This is similar to the CD v vinyl debate, but you never really hear anyone bemoan the loss of audio cassettes. Which, I think it pretty understandable, with the one significant exception: the mix-tape. Part of your point here is similar so I can appreciate that much. I also agree with the preference of actual film projection at the cinema as opposed to digital (as beautiful as it does look).

However, at home I do prefer the best quality I can get. Perhaps this is down the making up for not having a massive cinema screen or surround sound, but even going back to watching DVDs after getting used to Blu-ray is difficult.

Personally, I grew an affection for the “You wouldn’t steal a car, etc” copyright business at the start of DVDs, even creating my own ridiculous hypotheticals, but did manage to fast-forward through them (but not skip the chapter entirely). I guess I take the warning screen as a fair trade off for improved quality.

I’m often behind on the times and not the most technologically advanced guy in the world, but I am on-board with HD. It allows for true recreation and appreciation of what we were intended to see. I think of all the time and passion that goes into a Pixar film, for example, and look how beautiful they are. For me that’s a simple pleasure, so while their may be children starving in Africa, goddamn Toy Story 3 looks amazing.

Still, while I may disagree, I find your affinity for VHS to be quite charming. Thanks for passing on the link.

The latter would, occasionally, ediorially decide that the end of a film (or whatever else had been recorded) should
be several minutes earlier than the amount of available tape. (In this, the tape was utterly dictatorial, as no amount of winding it backwards and forwards, in the hope that lack of tension in the tape was the problem, would remedy it.)

If the play-head had become dirty (or, equally, for no good reason at all), there would be interference at the top of, or even across, the picture, which could last indefinitely (despite the deployment of the head-cleaner): it might have been a feature of the tape, from having been played on a machine with a damaged head, but one could really never be sure.

That apart, VHS tapes (and, before them, the Betamax cartridges) were both manufactured in such a way that you would have to go out of your way to damage the tape itself directly. Contrast that with the difficulty, as with CDs, just of keeping one’s fingers off the playing-surface, let alone the danger of dropping the disc on the carpet, when trying to put it into the player, and no wonder DVDs are prone to stick and jump (and could, if one were unlucky, render some crucial scene incapable of being viewed (reliably or even ever)).

And those errors in reading the disc do not necessarily result from the hazards of handling them at home, since a DVD that has been freshly prised off the spindle of a newly unsealed box (and I swear that one will snap in half some day at the immense amount of pressure that seems to have to be applied!) is just as capable of misbehaving when it is let loose in the player.

That almost certainly was not the case of the screening that I was last at with my ex-girlfriend, but the freezing of the action for seconds (more like tens of seconds)
at a time was threatening to distend a 90-minute film into infinity, so (unlike the rest of the audience) we decided to abandon it. (In fact, I only ever got to know her in the first place because the same length of time had been taken, in similar circumstances, in failing to screen a previous film at all, despite changing laptops and fiddling with the projector: ordinarily, during the showing of a film, there would have been no opportunity for the chance to talk that we had!)

So DVDs freeze (sometimes so that fast forward is the only option), they skip, but, worst of all, they have menus that are often designed if not to be more infuriating, with their looped music, than those of the early video-games, then just in such a way that they are.

If the fan of this format tells me that there are not menus whose operation or nesting of options is not so impenetrable that just putting a cassette in a machine and winding on or back to the bit that one wants is not obviously easier, then he or she is just lying in the cause! And a video-recorder would perform the instructed command pretty quickly (if the cat hadn’t been in the way of the signal from the remote), whereas the ‘thinking time’ that we are used to from PCs applies to a DVD player, and when we tell it to eject, thinking that it missed it the first time, it suddenly ejects and reinserts the DVD…

* Although, if there are ones for multiple countries, one can actually skip through them all but the last, I have found.

There’s something about DVDs that is clinical and outside of our control. I almost never sit down and watch movies on DVD but I couldn’t stop watching them on VHS. Don’t know whether it’s delayed nostalgia or simply that I was in a boring place but that’s what happened.

I kept forgetting to rewind them after watching as well. Oops.

The Thing in HD is a totally different film. It seems you have a problem with the progression of technology in entertainment. Blu ray is as far as I will go but it is so worth it and it’s cheap if you look in the right places. VHS has had its time and in my opinion is good for nothing but decorative purposes.

Comparing VHS with vinyl is also pointless. The crackle of a record is warm and welcoming, as if it was meant to sound that way. Films were not meant to be viewed as if the ariel is broken.