VHS-C: A lazy idea that's also perfect

Do we know whether it was luck that the layout of the VHS cassette allowed for this drop-in solution, or whether it was already explicitly designed to be able to do this later? My guess would be the former.

By the time I encountered these cassettes, their purpose and design constraints were very obvious. It's really nice to get the early history of the technology.

caption issues (on YouTube): I saw "right" in place of "write" around 14:00 ("right protect"). And sometime before that it transcribed "doodad" as "duad" or something like that, but I didn't catch the timestamp.

“Figure out how your brain works before the sales team“ damn right

Well, actually ... I don't need more battery life in my phone(s). I really don't. I have Pixel 7s and a Moto egde50 neo, and all of them have absurd battery lives so it's rare for any of them to drop to 70%, much less even lower. But then I am not on the road much, at least not without a power source for the phone I am using. I don't need my phones to be thinner, but I don't want them to be thicker (and heavier) either.

We had both types of camcorders in the 1990s. I always wanted a dedicated Video8 VCR, not only for playing cassettes from the camcorder, but because I recorded a lot of TV shows and had a large archive, which took up a lot of space. I would have loved to be recording those TV shows on Video8 instead. The trouble was, dedicated Video8 VCRs were ridiculously expensive and hard to find.

1. i love this video and learned a lot. Growing up, my family had pretty much all of these from like ‘82 on. (My dad had been a 16mm cameraman for Italian TV and we had a VHS and a Betamax and we rented movies in one format and ripped them to the other and we had VHS-C when it came out but also 8 for filming school plays and stuff where duration and sound quality mattered.) This was really illuminating about the pros and cons of all these formats and why we had one of everything, each for its purpose. 2. There’s a Bones Brigade documentary with footage from the late 70’s through the end of the 80’s and it’s really something to look back at the footage that evolves with the formats of the time and also to remember what an incredible change it was when skateboarding (for all of us a million miles from California) broke out of print photos and into moving images and what these little cameras did to carry what *wasn’t* hollywood movies (or home movies) into basements and living rooms.

Very good stuff as always my man.

Love having this directly on Patreon!

Did audio in pro VHS and pro Betamax vary much? When I was in TV in 2001 (phew) for a summer, we had the hand me down Beta stuff from the bigger TV market. (I am so GLAD I didn't have to haul around the 3/4" decks!!!) Some of our anchors wanted to hassle the cross-town lower resourced station that was stuck with VHS for their news coverage.

I really enjoyed the slight joke about "early adopters" in the marketing cycle. I agree, very profitable. :)

Alec I actually have a question. Under the door of the channel setting controls on the RCA VCR tuner there's a way to set channels "J-W" and "A-I". What are those? I've never heard of channel letters. Maybe this unit was sold in a country that did use them? Like I mentioned in my other comment I grew up with this VCR but I don't remember seeing the letters. Or if I did I didn't notice at the time.

Thanks again for uploading directly to Patreon!

You didn't mention the extending "idiot tab" on the adapter so people couldn't insert the thing into their VCR empty. Not sure it needed mentioning but here I am saying it.

okay but baby alec is absolutely adorable though

My father went from Video8 via S-VHS-C to Digital8, we got that what was on sale on the occasion market :-P. But it means I used all the formats (as you said: camera tapes for the camera, we didn't care about the format, although with the S-VHS-C camera also came an S-VHS VCR for in the living room). We just had the cables hanging ready to plug into the camera. Personally I like the Video8 cassettes much more, they fell less flimsy than VHS-C. The S-VHS-C camera became unreliable and died after it went under water. Funny enough, I was able to recover the footage, it became my first YouTube movie: https://youtu.be/l2N9IN4tx1c?si=etnDtk_oRgpUPG-X The Video8 camera was much studier (and bigger and heavier, a Handycam from 1987), I still have it and it still works! BTW: I would love a video about S-VHS and Hi8 :-D

If that wasn’t you as a little kid, you should sue that kid for copyright infringement.

This video triggers good memories. I worked in a video and audio duplication facility in Sydney when VHS movies were at their peak. We had many hundreds of, I think, Panasonic commercial recorders, and the cassettes were loaded in a clean room with the tape just longer than the movie and trailers etc.

I always appreciate your nuance, pointing out how "better" doesn't always mean it's the right choice. Also I like the direct upload, I'd rather watch here than YT.

Those autocaptions are indeed good! There was a homophone somewhere in the middle, but I completely forgot what or where. One in a half hour video is good going though.

I’ll point out that 20 minutes is plenty for a certain type of home movie, especially the ones people didn’t want on film they had to send to a lab for developing.

This video is a triumph - one of your best! I can see a LOT of work went into it. My dad picked Video 8 because it was sold as better quality, and VHS recordings always looked a bit rubbish, so better quality was something worth the small inconvenience.

The RCA portable VCR and accompanying camera you showed off was the same set my family had when I was a kid. When I saw it, it was like a bolt from the blue of nostalgia! I had not seen it, either in person or photos, since the early 90s. I have videos of my dad (who passed away when I was young) thanks to that hardware. It was amazing to see it again! I also recorded a lot of cartoons and TV shows, and my mom would record her soap operas and such. It was kind of a pain to program but OSD was not a thing yet. I remember having to tweak the little tuner dials under the door on the top if you wanted to add a new TV channel. Thanks for another great video. You continue to rock. :)

Here's a scope-creep-proof video idea: float switches!

Clock set to 4:20 lol

You’re going to have an amazing personal museum, if you don’t already!

Perhaps far more importantly — can we get a B roll of the rest of the footage from the Epcot evening in 2001??

Thank you for the direct upload, always nice to know if It came down to it I could abandon youtube if needed. Hopefully its not too much extra work on your end.

My parents originally had a video 8 camera, and later on switched to a vhc-c. When I went to digitize them I was thankful they switched, it was so easy to just use a vhr I already had to play them vs buying a random video 8 camera on ebay and hoping it would work .

Not sure if it's just me, but the Patreon player gave me a really low-res video. YT is fine though

Well now I know the real reason Beta lost the format war. It didn’t change colors when you put it in the refrigerator.

Thanks for showing us little Alec’s first fascination with the refrigeration cycle!

I love how you use your own baby videos as examples. That’s both cute and also a great example of how important these types of memories are. I’m so old that I don’t have video recordings of myself as a baby, but I did play around with my friends with a camcorder. There could be more at my parent’s house, but I haven’t gotten around to getting the equipment to actually view then with modern hardware.

I think we're going to have to file for FOIA disclosure of that "Christmas '96" tape... edit: purely to see the recording quality, of course...

My father had a Sony Hi8 camcorder and was the only person Ive ever known that bought the Waterproof case for it. He was going down Jersey Shore waterslides and into the Ocean with a Camera in the 90's and it was so cool.

So does the VHS-C cassette have any relation to computer data tapes? They look very similar.

Wait a minute, that first VCR looks like it has actual sane programming controls? Really? Does it?

I'm loving how much kit there is in this video

Of course you had to wear the "T120" shirt... moral imperative there!

Thank you for posting this straight to patreon! I recently deleted my YouTube opting to keep patreon so I can choose what I want to support so this is great!

Interesting. My family got a Video 8 camcorder in 1992; my friend's family got a VHS-C one, and I always looked down on it - VHS sucks, after all. We knew that cause we had a Beta VCR (the 'Max' part never seemed to be a thing in the UK) back in the 80s and begrudgingly got a VHS replacement a few years later. Anyway, I see your points about the use cases of the two, but for little me, I saw no downside because you still need to mess around with that adapter, and what if you wanted to do editing? Sure, there was generational loss (onto crappy VHS, of course) but I'm not sure it was even possible on VHS-C without two VCRs, whereas we were plugging the camera into the TV and were fine with it. I'm sure we had a spare battery and a few tapes, too, so we were always able to film. Lots of fun home movies made that way, until we replaced it with a MiniDV camera in 2000 - which was also incompatible since DVD-Rs didn't exist and VHS still sucked. You could turn the tapes into video files on your PC, but 13GB per hour was ENORMOUS back then. But I digress, good video! And you should do MiniDV, too!

Hmmm ... I see also that Patreon is so self-important that it auto plays :(

Please also keep uploading to YouTube (at least unless Patreon has a video player on Roku!)

Thank you for the Patreon upload 🙏

I will stand with you on the hill against the term "VHS player"

For a video about video I have to say, the audio on this one is particularly outstanding. Very nicely done.

Been a while since we've had a video about video stuff.