The best VCRs were back in the days when they had the cassette slots on the left, huge vacuum fluorescent displays on the right, and flip down faces hiding zillions of buttons. Back then VCRs had personality: animated icons, transparent cassette doors, VU meters and all kinds of crazy shit. I've had an early 80's JVC with mic inputs for dubbing, a huge slide-out drawer for programming controls and a remote control made out of fucking metal. Later, I had a Mitsubishi that had a sweeeet fast play mode where it would play at 2x with crystal clear picture, making it awesome for porn. That same VCR also had a tuner that would make the scrambled porn channels on cable much more watchable. not perfect, but often pretty clear with negative color as the only side effect.
Then then all became gray boxes with the cassette slots in the middle and the same blue screen OSD, they all felt hollow and cheap and the rewind clutches all failed within a year.
Then DVD came and took it to the back yard and shot it, because those last days of VHS were a tragedy.
A DVD isn't fucked if it's scratched, if it's only a minor scratch you can buff it out (with toothpaste, or you can take it to a store and they will use a machine to do it) and it will play perfectly again.
>>4
The toothpaste trick doesn't work if it's a program, only for music and videos. It tells the disc to skip the fucked bits, which isn't much help when you need some code to run.
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Anonymous2010-10-17 18:54
>>1
My father had an NEC that was sort of like that. The remote wasn't made of metal, but it sure could take a beating. It also had this cool ass metal mirror plate and I could watch the internal reel inside the VHS cassette while it was playing or rewinding in the VCR. Good times, man. Now I got a DVD/VHS combo box to play all my old VHS tapes with.
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Anonymous2010-10-17 23:35
>>7
I say toothpaste is just a polish that can remedy the clear layer to allow the laser through. It has nothing to do with the data layer. If you polished a data layer, you'd fuck it.
>>9
It may not be polishing the data layer, but the way it works is to make the laser skip bad sectors. As I've already explained.
I know this from doing it myself. Yes, if you take it to a shop and have some of the bottom layer removed, then you have a chance of retaining the data. The toothpaste thing won't do that though.
>>10
no it doesn't. that's redickulous. there is nothing special about toothpaste - any polish will do the same thing: simply polishing the clear layer. any problem with the data layer is independent of whether or not the clear layer has a defect that can be polished out.
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Anonymous2010-10-22 23:38
>>12
My friend used to use toothpaste to clean his Dreamcast discs.