Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling? Was there a singular precipitating event that got trans folks pissed at HN? Is it a series of factors that I'd have to sift through millions of comments to understand??

What is it with the message to hacker news?

foone should be followed on the birdsite as well, it's worth the time.

Hm... Would you mind expanding on what you mean?

Before that it was DIVX, Digital Video Express (not the codec), who in the late 90s tried to create an alternative to video rentals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX.

Indeed! Nice 'documentary' (what do you call this format?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccneE_gkSAs

> Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now

This article seems like a pretty strong argument in the opposite direction: about a tape format which is effectively unreadable without significant heroics (to the extent that a documentary was made about trying to play one of these tapes.)

The format admittedly wasn't exactly successful, and I imagine more common formats would have better luck finding usable hardware. But even then, the tape still degrades.

If I really needed something to last a Very Long Time, I'd print it in highly redundant QR codes on lots of paper, and then also print the specs for QR codes and whatever other encodings were necessary.

> He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.

Oh please. Just use raw PCM audio. No one will ever lose track of how to play that.

A 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch tape can be digitized just fine to 16 bit samples, 44/48kHz, 24 channels, most of an hour. That's about 7 gigabytes. So you could back up a huge number of digitized tapes to a dozen different locations quite easily. You could put a thousand of them on a pocket SSD.

We should start thinking more seriously about long-term preservation of digital data in general, and I think that one thing that would help a lot is to design our storage (not transmission) formats to include a detailed human-readable description of the format in its headers. Basically just a blob of text, not compressed in any way, something that would be immediately visible and parseable if you inspect the raw data. Depending on how detailed the spec is, this would be an overhead on the order of tens of kilobytes to a few megabytes - for storage, this is negligible, while the long-term benefits are clear.

Seems somewhat ironic that this is tape?

I played with the idea as one way to deal with a problem client. At the time I had never heard of the method.

Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.

Yeah, that channel is where I learned it as well. I probably should have linked it.

Basically every video he does scratches that itch of learning a new thing about the world. The analog video series is indeed especially fantastic (laserdisc, VHS, B&W vs color TV, blu-ray, etc).

I've heard of someone doing this by connecting an ADC directly off the heads of a VHS player, but I can't find it now. The bandwidth of such a system is only about 6MHz, putting it well within modern SDR capability.

Certainly this is how the "applesauce" reader works: https://applesaucefdc.com/

That's going to take an extremely high resolution to avoid cross-talk. For a linear tape with multiple tracks you just need to have a few small heads at different heights.

I dumped a bunch of albums, and a few CD's, to Hi-Fi VHS. A while back, I stumbled onto a compatible VCR at a yard sale for a couple bucks.

Yes, those gaps are annoying as all get out. Tracking has to be dialed right in to recover the sound properly.

But, once you do that?

It's really great! Frequency response goes almost to zero, and up to 22Khz, and it's flat for most of that range.

One of the albums I recorded had a warp in it. When the actual vinyl was played on a good stereo system it was possible to see the speaker cones actually move in time with the warp. It's essentially a very low frequency signal.

Cassette does not reproduce that. I bet a good reel-to-reel system would.

Hi-Fi VHS reproduced it pretty much bang on perfect!

The best part was being able to add index marks! While recording, one could press a button and get one of those written to the tape. I had several tapes made with music I really like and could access pretty much anything on it quickly.

Fun stuff!!

That's a backronym. VHS originally was an abbreviation for "Video Home System".

Edit: also, the helical scan on a VHS tape can't really be said to be "vertical". A helical scan already implies a direction along the length of the helix, and "vertical helix" doesn't really make sense in the context of scanning down the length of a magnetic tape. Adding "vertical" to the actual term "helical scan" can really only be an attempt to back-fit an acronym to "VHS".

Other tidbits I recall from what my Dad told me years ago. He repaired VCRs for a while.

The beta machines would phase shift the signal 180˚ every other frame when writing, and they use that for noise cancellation. VHS did four frames at 90˚ each, because of patents.

The read heads were on a spinning drum. Beta machines had an L loading system that would grab the tape and wrap it almost all the way around the drum with the read heads, exposing more tape at once to the reading mechanism. VHS had an M loading system that grabbed the tape on either side and pulled it up, covering maybe half of the drum, because of patents.

And supposedly VHS won out because Sony was begging a lot of money for patent licensing. But tape capacity was probably a factor, too.

Nice idea. I think you'd have a problem with shedding. A HD head is designed to fly/float above a clean platter. Old tape is icky, flaky mess of brown dust and wobbly plastic that would foul up the head PDQ. But rather than scanning maybe you could encapsulate a bunch of old HD densely together in some kind of epoxy/glass to make a high-res tape head?

Yes, but none of that has anything to do with why RSS+mp3 won. If somebody invented podcasts today it would be a walled garden, not an open format where I can point any podcatcher at any host and get the feed.

If you can see the bits, you can figure out raw PCM. It's super trivial.

If we're worried about being unable to access the bits at all, we should consider etching them into metal or printing them on archival paper. Tape won't reliably last hundreds of years. But for now we can keep bits alive pretty easily, with low but nonzero sustained effort.

If you have a lot of tapes, a dozen digital copies will survive a lot more incidents than the originals, and be a lot cheaper than analog backups along with no generation loss.

"Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex"

Sure, but the tapes had Boris Karloff himself as host, you can't just wipe a tape with Karloff in the 60s [1] and think "eh, probably no one will ever want to watch this again".

It's just a point how awfully relative everything is. What if Max Brod actually listened to Franz Kafka and burned all his texts. How much we miss because Nikolai Gogol did actually burn the second volume to his Dead Souls.

[1] "Boris Karloff was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff

Are there local versions of the Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, too? Maybe an EGOT ain't as out of reach as I once thought.

They reflect on it here: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924

Or in a saner format (when it loads): https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924

> The greaseweazle still looks like a connector for an existing 5.25" drive

That's because it connects to an existing 5.25" drive

> is there any hardware you know of that replicates the drive itself?

Why would you build a device to emulate a device that already exists, when all you need to do is communicate with it?

I think one major network in the US is 720p60, but the vast majority of broadcast transmissions globally is 1080i25 or 1080i30*

Of course sadly so much content is produced at 1080p24 nowadays for that “film” effect it’s rather meaningless for display purposes.

Online of course it tends to be p50 or more commonly p60 (even in 50hz countries). YouTubeers tend to be able to afford more lights and clearer microphones than big budget productions too.

* 30000/1001

Well, that's just how the underlying PAL/NTSC signal worked.

Which occasionally has unexpected consequences.

The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway, but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, they seem destined to only survive in pirated copies. If that.

The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.

The real issue with DIVX wasn't the rental/PPV model, it was certain studios who were boycotting DVD, due to poor DRM security. (Which they eventually 'patched' legally.) So it was imperative that DIVX failed to avoid a format war.

It’s not unreasonable. The problem is that blank media imposes a lower bound on the discount that can be offered for these rental schemes (to say nothing of the e-waste) to make economic sense to the seller.

Most consumers aren’t going to rent a movie they can only watch a few for a 10% discount off the price of unlimited views.

For example, Apple typically prices movie “purchases” around 4x of a 24 hr rental (75% off), and that has essentially zero marginal cost of production. With physical media there would be no profit.

The general trend seems to be towards not owning anything in general.

Stating this as an observation in general really needs a caveat of "and absolutely no clamoring by users for something otherwise is heeded".

Producers rent seek. More at 11

Given the scale of wasteful packaging and other materials people dispose of without a thought, a DVD seems like basically nothing.

Fair enough--although the magnitude of the change is still much smaller than in the case of digital content.

It might not be the worst idea to make renting houses normal and just as convenient as owning. If rental laws were fixed to provide extreme stability and decent rights, you'd only own for investment purposes. And you wouldn't have extreme upwards pressure from renters trying to buy at any cost to avoid shitty renting conditions.

We really should allow renters to stay indefinitely at rentals and also pass on the general maintenance responsibilities on to them as well.

Renting things like appliances doesn't make sense since you require exclusive access to them and generally use them for their entire lifespan. While houses mostly exist before and after your need for them.

This shit is the entire reason I bother with piracy at all. I very, super-duper much don't want to maintain a media server, but I do want several things in their full, original versions (Beavis and Butthead is one, in fact, but there are several), or that flat-out can't be had otherwise, or whatever, and as long as I'm having to maintain the server anyway....

If they (all these companies) ever fully sort out audio rights, start providing great-quality copies of movies without screwing with them (the 4k77 and related projects are far and away the highest-quality copies of the original, unmolested Star Wars trilogy available, period, for any price, and they're entirely a very-expensive-to-produce volunteer fan-made effort, available for free! WTF?), stop cutting episodes, and stop revoking access to things, I can finally scrap that stupid server. It's 1000% not worth the cost and effort just to avoid paying for the things I watch. Buuuuut if I'm maintaining it anyway, for other reasons, well, that's another matter.

Ah this is why I can never find Wayne's World hilarious review of November Rain MTV video by Gun'n'Roses. :-(

I always find it funny when people try to use "rent-seeking" as a pejorative.

Like, yes, someone invested a lot of capital up front and hopes to make a profit by selling time-limited access to what they bought, thereby making the goods accessible to people who don't have the up-front capital.

I can see preferring to own, but as a moral position, "rent-seeking" is synonymous with "risk-taking" and "access-providing."

For my part I am very happy to be able to rent a digital movie for $4 rather than buying a DVD for $20. The risk to me is lower and I'm more likely to try movies I wouldn't take a $20 chance on.

> Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.

Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.