When did VHS tapes become obsolete?

I don't know, but I still own a ton of VHS tapes.

i think it was a little later, like 2006

I know VHS was still dominant in 2000 when I moved to LA. But it was a pretty quick transition. Here's a 2005 article about Wal-Mart's decision to stop carrying VHS and it mentions Best Buy and Circuit City had already abandoned the format "a while back."

I think the big rental chains like Hollywood and Blockbuster continued to stock VHS, at least for new releases, a bit longer.

It always cracks me up when I see people trying to sell VHS tapes for $ 1 at yard sales or flea markets.

Uh, I have boxes of my own I haven't thrown out yet ......no thanks.

My elderly parents still have a VHS player and are comfortable with it. Sometimes I'll go to a big thrift store and just fill a basket with tapes. They're usually 50 cents or 3 for $1, and when they've watched one they can either throw it out, give it to friends, or deposit it back in the thrift store bins.

Well...I have Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) on VHS and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) on DVD...

I prefer VHS tape to DVR.

It's funny to think that movies prominently featuring VHS tapes like "The Ring" have to now totally be rewritten to feature some new tech.

i still own a vhs player and some vhs tapes. going to throw them out eventually.

i prefer dvd.

DVD? We're in the Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D era.

aren't we in the download era now r9?

No, r9. We have the option to dl, but when it comes to an actual physical purchase, Blu-ray is it.

There's stuff they put on VHS that will never be put on DVD.

And TV shows I taped that are priceless. So I've kept my two VCRs.

r12, why not convert them and burn them onto a disc? It's easy

Is anyone else a fan of the Found Footage Festival? It's two guys who travel the country with weird clips from VHS tapes -- commercials, instructional tapes, exercise tapes, public access TV, etc. It's hilarious.

Here's a commercial for Linda Evans' "Rejuvenique" mask, which looks like a horror film prop.

I'll never convert my old VHS tapes to discs. It takes something away from the nostalgia factor of it. I've been taping shows since the '80s, and I'm attatched to those tapes. Besides, DVDs can act wonky, and what if they get scratched or I lose one? I have a DVD/VCR combo and I love it.

I still have a Betamax and Beta tapes!

I destroyed all my VHS (almost 950 tapes) in 2003 and I don't miss them a bit. DVD/Blu-ray doesn't take up as much space.

When you say destroy, do you mean you had them crushed, or you just through them out?

[quote]I'll never convert my old VHS tapes to discs.

Not a good idea. I have old tapes I wish I would've converted because the tapes was so old that it disintegrate the ribbon over the years and when I tried playing them, the ribbon was so thin and worn out it broke in the VCR.

*Threw* them out.

I've held onto one Beta and one VHS machine because of the material I've taped over the years. I've recently been transferring a lot of shows to DVD and hoping the VCRs last long enough to complete the job.

It's funny how attitudes change. A coworker said he tried donating his VHS tapes to a homeless shelter. "Even homeless people don't want them," he said. "I offered to include the machine so they could play them. They still didn't want them."

Blu-ray video looks like shit, I'll stick with DVD. Fewer interactive options, but the movies look better.

R19, I have tapes that date back to 1989 and they still play well. They're a little fuzzy, but...

On March 14, 2006.

That was when A History of Violence became the last film released on VHS.

We had a great video store which was wall to wall cult and indie films all on VHS. The video boxes were on display and you would detach a little Velcro chip and hand it to the movie nerd behind the counter where they actually kept the tapes. They must have invested a fortune in them and I wonder what happened to them all. Much of that stuff will never be released again. They did transition to buying stuff on DVD around 2000 or so and finally succumbed to Netfilx about five years ago. I still miss the experience of browsing there for something to watch on a weekend night. I haven't had a VHS player hooked up for almost a decade now.

[quote]I prefer VHS tape to DVR.

You sound like a fucking idiot.

I remember seeing first DVDs and DVD players sometime around 1998 or so. At the time, hardly any people I knew had one and the price of players was prohibitively high. I think it was around 2001 when DVDs started becoming increasingly popular and I used to watch them on my laptop's DVD drive before I bought my first player shortly afterwards.

I'd love to have VHS tapes of TV shows with the commercials on them. I miss old tv commercials.

I love my Laser Disc player.

VHS?! DVD?!

I'm still using Super-8.

I remember paying $800 for a VCR and that was considered cheap back in the day!

Question: How on earth are video stores still around in this day and age? Yes, they rent out DVD's, but with Netflix and Redbox, I just don't get how they stay in business.

[quote]I love my Laser Disc player.

Those were cool, I thought the sound was great.

[R32] They stay in business my making more money than they spend, by serving as a front for money laundering, or by being owned by people who don't mind losing money.

Just like any other business.

[quote]Question: How on earth are video stores still around in this day and age? Yes, they rent out DVD's, but with Netflix and Redbox, I just don't get how they stay in business.

There are still some people who don't want to stream movies and who want to watch something besides the new releases available at Redbox. I don't imagine there are enough of those people to keep the rental places going for long but there may always be a rental market for rare, obscure, cult and foreign titles that aren't readily available to stream or download.

Oh god, I miss VHS tapes so much. It was funny how you had to pay a small fine if you returned the tape unrewinded to the video store. I know you can download any movie you want now from torrent sites in a matter of minutes but I still preferred the trips to the video rental shops. Those were the days!

Be kind. Rewind.

Use my dual deck VCR everyday. No no pay for Tivo or cable company DVR.

I went from VHS directly to downloads as dvd burners and blank dvd-rs were crazy expensive. I bought external hard drives instead... It was in 2001. The very year ADSL suddenly became cheap. Something like 20€ for unlimited 512k. I still remember opening my modem with rabid anticipation. Internet was a true revolution.

To break from the pattern of highly personal narrative about the many thousands of double-shelved and very, very rare (and vital) Benson & Hedges smoke-yellowed VHS tapes that line the walls of a studio apartment that I share with Mother...

1977 first VHS players widely introduced in North America

1997 first DVDs widely introduced

2000 general realization of inevitability of VHS being supplanted by DVD format

2003 DVD rentals overtake VHS rental

2005 Blockbuster stops renting VHS tapes

2006 last major theatrical release in VHS (New Line Cinema's "A History of Violence")

[Partly sourced for article at link]

I opened the cassettes and took the reels of tape out and then burned the tape of all of my homemade videos. Things like family reunions, porn and especially my homemade porn. Everything else went in the garbage can.

That's a LOT of work for so many tapes!

R41 Apparently they don't have strict air quality laws in your area.

Have a few VHS movies that have never come out on DVD including LOOKING FOR MR.GOODBAR. I'll hold onto that until it gets a proper (if ever) release on DVD. I still have a combo Sony VHS?DVD player and blu ray player in the den. And a Go dual deck VHS which I haven't used in years but don't want to throw it out just yet.

[all posts by tedious, racist idiot removed.]

Streaming is so...blah. I prefer buying DVDs and the occasional VHS tape if the movie I want isn't on disc.

R44 here.I have Netflix streaming with Google Fiber TV and the selection is not nearly as good as what Netflix offers with their DVD rentals.

[quote]I remember seeing first DVDs and DVD players sometime around 1998 or so. At the time, hardly any people I knew had one and the price of players was prohibitively high.

I bought my first DVD player in 1999, and paid around $200 for it. Within a year or two, suddenly everyone I knew had a DVD player, too.

I'm in rural Alabama. It smells like honeysuckle most of the year (R43)

I love my VHS tapes.

I have watched movies on Netflix streaming and on Amazon prime and the picture quality isn't as good as Blu-ray or even DVD. Their HD content has the picture quality of DVD and their Standard definition content as the picture quality of the VHS. If they improve their picture quality then I might consider using them. Until then I'll stick with Blu-ray and DVD.

I love coming across old soap operas from the eighties.

The hair was the best at that time. The bigger the better.

r32 Some independent films and many foreign films are hard to come by if you rely on net-flicks or red-box.

I still have my VHS and lots of tapes including many porn. A few years ago I gave someone like 100 porn video tapes that I had. I still have like 40 more but because there's free porn online, I haven't looked at them in years. I actually was going through some this past weekend to throw away. Anyone want them?

2006/2007

I used to love going to Erol's video store and renting movies.

I found one of those old Erol's bags in my garage. And I haven't lived in the area since 1987!

Netflix is going the way of Blockbuster.

Everyone I know uses the on demand video service from their cable providers. And if not, they're with Redbox.

Plus you pretty much go into any store nowadays and pick up bare bones copies of recent movies. Or find classic movies for extremely cheap prices.

[quote]Netflix is going the way of Blockbuster.

Not yet. Netflix may not be around forever, but they're nowhere near shutting down.

[quote]Everyone I know uses the on demand video service from their cable providers. And if not, they're with Redbox.

What a pointless, meaningless anecdote.

The bad thing about Redbox is you only have newer movies. But I would prefer paying Redbox $1.00 or so rather than the overcharging that Comcast does.

LOL, I just bought two VCR players at Goodwill last weekend.

"Netflix may not be around forever, but they're nowhere near shutting down."

What a trite and poorly written example of a rebuttal.

Damn, R41, your family reunion sound totally cray-cray!

Can you buy blank tapes anymore?

[all posts by tedious, racist idiot removed.]

R65 needs to be seen as being cool by a bunch of anonymous posters on a message board.

What happened? The blow up doll deflate?

[quote]Erol's

My first video store membership was with Erol's and my 3 cousins all got their start in their successful IT careers working for Erol's call center (they were also an ISP) HQ in NoVa. I remember when the brash upstart Blockbuster bought the video stores out in 1991 or so.

The thing with Redbox is it doesn't interest me very much since I'm a movie fan who likes old or offbeat stuff. I'm not going to find that there. I like finding out about an old actor or actress and then seeing what I can of their work. Usually they will have 50 credits and maybe 2 are on Netflix. They don't replace their older DVD's that have become lost and only stream but a fragment of what they could.

Streamed a few movies over the weekend with Netflix using my roku. The picture kept getting blurry every three or four minutes. It drove me insane. My internet speed was fine as I tested it using my smartphone. My computer connection was fine, so I'm inclined to believe that streaming just plain sucks and I should stick to DVD's

[quote]Can you buy blank tapes anymore?

I think I still see them in the dollar store sometimes.

I don't have a problem streaming movies or watching bad uploads. I guess 'cause as a kid, my parents forbade anything electronic. We did have an ancient TV with rabbit ears (this was the '90s) but no cable so we only got reception, i.e. network channels and PBS. We could get Fox and the WB if we fiddled with the antennae, but even then it was fuzzy. So when our parents were out, my sibs and I really had to strain to watch MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, THE SIMPSONS, BUFFY, DAWSON'S CREEK, etc. That's why I think it doesn't bother me if the picture is not crystal clear. HOwever, I have a friend who's a "picture snob" and won't watch Netflix downloads or any of those piracy sites.

[quote]Can you buy blank tapes anymore?

Of course. Mostly in WalMarts, dollar stores and drug stores. I just went cold turkey on buying them, and now only record my programs on DVDs.

i would rather have all VHS tapes then DVDS. three quarters of my collection is VHS.

I would say 2001/2002 was when the big switchover to DVD happened. And it did happen fast.

I'm still hanging onto my only VCR (a TV combi unit) because I've got family home videos and I haven't gotten around to buying a cable to connect a VCR to a computer and figuring out what program to use to copy them to hard disc.

R41 So you were equally concerned that no one else ever see your family reunion videos as well as your homemade porn?

Im almost done getting rid of DVDs.

[quote]We're in the Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D era.

Maybe you are, but the rest of us are in the streaming/download era.

We still have not one but two VCRs to watch our many VHS tapes that we acquired through the years. We're weird, but we enjoy watching, say, a movie taped off of TNT in the early or mid-'90s with all the wacky commercials. Anybody else here have the Joan Crawford "Bad Movies We Love" marathon on tape? Margulies and Rebello hosted. Not something that will ever make its way to DVD, BluRay, or streaming...ephemera that would be lost to the ages if not for VHS.

That said, I find it hard to believe there are people feeling nostalgic for the "glory days" of Blockbuster. $4 a night to rent a VHS tape, ridiculous late fees, never having the movie you want, waiting in line for 30 minutes on a Friday or Saturday night to check out? Good riddance.

Who had a non-chain local video store? Did anyone ever know any place that was like Video Archives? (where Quentin Tarantino worked before he made Reservoir Dogs)

[quote]aren't we in the download era now [R9]?

You still can't get DTS-HD surround sound on Digital download. Or, the extras. Blu-Ray is still the best way to view movies!

Another thing that became obsolete-floppy disks and floppy disk drives. Embarrassingly, I used a usb floppy disk drive until the end of 2006. That was more trouble than it was worth. Thank god for flash drives.

[quote]You still can't get DTS-HD surround sound on Digital download. Or, the extras. Blu-Ray is still the best way to view movies!

True. I have a big-screen HD TV and Dolby Digital 7.1 set up.

But I still watch movies/tv mostly on my laptop or iPad.

CD players are fast going the way of the Dodo as well. Many new vehicles no longer offer them as standard equipment it seems.

[quote]I'd love to have VHS tapes of TV shows with the commercials on them. I miss old tv commercials.

They're all over youtube, hon.

"We'll never convert our old VHS tapes to discs!" vow residents of Shady Pines Assisted Living Community.

Holy shit you people are old!

I recently paid to have all my family home movies transferred from VHS to cd. They previously were transferred from 36mm (I think) to VHS. It cost over $2000, phew!

...and of course we don't watch them, but once.

We did have audio files from the late 1950s that were pretty cool. Nice hearing my parent's voices again.

I use my Dual Deck VCR everyday. Why pay for Tivo or DVR?

To each his own. I find it sad to visit someone's home, especially a hookup, and see some OCD maintained and loved collection of DVDs or CDs. VHS is slit the wrist depressing. I suppose this is a classist statement. God bless if you love your collection. I suppose good collections are: VHS collections of things someone personally taped VHS collections of rare and cult, especially if never on DVD

Even Vinyl collections give me limp dick. OK some old geezer with a priceless vinyl collection, and a very fine HIFI, OK. Or a DJ. Otherwise, rip those albums lossless, and SELL THE VINYL.

[quote]I find it sad to visit someone's home, especially a hookup, and see some OCD maintained and loved collection of DVDs or CDs.

Define "OCD maintained". Does having them in alphabetical order count?

You can get Dolby Digital Plus on a Roku player when streaming Netflix or Vudu.

[quote]Holy shit you people are old!

So what? I have a huge collection of VHS tapes that I won't get rid of. They still play pretty good. Better than Netflix, in MHO.

I grab vcrs when I can from family members who are throwing them out or whatever. Tapes and vcrs both degrade and then the tapes get stuck or eaten. I have a huge collection of tapes. I've converted some but I don't have the time to do all of them. I have to admit I don't throw out the tapes afterwards because what if the DVD gets fucked up or the digital file gets wiped.

The only thing I think most people can't save things that aired on TV anymore. Dvr is so ephemeral unless it's a popular show that gets torrented. Like my little cousin was on the news and her mom dvred it but couldn't make a tape to send grandma. I have a Dvr with hard drive and DVD Burner but most people don't. We finally got the cable company dvr because we were forced into it and it sucks ass. Fast forwarding the cable dvr is even less precise than the vcr. So I still record on my hard drive dvr which has better functions like commercial skip and ability to bookmark or split and edit out commercials. And no monthly fee.

Alphebetical order is fine. Meticulous hand-printed labels in coordinated cases. No. Well I had a hot fuck buddy once with a huge collection of OCD maintained VHS war documentaries. His apartment was spotless. He likes drill sergeant - private - boot camp role play.

[quote]Meticulous hand-printed labels in coordinated cases. No.

So what would an OCD maintained DVD collection look like?

IA with 2006. I was still able to buy them at Costco in 2004 and early 2005. They still sold VCRs then too. I wish I had stocked up on those. I never dreamed they'd become totally obsolete. I have thousands of VHS tapes and some Beta's that my dad left me like all the episodes of soap and Dark Shadows that he got on the SciFi channel around 1993, every episode of every ABC soap going back to 1978, almost every nighttime show on all channels too and a great bunch of stuff from HBO and that Liza and Goldie special so much. He used to tape anything I asked him too and what he liked too. I think there are baseball World Series and Super bowls tons of TV movies from back when they were good and heaven knows what else.

I couldn't live long enough to watch it all and even if I could I don't have any more working VCR. I don't even think anyone repairs them anymore. Besides, I remember back when all there was were VCRs that the repaired ones never lasted. My dad went to dozens of different repair places and they all sucked, that or VCRs just don't repair well.

Does anyone remember how excited they were when the first Blockbuster came to their town and within a year they were everywhere like cockroaches?

Who would have dreamed back in the late 80s or early 90s that such a huge business would eventually go kaput. They put all the small video rental places out of business like Walmart did to ma and pa stores. I wonder if the day will come when someone puts Walmart out of business?

I'm usually the last to adopt new tech, and I got my first DVD player in 2005, so I would estimate 2003.

"1977 first VHS players widely introduced in North America"

I got my Betamax in 1976.

Does Blockbuster still rent VHS movies? Remember when they had a choice of both?