V-Lite Videocassette

This thumbnail is gold Mat! How did you cut yourself out so cleanly? Hours in photoshop? Even the transparency in your glasses is spot on!

Funny isn’t it how our attitudes have changed so much over the last 30-40 years. If we ignore that physical formats is pretty much a spec of dust now in sales, and think about the environment, it is a good thing that it didn’t hang around for longer! As Mat said, I wonder if there are still some in landfill and will stay there for another 500 years. I still like physical formats, but you cannot ignore the fact that digital music and video has eliminated so much of the waste of products. Remember when every pre-recorded VHS came in a plastic box, then all the plastic components in the tape itself, and how many of these are now in landfill? Unless you count them in the shops selling dead peoples clothes. How much of this shifting delivery of music/video has just shifted the environmental impact from in our own houses and now to global data centres and wireless carrier systems, all of which require huge amounts of power to make them work!! Thanks Mat, found this interesting on seeing how there was a race to the bottom with VHS!

Panorama just published a documentary on how terrible and environmentally threatening the 'Cloud' is... and ten's of thousands of plastic/polystyrene VHS tapes would be better than one single MP4 file streamed instead? Your, Mr. Angry!

Can't afford to buy a clue here. Never heard of this one.

The thumbnail changes are nice - the stick dude throwing a VHS into a bin is an amusing addition.

12voltvids did a video about a previous super cheap and lightweight VHS cassette design from the early '90s, which he called "unishell" since it was made from a single piece of molded plastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNIYhIMRvkk

Let me know if you try recording over a v-lite. It didn't look like it has a square hole on the lower left of the front side, so it should be possible.

Would the quality of the tape been exactly the same? And as a side note, was there anything like VHS type II or VHS Chrome ? Or is that a silly question.

For some reason I have a hunch this video can become a hit on YouTube, with many views. The editing pace is especially good and speedy on this one. I'm really curious how it will perform once going public.

Mat, what capture device are you using to grab composite input? Struggling to find something that works on the latest Mac OS

Very elite timing on this video! :)

Reminded me of a time when certain monthly magazines includedc free sample DVDs with each issue. I particularly remember a couple of music mags and several pc/console gaming mags doing this. I discovered many interesting rock groups and brought many great console games purely down to the free bonus discs that came with the magazines. unfortunately they were vey easy to steal and i wonder if this had anything to do with their demise!!! P.S.Does anyone else find typing messages on this patreon keyboard awkward, painfully slow, laggy and frustratng.

What a fantastic video. Count me among the USA natives who are old enough to have used Betamax when it was contemporary, but had never seen one of these.

i was wondering if the v-lite was rewindable. did i miss that bit?

I was excited to see the OLED back on set!!

Firstly, love the sight gag of the floating tape! I'm glad you addressed how disposable these are, what a waste of materials. Definitely an example of something YouTube does better for promotional use; though subscribing to Techmoan By Post on a V-Lite tape would be pretty hilarious. Not surprised your newer player borked on playback, but those Panasonic MK2's (I have a few) are absolute tanks and cannot be destroyed - and play everything!

Reading through these comments makes me more motivated to find a remote control for my Mitsubishi MD3000 SVHS (https://ibb.co/DMMYrb5). The machine itself works great, it's just that I can't control all of the important functions without the remote. When I put in a tape, it automatically plays at the wrong speed and cannot be set. 😋 The jog wheel won't help because it has to be the correct speed to begin with.

Should the captured footage not be 4:3 pillarboxed in the 16:9? Looks a bit off at the moment. But again a very nice video of an unknown to me tape!

Oh, and yeah. As a teenager in the late 90s, a good friend of mine was into boxing. There were physical lists of tapes people would mail (snail mail) to each other. Then you'd select what you want and then you'd get the fights on a tape on the Mail. As things evolved, the lists would be mailed but the whole posting went on even after a change format into DVD

Very cool, thanks Scott 😊. I presume they mention the absence of the door because it is something patent-worthy. I have to deal with the patent world and thus with lawyers and all and, as an engenieer you really need to change the way you think.

Don’t you recycle styrofoam in the UK? We’ve been doing that for ages on the continent. Although It’s not used as much lately. They use paper and cardboard instead. Styrofoam dwindles into a little puddle when you add some acetone.

I think I saw one of these one time and it was definitely in the UK, probably in a charity shop. So, they definitely existed in the UK. I had a PAL/NTSC capable player and remember buying NTSC tapes form the USA in the late 1990s because it was cheaper, even if the quality was slightly less.

Now I want a signed VHS-copy of one of your YouTube movies, Mat! 🤪 And yes, I can still play them! As always, an obscure format that I'd never heard of before, and Mat brings it to live again, makes my day!

Really love the humor in this one. Wouldn't mind if there was an increased focus on humor in every video.

Ha had no idea these excised, never seen them here getting mailed to me in the Netherlands. Just wondering what video aspect ratio its on tape, because at @4.30mins it seems to be a bit out of aspect ratio?

When I get my home studio set back up after the move, the first thing I’m doing is hunting down a Vcassette & recording this video over it. I’ll crop the aspect ratio down to 4:3 and everything.

Looking at the patent, the two chaps who came up with the idea started back in 1993, with a few revisions before the final revision being filed at the end of 1996 and granted almost a year later towards the end of 1997.  IMHO it's an impressive design, reducing the weight, and components, yet it's much more robust for shipping.  I found an article where Kermit Krantz (one of the inventors) said "We are the video of junk mail." and they had high hopes of distributing 20 million cassettes in its first year and by 2000 it will be a billion-dollar industry.  If it had been invented five years earlier I could have seen that, but, as you mentioned, just too late to the party.  They also stated the cassette, plus mailing cost just $1.  One of their first clients, a Chevy dealership, mailed out 10,000 copies with 428 people coming to view the car and 77 sales. The recycled part is interesting, obviously terrible for the environment, the inventor stated that the units themselves are made from recycled plastic and come from China where the labor costs are low....not the greatest of green credentials, but it was a different time back then. Mr Krantz then went on to create Ergocards, playing cards that were easier to hold for both children and the elderly.  Quoted as saying not the jackpot of sales, they were fairly common in Mom and Pop stores and he was happy that young and old could get together over a game of cards. After that, it appears the ideas of Krantz stopped, it mentions he was the VP of Mercantile Bank in Kansas City, so he obviously did well for himself.

Would love to have “Techmoan Greatest Hits” on all well known formats VCD, LaserDisc, VHS. With a killer soundtrack “album” on Teffifon and Elcaset.

re: the mics - How annoying again! You can definitely hear the 'crunchy' and compressed audio from your talking-heads sections of the video. It's a shame. Oh well... moving on to the older better mics.

But Mat, you weighed the cassettes when there were BLANK. Once you filled them with a few episodes of Deep Space Nine, wouldn't they be heavier? Hmmm... So this is essentially the Flexdisk version of a VHS tape. Clever. Too bad the format was well on its way out by 2001. I wonder if anyone remembers when music magazines would send out "Video Magazines" with actual music videos on them. I was desperate to see Depeche Mode's "Stripped" because MTV played it exactly ONCE one school year and I nearly sprained my ankle trying to get to the VCR to record about 45 seconds before the show transitioned to Dave Kendall interviewing Peter Murphy. But then I found out from an imported copy of the NME that I could order a video mag from VIrgin in the UK with the aforementioned "Stripped" on it! Awesome! Ten weeks later the tape arrived and I learned an important lesson about regional encoding systems. :( There is something oddly depressing about watching the V-Lite being disassembled. Like, if as a kid you REALLY wanted one of those wrapped "presents" under the shopping mall demo Christmas tree but then discover it's. just gift wrapped styrofoam. We can't have nice things. The "Ludacris" bit - the editing was REALLY good! Genuinely laugh-out-loud! In 2001 I was living in a trial market region that got cable internet for the first time. "In my day" you'd have to wait 90 minutes to watch a 22 minute episode of South Park downloaded from a dodgy website! And I was happy to get it!

• This video contains echoes of 'Tapes On A Plane' - and I love it. So... it's 'Tapes in Polystyrene?' • Thank you Scott from CA. • For some inexplicable reason this reminded me of movie screeners that used to be sent out to members of the press and/or movie critics for early film promotion. Somehow, those things ended up on a file sharing site - but I know nothing about that. • Have a look at that wonderful VHS clarity - and I used to tolerate that in my youth. Is it just me or are these things in need of archival restoration? (no) • Craftily, one could repurpose the tape components by creating a ghastly halloween mask/decoration. • This short video amused me greatly - thank you much. 🤍 Oh, by the way, my family never got these. Apparently a redneck family out in the wilderness of Iowa wasn't a target audience. 😂

"Thanks to Scott" .. yay! I have a new ringtone. Interesting video. I swear I remember getting one of these for some ad, Though I can't remember the ad. Really speaks to how well their ad campaign worked if I remember the cheapo VHS tape more than the ad.

Wow, never heard of this (I'm in Canada). Interesting!

Not only did I live through and participate in the vhs era in the US, but I’ve run a video transfer service for close to twenty years, and in all the boxes of people’s video collections I’ve received where it’s just a jumble of everything for me to sort through, I’ve never run across one of these, or even heard of them before today. The campaigns that used them may have mailed out a lot, but I don’t think it was very widespread here.

Ah yes! I got a couple of these (and likely still do, knowing me…). I didn’t realize they were available in the UK, they seem such a uniquely gross American thing. I think I even have the promotional video from the manufacturer provided in the tape itself. As I recall it was prone to jamming. This disposable effort reminds me of the Flexi discs you’d occasionally get in magazines- which astonishingly were still being made in the 2000s to distribute books for the blind. At least they weren’t a big brick of styrofoam.

I preferred to send off a VHS tape and get £250 in return - that seems even more crazy now. I can imagine getting videos through the post from weird uncle Mat though, with a note asking me to post it back so he can record over it next time.

I suppose a DVD equivalent were those EcoDiscs (of which I only have one example, left on a garden wall for some fool like myself to take!) They bend, and have a warning about using them in slot loading players. I've been buying several VHS tapes on the BBC Video label again recently, mainly as find the early "omnibus" versions of shows rather quaint. Some Doctor Who stories, and early Reginald Perrin episodes were cut into "movie" versions for the earliest releases, often missing vital plot points!

How many times did you film that going through the letterbox before it fell just right?!? I never received a V-Lite in the mail. I must have been on someone's naughty list. I got a ton of AOL discs though.

I'm looking forward to watching this when I get home 🙌 - however, here's a couple of VHS related eBay listings of interest: Sansui 6-Inch LCD Portable AC/DC Television w/Built-In VCR VHS player https://www.ebay.com/itm/155402805557 JVC HR C3U TM 63U VHSC Compact Video Recorder w/monitor https://www.ebay.com/itm/295527523441

In the 1990s I made a series of technology videos called Video Interface which were distributed to corporate IT Directors etc on VHS cassettes. We had about 2,000 copies of each programme made by Technicolor near Heathrow and we used similar cassettes. They were guaranteed for only 50 plays (which was plenty!) but recyclable. They were short lengths and the cassettes were filled with tape to the length of the programme master tape we supplied to them on digital Betacam. I worked in Slough and used to try to get down to Technicolour when they were duplicating our programme. The sound of 500 VHS machines all going into record or rewind simultaneously is something to hear! :-) I think I may still have a few of those cassettes if you're interested.

My first CD ROM drive, bought in PC World, Southampton on the day it opened in the mid 1990s came with a VHS tape in the box explaining how to fit it ! As for mass marketing campaigns I'm sure everyone in the U.K. in that era would have received a few AOL and Freeserve Floppies then CDs.

My god! What a strange format but incredibly interesting! It’s basically the FlexPlay or DIVX of VHS haha. Great video as always!

I can foresee revisiting the tape players of Mission Impossible wherein Mat Phelps receives his missions on a V-Lite tape that self-destructs after Mat thoughtfully looks through the dossiers of the latest villains that he and his MI team are tasked to neutralize. Of course the Patreon viewers will disavow any knowledge of their actions.

Good video. I never saw this format before, but it is so typically American: Redesign the VHS tape to guarantee it to be pitched in the landfill, just to save a few pennies in production. I received my share of promo-ish VHS tapes, with only 10-15 minutes of content. But these were in traditional cartridges with 10-15 minutes of tape loaded. The difference was I could scotch-tape over the record protect notch and then use the blank tape for my own use. Only us yanks would consider this as innovation.

I grew up in the US during the boom of the VHS...I had no idea these were a thing. This is why I love this channel and the content on it. I wonder what happens when you rewind one of these. It looks like it might fly right off the reel.

I was born in 1988 and to my recollection the only time I ever bought a VHS was from a charity shop in my teens. Looking at how they're constructed they must have been fairly expensive to make and ship. What was the average cost of a new film on VHS in the mid 90s?

Oh no, it's the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" guy!

Wow, I’m in the US and was obsessed with crap like this, but I’ve never seen one of these before. There was another simplified/lightweight VHS design that made the rounds (probably best remembered from the Street Fighter II Turbo promo cassettes Blockbuster stocked as a free rental), but it was all plastic and quite a bit more robust than this. I would NOT feel comfortable putting this in my VCR! Great video!

That was very interesting, which kept me watching even through the squeaky polystyrene section

It's as if Colin Chapman from Lotus designed the VHS tape instead of JVC's engineers. Though if Chapman had designed it, it no doubt would have fallen apart after it ejected after it's single intended play.

This is not a complaint, but an exclamation of pleasant surprise: Has time sped up, slowed down, or is it a flat circle? I was expecting a slower pace of video releases this year, but it looks like we're getting them at the same rate as before, about one per week. Whatever--if it makes Mat happy, it can't be that bad.😎