This article originally appeared onDen of Geek UK.
If youre reading this, you probably have some interest in home video, in all its forms.
If you were born after the mid-80s, you probably cant remember a timebeforevideo recorders.
Oh yes, youd certainly feel like an aficionado of cinema when you obtained a widescreen edition.
Innerspacewas one of the first home releases to be offered in widescreen format in the UK.
Hence the dilemma on that format, widescreen was a compromise.
Most early video player machines offered a manual tracking control.
Picture a bit fuzzy?
It was always worth having a fiddle with the tracking, a precise adjustment affecting the head position.
At this point, youd feel like Scotty fromStar Trekclimbing into a Jeffries Tube to save the Enterprise.
Veterans of video recording had a finely-honed instinct for when the adverts were about to crop up.
Youd just have to wait.
Same goes if you heard the phone ringing in the next room.
Picture this if you will you leave the room for some reason while youre taping.
You return a minute later and realise that, shock horror, the adverts have started.
What do you do?
You could pause now, but then youd have thirty seconds of adverts, causing much confusion later on.
Once youd hit the stop button you were committed.
Then youd press rewind, estimating the amount of time since the adverts started.
Hit play, and with luck, youd see a bit of the program just before the adverts.
Eating up precious seconds, youd have to sit, in agony, waiting for the break to begin.
However, lets say you timed things wrong do you press play again and try rewinding again?
Eventually, youd muddle through, find the start of the adverts and then hit stop.
At this point youd realise that youd stopped breathing.
For some acts of heroism, a person doesnt get any medals.
Knowing what youd done, and why, was enough.
Favourite screw ups when cutting out the adverts?
Pressing pause and not starting the machine up again afterwards was a good one.
Same goes for a TV series.
So, it might be worth going on with recording if youd only lost five minutes from the middle.
The truth is, DVD box sets of an entire series can be good value these days.
The alternative was to tape an entire series yourself.
One mistake could ruin the whole thing.
Oh yes, people back then would watch, perhaps,twoepisodes of something in a single day.
They were indulgent times.
When you first started taping, it was common to use every sticker.
The dedicated would make use of the little square number stickers to work into an index system.
I ended up giving up on it though.
People take something like that for granted today, but it was something that previous generations couldnt have imagined.
Fancy a bit ofGoldfingereven though its not a bank holiday?
No problemo, Mr Bond.
Sometimes a friend would come round and go over the collection, looking for something to watch.
Remember the line inBack To The Futurewhen Lorraines mother exclaimed Oh, honey, hes teasing you.
Nobody has two television sets?
Perhaps a lucky teenager would end up with one in his or her bedroom.
That last one never tended to get used, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
SCART those babies up, press play on one and record on the other and reproduction would occur.
Not that wed know much about things like that.
Like a lot of these memories, this one is a bit of an age test.
Oddly, everything had an extra excitement factor when you were watching it in school.
Aw man, it sounds like youve got crabs!
Maybe youd get to see a bit of a proper movie on the last day of term?
Maybe it would be the legendary porno film that someone snuck in, last year?
Ah yes, I remember the (usually miserable) teacher let the class watch it.
These days, the educational information is transmitted directly into the brains of the children, using lasers.
After hours and hours of constant use, your precious machine would start to perform below par.
It began with a few extra lines across the picture.
Head cleaning tapes were available.
It was generally safe to pull out some of the dust along with the human and car hairs.
While you were in there, you could marvel at what a complicated mechanism it was.
Its ironic that a DVD player doesnt have much in it compared to a VCR.
Once the machine was really worn out, it might start chewing up tapes.
Or go fnrr fnrr at you and refuse to accept a tape.
What you did at this point depended on what year it was.
In the 80s, youd take your expensive machine to be repaired.
Sob when you sat down and felt the remote for the old one underneath you.
Double sob when you remembered that youd left a tape in it.
In addition, it opened up the possibility of better quality, stereo sound.
VHS was a friendly system, and its missed for a number of reasons.
As tape systems are linear, they remember the place youve left off.
Never mind if you move a disc to a different player.
Online streaming has brought back some of the fun of VHS, in this regard.
VCRs had a reasonably fast start up time.
Shove the tape in click, gurrurah, thump, whirl and the thing would play.
The tapes themselves were somewhat robust and were often usable when badly damaged.
Once a DVD is damaged, its probably better to throw it away.
Sometimes, you could even get away with carrying out a repair on a damaged cassette yourself.
Youd simply have to find a donor cassette to sacrifice for the repair.
Then youd unscrew both cassettes and take the tape spools out of each.
Then youd throw both tapes away but, in theory, they could have been repaired.
Never mind the headaches of recordable optical discs.
Its still not clear exactly how long home made recordings will last.
Plus, there are often problems when moving recordable discs between machines of different manufacturers.
Even the glitches had their charm.
Could modern players start adding cute little artifacts and sounds to make every recording unique?
Reassuring sound effects would need to emanate from the machine itself to complete the effect.
The size of the VHS boxes worked against them though.
Pre-empting the arrival of USB connectors, the boxes of VHS tapes conformed to standards several of them.
Imagine the OCD time!
pictures that would have popped up if the VHS boom had coincided with the era of Facebook.
As the machines got cheaper they also improved in terms of features.
The earliest VHS machines had to be manually loaded.
The earliest remote controls were wired units and only had a small subset of features.
Prepare for maximum velocity!
HQ was a slight refinement that improved overall picture quality a little bit.
It might have been your first look at a film with some dirty material.
It might have been pirate tapes.
For younger readers, it might have been your first look at an R-rated film.
Imagine youre down the pub and a mate does something funny.
Now imagine that you tell him to do it again and whip out a massive video camera.
That night, you do some tape-to-tape magic and duplicate the master copy.
Within days, letters would arrive, commenting on the event.
By the time the more practically sized models were commonplace, they were used for event recording.
When they were employed at weddings, for example, they became an extension of traditional stills photography.
The same thing goes for capturing holiday memories.
Why dont we rent a video?
As a kid, being taken around the the video store might be the start of the weekend.
For teenagers, it might make part of an outstanding Friday night.
For the aforementioned most of us, it was a fairly gradual process.
I wonder how many people felt like they were building up a collection that would serve them into old-age?
Sadly, it became a cupboard full of boxes that never got touched.
What do you do when youve reached the end of the era?
Were you a member of Generation V?
Share your memories below….
