Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Were VHS Releases Mastered?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1835 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
|
|||||||
Early VCRs could only be programmed with (unintuitive) front-panel controls. Basically every Betamax deck my family owned. When we finally went VHS, it was a Sony model with on-screen display that was programmable with the remote control. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5132 |
|
|||||||
Ah, yes; I remember that: It was my 1st -- or 2nd -- exposure to technology that only allowed you to do the most with the remote control. I considered it quite bizarre. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9924 Location: Virginia |
|
|||||||
|
Our first VHS player (a Hitachi bought in 1983) was programmed with small buttons on the face and a half inch by three inch display.
The hard part was programming the 20 channels it would recognize for recording. There was a door on top with 20 little thumb wheels. Each was a TV tuner. You had to have the TV on and set to the channel you were tuning. You then turned the little wheel until the channel you wanted showed up. If you wanted to record a channel you hadn't pre-set you had to reset one of the existing channels. It was limited as to how high numbered were the channels you could use. On the other hand, it was built like a watch. It lasted for ten years with only occasional professional cleaning and roller replacement. It weighed about five times any subsequent player we bought. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
|
|||||||
They ended with a screeching crash in '96, the day Tenchi and Ghost in the Shell came out on that new "DVD" thing, and you only bought one (expensive) disk and flipped between dub and sub with the flick of a button. Soon there was no more need to take fans' wallets hostage in accusing companies of "pandering" to "idiot" dub fans by making their dub VHS's cheaper or more mainstream, or calling sub fans "snobs" and saying that reading your dialogue was "too hard to concentrate on". Oh, and you got the whole OVA series in one box, without having to make shelf room for six tapes.
I used to program everyone ELSE'S VCR when I visited friends and family. To this day, the sweeping don't-understand-technology "My VCR still flashes 12:00" joke, that was the social default of its day, still triggers my teeth on edge like cops/donut-shop jokes.
I remember when TV Guide used to publish those eight-digit VCRPlus number codes in their listings, that would automatically translate into the proper running start/stop times. My old VCR still didn't have one, so I had to keep looking around Best Buy for one of those remote-like devices that beamed the info to a set-top box, and they were disappearing rapidly as more units had the VCRPlus circuits built in. For that matter, I remember when TV Guide used to publish TV listings. 
Losing that was the first canary-in-the-coalmine harbinger of the Death of Television. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
GVman
 Posts: 730 |
|
|||||||
|
Wait, wait, wait, you could set VCRs to record at set times!?!?!?!? I was just eight when the '90s ended, but I spent the better part of those years assing around, recording junk off of TV. You mean there was a way to do it without having to manually turn the TV to the right channel at the right time and punch record each time!? I don't know whether to blame myself or my parents for this...
TV Guide doesn't publish TV listings any more? What do they even do now? I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I just assumed they'd cease publication when they quit doing their raison d'etre. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9924 Location: Virginia |
|
|||||||
You are kidding about the VCRs aren't you? We bought our first VCR in 1983 and it could be programmed to record at any time unattended. In fact that is why we bought it. My wife liked to watch horror movies that only came on at 2am. TV Guide still provides TV listings tailored to the local area. They don't provide daytime listings and don't cover some of the odder cable channels like Chiller. The cable company's on screen program guide is more reliable for that. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
GVman
Posts: 730 |
|
|||||||
|
I'm not. I'm still flabbergasted. All those extra hours of sleep I could've had as a child...
Ah. I knew TV Guide still had to carry some form of TV listings. No surprise on the onscreen guide being more reliable. though I do find their decision to carry only the non-daytime listings for the local channels a bit odd. I remember using it to figure out when Digimon and like was coming on the local access channels before satellite providers started integrating those. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
|
|||||||
I remember using an old bookshelf stereo, which I still own, to record songs from the radio. To do that I had to tune the radio to the correct station, wait for the song that I wanted, then press the "Record" button. That was a radio with an audio tape recorder built in. It is possible that you had a television with a video tape recorder built in that worked the same way. I never saw one like that myself, but I can believe that they were made. Every VCR that I owned was a separate unit that had its own tuner and a timer. I programmed the channel, date and time and set it for automatic recording. Some were even easier than that, with a four digit code that was entered for recording specific shows. Ahh, the good old days. 
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
|
|||||||
I blame you both. Engineers' creed: " when all else fails, read the instructions".
Last edited by Mohawk52 on Sat Jan 02, 2016 10:08 am; edited 1 time in total |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group