the tar everywhere and the display completely fogged up.
I don't know why amps and TVs didn't attract the smokers gunk that much as VHS machines.

There was a time very early on when I went to video rentals but recording tapes and building boxes to bypass the copy block signals was more my thing.

So happy when SAT TV became available late 80's in Europe. This was analog although the decrypting was digitally done so that was actually my first valuable experience using MCUs for the purpose to watch the British Sky network and some awesome Scandinavian channels that showed English/US shows and films in original audio. Of course for X-rated, English audio was irrelevant.
This went on all the way through the 90's until I went back to rentals when the first DVDs came out.
Then the copy craze continued

[enf]

VHS good riddance.

PITA to fix because back then everybody smoked and that stuffed up all the rubber rollers and mechanics that were hard to replace.
Even though I smoked myself some machines were so disgusting with the tar everywhere and the display completely fogged up.
I don't know why amps and TVs didn't attract the smokers gunk that much as VHS machines.

There was a time very early on when I went to video rentals but recording tapes and building boxes to bypass the copy block signals was more my thing.

So happy when SAT TV became available late 80's in Europe. This was analog although the decrypting was digitally done so that was actually my first valuable experience using MCUs for the purpose to watch the British Sky network and some awesome Scandinavian channels that showed English/US shows and films in original audio. Of course for X-rated, English audio was irrelevant.
This went on all the way through the 90's until I went back to rentals when the first DVDs came out.
Then the copy craze continued

Pretty much the same Fester.....I remember the first primitive dubbing kit I had for VHS transfer......what a joke...

[mtv]

I don't know why amps and TVs didn't attract the smokers gunk that much as VHS machines.

Probably due to the handling of grubby cassettes being inserted frequently.

Not to mention bits of toast and anything else little kids would put in the 'letter box'.

[Johnno]

Definitely Betamax were a superior format than VHS.. The power of marketing back then.

[shred]

Used to go most Friday Nights and grab a pizza on the way home.:

I wonder how much the demise of the video shop has hurt the takeaway pizza businesses?

I remember getting a popular DVD home, only to find that someone had scratched it and it wouldn’t play. Veerry annoying.

I also recall an aquaintance carefully cutting the seals on a couple of rented videos and swapping the tape reels between a hard core porno and a kids movie, then returning them. It seemed funny at age 19, but probably caused someone much distress.

[Johnno]

I wonder how much the demise of the video shop has hurt the takeaway pizza businesses?

I don't really think that much at all, How many Kids under 30 know how to cook a hearty meal.. Very little I reckon.. They all buy takeaway.
A young couple I know just spent $65 on breakfast using uber delivery. No wonder they're always broke. LOL The last time I had pizza was (hang 5 let me ask the missus) January 2020.