Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

foone.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 260 posts

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#91

Post by philwelch »

ghaff wrote: post #76
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general trend seems to be towards not owning anything in general.

I'm not sure how true that is as a general statement. Definitely yes for digital content that used to be shipped on physical media: music, movies, software, books to some degree. Uber and Zipcar (and competitors)--along with incremental public transit and cycling infrastructure along with e-bikes--have probably made it marginally easier to get off without owning a car in some locations. But other than that I can't th…

What about homes?

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#92

Post by danbruc »

delecti wrote: post #70
danbruc wrote: post #56

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.

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…

I am at least aware of the diagonal recording on VHS tapes, that is why I assumed it might be hard do build a generic reader as you could not necessarily take advantage of the geometry or the speed of the tape or things like that. There is probably a good reason for the complexity inside an old VHS recorder.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#93

Post by patapong »

sneak wrote: post #89
patapong wrote: post #73

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.

You are the person opening the red tapes to be able to watch them again!

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#94

Post by LudwigNagasena »

ghaff wrote: post #76
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general trend seems to be towards not owning anything in general.

I'm not sure how true that is as a general statement. Definitely yes for digital content that used to be shipped on physical media: music, movies, software, books to some degree. Uber and Zipcar (and competitors)--along with incremental public transit and cycling infrastructure along with e-bikes--have probably made it marginally easier to get off without owning a car in some locations. But other than that I can't th…

The number of homeowners in the US has plateaued after the Great Recession while the number of people who rent housing has been increasing since then. Yes, your clothes and kitchen appliances are safe for now, but who knows for how long?: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#95

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #2

> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I'm just speechless.

ABC Britain made this probably amazing anthology series in 1962 called Out of This World [1].

I say probably because out of the 14 episodes made the only one left today is episode 3, Little Lost Robot [2], the first adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. The reason we don't have the other episodes? Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.

So many treasure troves, art and otherwise, have been lost to carelessness; perhaps with the new found generatively hallucinatory powers of statistical learning we could see some restorative trend, a retro-magination, based on extant leftovers. Perhaps Aristotle did write a treatise on Comedy after all [3].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163475/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#97

Post by [deleted] »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #2

> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I'm just speechless.

[deleted]

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#98

Post by btilly »

ghaff wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which occasionally has unexpected consequences. The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway , but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, th…

For that matter, the licensing of the music on certain TV series didn't anticipate DVDs. Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati were missing a lot of the original music on the DVDs--although this is apparently partly corrected in the newer complete series releases.

Yes, the high profile examples can get fixed.

But the second tier ones don't. There isn't so much money to be made from fixing them, nor is there the public pressure. So they languish..indefinitely.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#99

Post by iamdbtoo »

ghaff wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which occasionally has unexpected consequences. The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway , but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, th…

For that matter, the licensing of the music on certain TV series didn't anticipate DVDs. Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati were missing a lot of the original music on the DVDs--although this is apparently partly corrected in the newer complete series releases.

Similarly, Beavis and Butthead has never had a release that mirrors the broadcast because of the music videos.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#100

Post by dunham »

danbruc wrote: post #92
delecti wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am at least aware of the diagonal recording on VHS tapes, that is why I assumed it might be hard do build a generic reader as you could not necessarily take advantage of the geometry or the speed of the tape or things like that. There is probably a good reason for the complexity inside an old VHS recorder.

Other tidbits I recall from what my Dad told me years ago. He repaired VCRs for a while.

The beta machines would phase shift the signal 180˚ every other frame when writing, and they use that for noise cancellation. VHS did four frames at 90˚ each, because of patents.

The read heads were on a spinning drum. Beta machines had an L loading system that would grab the tape and wrap it almost all the way around the drum with the read heads, exposing more tape at once to the reading mechanism. VHS had an M loading system that grabbed the tape on either side and pulled it up, covering maybe half of the drum, because of patents.

And supposedly VHS won out because Sony was begging a lot of money for patent licensing. But tape capacity was probably a factor, too.

Post reply on HN