This reminds me of Nina making magnetic tape at home
https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/111275088385639559This is wild:
One problem: sticky shed syndrome. Instead of spooling smoothly off the reel, some poorly preserved tape adheres to the layer below it. “If you just play the tape, you start ripping oxide off it, which erases the tape in the most heinous way possible,” Ackerman explained. The solution is remarkably low-tech: baking. Using special laboratory ovens that are capable of holding a constant steady temperature, Ackerman bakes VHS tapes at 125 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit for up to five days. “If you can bake the tape at a particular temperature for a particular amount of time, you can temporarily re-cure the material for long enough to get a good preservation transfer,” she said. It’s a high-stakes gamble: There might only be one chance to read the tape before it’s too degraded to try again.
Time hasn’t been kind to VHS, because VHS sucked as a format. It had so many flaws, I’m not even gonna bother to list them because anyone who was ever reliant on that format is already having PTSD flashbacks while they’re reading this sentence. We only used it because it was the best thing available at the time (other than BetaMax, of course, but the licensing fees that Sony demanded for it killed that format before it really got anywhere, and LaserDisk was absurdly expensive, and very cumbersome to handle). The instant a better format came along, we moved along with it.
So hyperbolic.
VHS was great, for its time. You can record over it again and again, like floppies. Crucially, they were cheap.
The biggest issue was your player. Shitty players liked to eat tapes.
That rewind noise then that sudden stop meant it was movie time! 🍿
No PTSD here. Just good memories.
VHS stood for nearly 30 years before it was credibly replaced. Just because something was eventually replaced doesn’t mean it was bad. It was an awesome format because it was affordable. You could have always mortgaged a home and purchased a professional deck.
There were plenty of other formats that came and went during VHS. Many took away consumers control of content. Only when flash cards came commonplace was the VHS and the ability to make mix and match your own media replicated.
You could deck to deck make your own tapes if you wanted and edit with scissors and tape.
It was good for its time, but we need to be careful not to confuse that as an absolute statement rather than a relative one. By modern standards VHS is garbage with many significant problems, it’s just at its time everything else was worse. There were certainly many aspects of VHS that were good some even revolutionary, but it also had many significant flaws.
By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won’t play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.
The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh… and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)
It had the same benefit that cassette tapes did: It was trivially easy to record things from live TV to watch later, or to copy VHS tapes you rented. My parents were not wealthy by any stretch when I was a kid, but we did have a dual-tape VHS player for that express purpose.
