Viedotape

Set a deadline. That should be the first rule of blogging. Post things more than once every 60 days. Of course that’s tough when you have paying gigs that require your attention, but as I pointed out in the first installment of this blog, this is where those great rare cuts and b-sides will be found. With that in mind Can I Have a Say? becomes a weekly effort starting now. I actually have lost of topics to cover, but the one I have the most energy for at the moment is, perhaps oddly, videotape.

Yes, videotape. I still use it---a lot. We rarely watch anything when it’s actually broadcast, except for sports. We do have a DVR, or digital video recorder, from our cable company, as well as a recordable DVD player. Yet the three VCRs do the bulk of the recording around here.

The DVR is nice because it records in High Definition (HD), which is great for time shifting a show like Survivor. I have it configured to run upstairs to the master bedroom, but through a quirk that I have yet to resolve, the downstairs TV must be on in order for the signal to go upstairs. It’s weird! It also consumes a lot of power having the HDTV on, w whopping 300 watts. Ouch!

The DVD-R is a spottier, and much more finicky beast. Nine times out of ten it works, but every so often the disc won’t finalize properly, meaning the disc cannot be watched in other DVD players. The discs themselves are also somewhat delicate. I think we all stopped believing the jive about digital discs, audio and video, being “indestructible” years ago. Also, you can’t re-use DVD-R and quite frankly I don’t trust the rewriteable DVDs.

Which brings us back to our old friend videotape. You can record over and over on it. Take it anywhere, and it stays cued up. It does wear out eventually, it’s kind of bulky and it’s not great for archiving, but then I’m not sure how good DVD-R is for the latter at this point. A lot of things I dumped form VHS to DVD-R freeze up when played back.

It just seems that we gave up on videotape a bit too soon. In the rush to get us to re-buy all of our VHS movies and TV shows on DVD we were left in a bit of a technology gap. Of course, that was likely seen as an advantage by studios looking to thwart piracy, as well as home-use copying.

The integration of computers may finally solve a lot of this. Being able to dump shows on to a zip drive and taking that to another room, or over to a friend’s house is a wonderful solution.

While that ramps up, the VCR slowly drifts away. You can buy VCR/DVD combos, presumably for folks who have not, or cannot convert parts of their libraries to DVD. The problem is, many of these don’t have tuners, so taping broadcasts is impossible.

Hopefully our old VCRs will hang on until the technology gap is easily and completely filled.