Very little to do with hype. More to do with consumer-led marketing - they are selling 40 DVD players and/or Recorders for every 1 VCR.
It makes perfect business sense to me to stop selling a slower line to accomodate faster/more popular selling electronics. That's why and *how* they exist.
DVD Digital Video is certainly the technological future of home visual recording. Magnetic tape in all forms has had its day.
Yes, you're right, but the MJPEG quality achievable does depend on the software or hardware codec. Some are better than others and it's not always dependent on price. For the vendors, it's a trade off between quality and speed although most systems are fairly adjustable. On the one hand people want to have speed, but they want quality and sometimes small file size as well.
Wavelet stuff can be better, especially when trying to squeeze the best quality out of modest bandwidth but I am not sure that there are any common standards using it. Arguably, it doesn't matter for a codec being used within an editing system as long as the transcoding with common display codecs is good.
Bollox, are you seriously suggesting that every one of the 100,000,000 plus VCR tapes around have been transferred to disk, FFS the vinyl record has meant to have been dead for over 15 years, you can still buy records and the decks to play them, how long since the 'compact cassette' has been main stream hifi (if ever it was), you can still buy both tapes and decks.
They are 'existing' by pushing 'the lasted technology' (it's their advertising tag-line after all...) to people who know no better, not that DVD is bad technology. As I said, if the VCR recorder was really dead you would not be able to walk into one of their sister companies and buy them off the self nor walk into any supermarket and buy the tapes !
So has the vinyl record, or the 'compact cassette', but you can still buy both recorder and tapes in main stream stores, I'm not even sure the
8 -track stereo is dead, certainly little used but not dead.The real point is, their is far more profit in the DVD recorder, by killing the VCR deck off in the Dixons stores they (Dixons Group PLC) are hoping to cash in on people like the OP and you who think that they will have to buy a DVD recorder just to preserve (in a watchable format) what they have on VHS - such as kids growing up, holidays, weddings etc. (most people will never gat to grips with either the fact or the nuts and bolt of using their computer system to capture and burn video to DVD).
The simple fact is, there is simple just to many VHS cassettes around for the VCR to be dead, if it's even dieing ATM - why would manufactures sell combined VHS / DVD units if no one uses magnetic tape any more ?...
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In a sense, they will have to convert to digital if they want to preserve their videos. Even unplayed video tapes degrade substantially. Anyone who wants to preserve their analogue memories for longer than a few years should strongly consider conversion to DVD.
(most people will
Of course they will! Just as people got to grips with recording onto VHS. It will become 'de riguer' Part of everyday life. Like mobile phones.
Preparing for the transition. Switching it round - why would they put DVD players alongside VCR if the video was still going strong?
Within 5 years nobody will even be making VCR's - it will all be; direct to harddrive digital recording or even on-the-fly to Digital Versatile Disk. I didn't suggest it would happen overnight. Not dead...just dying.
By the way, I don't work for Dixons, in fact I avoid them like the plague.
While DVDs might have the same sort of life as CDs, I doubt recordable ones will last anywhere as long as a decently stored tape.
Why, and do you really think that (home burn) DVD is going to be the answer ?
I'm not sure about that, there is real concern over *home burn* DVD's (and any other optical disk for that matter) long term stability, the one advantage that tape has over optical disk is that even badly degraded recordings play *something* - optical disks just refuse to do anything...
FFS many people still can't operated there computers, let alone capture, encode and burn optical disks, *some* people still can't even operate a VCR (more than putting a tape in and pushing play or rewind) ! And BTW, there are people who are baffled as to how to use a mobile phone, even though they use a fixed line phone.
It's an alternative medium, it doesn't automatically follow that it's a replacement, the compact cassette didn't replace the vinyl record but they did exist side by side and were often built into the same housing.
What like now you mean, I suspect that it to will be old hat too, according to Dixons...
Like the vinyl record, compact cassette or 8-track stereo you mean!
You seem to be taken in by the bullsh*t though.....
That's because Tesco have them for about £20. They'll be round for some time yet.
I really would advise waiting as long as you can on writeable DVDs. There are about five formats out there and only one of them is going to win. Are you feeling lucky ? :-)
It doesn't matter because most of the recorders support most of the formats anyway.
They do ATM, who knows what is going to happen in a year or two.
For recording?
Since the mechanisms and electronics already support the different formats at low cost there would be no reason to remove support.
It isn't like the Betamax/VHS issue where the mechanisms and machines were totally different.
Added to which the equipment is cheap enough, even at this early stage, that it doesn't matter anyway.
In a few cases. I was mainly thinking about playback.
There are multiformat drives like the Sony DRU 530a
The write-once media are now so cheap that it's not really worth buying the rewritable ones so recording compatibility is not so big a deal AFAICS.
Very few
Hardly a replacement for the VCR that way.
I don't think that it matters.
It depends on what you want to do. With VCRs I have tended to record on tapes once and keep the tapes as an archive for a long time and perhaps eventually bin them. I seldom re-use them.
DVD-Rs can be obtained in bulk for around 50-60p so I can do the same thing with those.
For people who would like to record something for viewing once or twice and then erase, there are DVD recorders with a hard disk which will do that. If the content is worth keeping, it can be committed to DVD. I actually think that that is a better operational solution than a VCR.
Pre-recorded commercial DVD disks can be played on anything, so as far as I can see, as long as one can have something that will read a DVD-R or a DVD+R (e.g. a drive in a PC) then the different media standards don't really matter - it's easy to transfer content from one format to another.
Yes, for plain 'Time shifting', the HD recorder is how it's going, the ability to start watching the start of the programme before the end has been recorded is one of the benefits the average consumer will find useful I suspect.
If the content is worth keeping, it can be committed
But home burn optical disk's ATM are not stable enough to archive something long term, such as family events etc., OTOH magnetic tape has proved it's self over the last 40 years or so as a long term storage medium and as I said in other post even if magnetic tape does start to degrade it will still play out something - optical disk's tend to just sit in the drive and do sod all.
I don't think anyone is arguing about pre-recorded commercial DVD's, that's a done deal, right or wrong... Although, in saying that, even the DVD as we know it is up for change, what with the 'blue ray' system being developed.
Recordable DVDs are too new to know yet, I agree, but equally I have not had problems with recordable CDs in the past. For something that is really valuable, multiple methods of storage make sense. I tend to keep copies of those on miniDV as well and even VHS as a last ditch.
Probably, although I'm not sure that it matters that much as long as there's a route to play media or transcribe.
The cost curve is very different. As the original BBC article said, when VCRs first came out, they cost £3000 in today's money. There was a long plateau in the £300-500 range before the price finally bombed as the technology nears the end of its life. DVD recorders have fallen to the £200-300 level very early on in their life cycle, and I think it's a reflection that people will expect to change them after no more than 5 years anyway.
It is also a reflection of the far greater simplicity of the CD/DVD servo mechanism. While it is relatively cheap to optimise the electronics and software for a high sales volume product like a VCR, cost reduction of the mechanics did not seem to happen for a long time, which may have partially accounted for the longer period to "commoditization".
(There is also seems to be less spread in price and quality on CD/DVD mechanisms, whereas a cheap VCR mechanism will only have a fraction of the life of a better quality one)
But the price dropped long before VCR technology became old, SVHS could still give DVD a run for it's money (other than random access etc.) even today and lets not even go down the possibilities of the JVC digital 7 format...
But you seem to be missing the point of this, with so many VHS or (now) DVD's in the world, other than for cold blooded commercial reasons, there is no way that people are just going to move on to the next 'bright idea' from JVC or Sony etc. - most people simple have to much invested (both monetary and emotions) in the formats for them just to die because someone like Dixons says that it is dead, people will see through this pure marketing hype.
I meant to the < £50-£100 level.
Only with a very good machine and good tapes and both are expensive.
But they do. Playback-only DVD technology languished for quite a long time because of the threat of DivX (not the software codec) which was a system for DVDs to be played three or four times and then be timed out through encoding. Several of the major studios thought that this was a great idea because they thought that it would produce more revenue. Fortunately it died a death as people went for standard DVD. Regional encoding has effectively fallen by the wayside as it has become easy to get multiregion players.
My point was that as long as there's a playback method for older formats, people will by new stuff.
It's pretty effective marketing hype. Sales of VCRs have been declining, even at commodity prices. The decline will be gradual, and perhaps the large retailers will have some influence over it. Not having something on the shelf means that people will look at alternatives. DVD recorders in the shops at below £200 just before Christmas will sell pretty well I think.
I've got both S-VHS and a DVD recorder, and the DVD recorder in its 'best' setting gives results near indistinguishable from off air FreeView. S-VHS doesn't. Except on B&W films. ;-)
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