
The Doomed Effort to Make Videos Go Vinyl - Hjugo
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-effort-to-make-videos-go-vinyl
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kisstheblade
Didn't even know these things existed, even though our family had the first
vhs and cd players in our neighborhood. Amazing that they actually got this to
somewhat work, persistent fellows :)

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brudgers
In the summer of 1982, I remember watching a movie from one in the dorm
commons building. I don't remember the movie, but my bias is toward _2001_.
Anyway, I suspect they lost out because the \R in VCR is for "recording".
There's a bit of compact cassette versus 8-track in the way things worked out.

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hga
Eh, I think the success of the DVD and now Blu-ray formats show recording
isn't essential. As the article notes, this format, and I'll note another
format in Japan using a stylus over a bunch of holes, failed in the face of
VHS and Laserdiscs.

Cassettes won in part because they were a _lot_ smaller and could eventually
play stereo, and 8-track tapes are a terrible, fragile kludge (my family used
to make them back when pirating them was legal, as long as you paid ASCAP ...
or tried to pay them, they never accepted the money my father set aside).

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yk
I would guess that recording was essential for VHS's success. By the time DVD
became successful, ca. 2000, there was a infrastructure of video rentals
available and hard disk recording of movies became possible/was just around
the corner. So the killer app for VHS was recoding TV, while the killer app
for DvD was rentals and somewhat ambitious home video creators would go
digital.

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hga
I guess it depends on how much of a success you consider Laserdisc to be. It
wasn't a blowout success like DVD, but it was a healthy niche.

I got the strong impression that DVDs were sell-through, a market I think
Disney pioneered. So maybe video rental wasn't so important for DVDs, but I
don't know.

You are of course right that recording was a killer app for VHS, lots of time
shifting ... although, hasn't VHS died without most people replacing it with
recording to hard disks? I'm not sure TiVo got big enough, but I don't know.

As brudgers points out in his reply in this subthread, recording got big
enough to worry the content holders such that they imposed DRM on DVDs and
Blu-ray, but it's not clear their fears are realistic. Certainly the cracking
of DVD DRM didn't stop production of them.

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joblessjunkie
We used to rent these discs when I was a teenager. They were terribly
unreliable. Skipping, stopping, starting over, my god it was a miracle to
reach the end.

And that's just side one; halfway through you gotta get up off the couch and
flip it over and do the whole gauntlet again.

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Gracana
One of my favorite youtubers has a big collection of CEDs, and he made a video
about them and their issues:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7UH9QfcIi0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7UH9QfcIi0)

~~~
davydka
That's a great video. Also, the rugged tablet running Windows XP made me
smile.

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tiredwired
Video on audio tapes was a thing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000)

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Somasis
I always thought CEDs looked so cool. What I really want to see is how they're
created though, and what they'd sound like on a turntable...

