Stock up on VHS VCRs when can

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by 67Zenith

I think that the way the Obama administration wants everything old to be trashed (such as their program to scrap refrigerators built before 1995 and the "cash for clunkers" program, which means cars made before 1998 - well...they want us to trash everything vintage. Maybe this is their way to make consumers spend money to buy newly made junk. It's scary to wipe out our history but we live in these times. Maybe next they will say that VCRs are unsafe (LOL) and everyone has to scrap them and only use DVDs! In any case, I'd keep a few of ANYTHING vintage you can afford to keep now and hang onto them.

Where did you hear or read this? It's flat-out ridiculous. If this administration even tries to have legislation passed that would prevent anyone from keeping anything more than X number of years old, there would probably be a huge outcry from antique dealers and collectors the likes of which you wouldn't believe. I am specifically referring to antique radio and television collectors, such as those here at AK (Doug, drh4683, for one, myself, for another, et al.--I'm sure Doug won't give up his collection of Zenith TVs and I have about seven vintage Zenith radios here that I will not give up without a fight).

However, I don't think we have anything to worry about. Because there are so many antique dealers and collectors here in the US and Canada, such legislation as I mentioned above, if anyone in Washington is bold enough to introduce it, may not and probably will not even come close to becoming law.

I do not believe for a second, either, that VCRs will ever be declared unsafe by this administration. Why would or should they be? A law was passed in 1975 that gave the public the right to tape television shows off the air for their own use; people have been using VCRs for this purpose ever since. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), enacted eight years ago, only outlaws recording television and radio programming onto digital media, then reselling the copies; it says nothing about people copying DVDs for their own use, although since most if not all commercial DVDs are copy-protected, such copying is all but impossible. I say "all but impossible" because there will always be some technically sharp and dishonest people out there who will figure out ways to circumvent the copyright law and defeat the copy protection schemes used.

The VHS/DVD players available for dirt-cheap prices at Big Lots, Best Buy, et al. are just that, playback devices only that do not have the capability to record off the air, as the dirt-cheap ones do not have ATSC tuners. DVD recorders with such tuners almost certainly carry warnings on their shipping boxes (and likely in their instruction manuals as well) against using the decks to copy commercial DVDs, either to a second DVD or to VHS; as a matter of fact, the ads for these devices in the Sunday newspaper flyers always carry a disclaimer that states "Does not duplicate copyrighted material." This probably (I would think almost certainly) means the recorder has at least one sensor and control circuitry that will detect Macrovision (and other copy-guard schemes) on commercial DVDs, will display a warning on the user's TV screen if copying is attempted, and will not allow the operation to continue.

Needless to say, the copying operation will fail, turning the blank DVD in the machine into a round piece of plastic unusable for anything except, perhaps, a coaster. If anything at all gets on the disc before the copying procedure is thwarted, it will almost certainly be an unwatchable mishmash of lines and distortion. The same basic system was used to prevent illicit copying of VHS videos in the '70s and '80s, when video rentals were just beginning. The Macrovision copy-guard system also makes it nearly impossible to use a VCR as an RF modulator for a DVD player; I am sure of this because I tried to use my Panasonic PV-4022 VCR as a modulator with my DVD player when the modulator I had been using went belly-up. The Macrovision copyguard signals caused the video to flash on and off on my TV screen after the disc had been playing about five minutes; eventually the screen went completely blank.