111–120 of 260 posts
Fascinating. These red tapes feel like a ridiculous and cumbersome idea. Thinking about it, their concept won in the end though, in terms of media consumption and ownership... Our current streaming services feel much more akin to these tapes, where you rely on a centralized entity to decide what you can watch and how, rather than infinitely repayable and transferable video tapes.
My NAS running Jellyfin would like a word.
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 than any other (digital) format. The tech is super simple and requires no proprietary anything. 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 m…
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It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
Does that mean I own every book I've checked out of a library? Every hotel room I've stayed in?
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 than any other (digital) format. The tech is super simple and requires no proprietary anything. 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 m…
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.
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You might be surprised at how the signals are actually recorded on tapes. For VHS tapes for example, it's actually a series of stacked "diagonal" lines of signal. Imagine a sequence of symbols like \\\\\\\\\\\, except at any given horizontal point along the tape there are about 5 stacked traces of signal. They're also diagonal on audio cassettes, but much less "slanted" relative to the tape's length. I don't remember…
If a high resolution reader could “recreate” the entire tape signal in memory, you could do the format specific parsing in software. You could even identify the tape type based on the signal patterns
Certainly this is how the "applesauce" reader works: https://applesaucefdc.com/
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And when will the people crying about virtue signaling admit the concept goes way, way back. Look at how popular necklaces with crosses are, as a prominent example.
Just because something goes way back, doesn't mean one shouldn't complain about it. It was crass 1000 years ago and it's still crass now.
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How is that any different from "buying" a digital rental on Amazon that expires after some length of time?
Morally - I don't see much difference, and think the push towards "rent everything, own nothing" is a bad, bad idea for social cohesion, economic equality, and general health and happiness. Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory prici…
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.
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You might be surprised at how the signals are actually recorded on tapes. For VHS tapes for example, it's actually a series of stacked "diagonal" lines of signal. Imagine a sequence of symbols like \\\\\\\\\\\, except at any given horizontal point along the tape there are about 5 stacked traces of signal. They're also diagonal on audio cassettes, but much less "slanted" relative to the tape's length. I don't remember…
One of the terms was interlaced, the nearly forgotten "i" next to something like 480i (versus 480p). Individual magnetic lines of a VHS tape would only describe half a frame and the two halves would be interlaced back together.
I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.
My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or decoding into AV signals.