That Said; S-VHS WAS Cutting-Edge Consumer A/V Tech... for barely all of five minutes there in the late-80's.
i mean; as a 1980's Analog A/V-Recording system... it IS reasonably impressive, - Thirty Years on - how well it could perform when at it's best,
and when given reasonably-high-resolution source material to draw from.

and, finally, Design-wise; the TOTL S-VHS VCR Ships-of-the-Line were indeed amongst the most Drop-Dead Gorgeous examples
of the glorious extremes of 1980's Japanese Techno-Excess...

Some of the early DVD menus were amazing. I was blown away when I first saw the menus on the Alien Legacy box set and the Abyss.

Correct. Some DVD menus are almost like a piece of art. You can see that
they really put a lot of effort into creating those.

And I’m sooooo glad it’s a lost art form. I don’t need starting a movie to take longer. Depending on the disc and the player you can waste over five minutes trying to start a film…which is longer than it takes to start a movie in any other previously invented format. Even threading a projector is faster than starting any Disney DVD.

“The customer’s time does not matter so consider it ours.” was the attitude, which I find deeply offensive. Also, threatening children with the FBI and lengthy prison sentences every time they watch a movie is just so screwed up. It’s the first thing they see every time they put in any Disney DVD. The word “PRISON”. And you can’t skip it. Not even the 1000th time you watch the movie. Satanic. Do you know who NEVER sees that warning? Pirates. Only people who pay get threatened with prison. The version downloaded via BT has had all that crap removed.

Customers, deeply ignorant as usual, excuse this because they think the movie is “loading” when you can’t skip stuff. In reality the DVD’s author has decided to deliberately make those things unskipable. Pointless delays are a FEATURE of the DVD format. Anyone who has authored one knows this.


While Forper does inspire conversation, which this forum badly needs, all the conversation he inspires is stupid. He should be banned for the 8th time and also Tasuke should lose his image posting privileges until he shoots some new stuff. He’s put the same pictures of stretched anime, sagging speaker cables and in super large format in so many threads that all you can do is say, “Thank God it wasn’t another series on creepy naked dolls.”

This. 100%.
Did compare Mary Poppins (DVD / LD) a month or two ago and I have grown a beard waiting for the crap ton of trailers on the DVD to finish.

Regarding your second part of the post:
What about this "Forper"? An old banned member of the forum? Sounds like there is a longer story behind this...

Absolutely man! LD was so pure.

Thank you for your "substantive" (?) post. D-VHS would probably do this. But the tech exists in a time I don't like. The decks look goofy and the luxury is gone. I'd prefer to put visually important titles onto SVHS. Its video is better than VHS but still has that analogue smoothness. Recently did 4K Full Metal Jacket to SVHS. I much prefer the look on SVHS. I also record SACDs to metal cassettes- the harshness gets smoothed off and it's much more pleasing.

My primary monitor is a 32" wide CRT btw. Every dub I make on my Sony SLV-R5 Looks incredible to me - better than the harsh DVD.

I guess everyone can't appreciate an analogisation approach.

Nice deck. It's from the perfect bubble era. I like to keep my gear bubble economy or post bubble cash also.

No IRL friends as I suspect many here do not have, including you.



Guy A and Guy B are sitting in their 1 room apartments and crying now because of your comment. Guy A is cying harder because of his vast collection of DVDs.



Okay, so be it. I'll continue on. Good luck in your quests, man.



Really? Coz figuring out how to rip a DVD without menus but in lossless quality is beyond me. Every time I tried with Handbrake I got lossy garbabe. Better for me to leave it to the Gods of Composite video in whom I trust...

I also dumped my VHS in the late '90s in the hope of collecting everything in LD. Turned out I had to resort to DVD, which sucks.



Why not? What do you use your S-VHS deck for then? Thinking of selling?

Who cares? How are the menu creators in any way connected to the original content?

Yep, you know how I feel then.



I don't know who Forper is but my "stupid" thread has garnered a lot of replies and conversation. Calling for my and Tasuke's banning seems pretty tyranical. Do you own this forum? I've read a lot of your posts and you seem pretty antagonistic and hateful to anyone that has a different view to you. I would never call for the banning of anyone anywhere (except for doxing or a crime, certainly not for having a different view on a format!), including of you here, and believe in free speech but are you sure you should be calling for the banning of others with your behaviour?

I very much still like the DVD format even though I find myself collecting mainly LD and 3D Blu ray titles lately.

Some of my favorite pieces of hardware in my collection are my high end DVD players from the late 90’s - early 2000’s which were built very well for their time. In addition, I do find that the picture quality on these early models seem to have a more analog look to them since the manufacturers were were still trying to get the most out the format along with them being optimized for CRT.

As for recording LD or DVD to VHS, my set-up is still optimized to do just that but I haven’t made a transfer in probably 10 years and it was only because I needed to make a test tape for work. Now that technology has advanced to the streaming age and I rarely ever find a working VCR in my line of work anymore, the need for a test tape is pretty much gone at this point.

I still use DVD often. Mostly because my local library lends out DVDs (no blu-ray unfortunately); even new releases. Any TV shows I want to catch up on that I don't want to pay for another streaming service to, I just get whole seasons on DVD from there.

Some DVDs I have contain supplements that haven't and won't be re-released elsewhere like Shriek Show's release of Fulci's Zombi 2. So a good lot of my DVD collection isn't going anywhere.

The go-to program for lossless DVD ripping without menus is MakeMKV (which requires an optical disc drive, not a DVD player). There's a learning curve, but the output is bit-for-bit identical video files that should work with basically any media-player software.

That’s nostalgia and possibly masochist too. You enjoy your eyes tortured with 240 lines of resolution when near 4000 lines of resolution version of the same material is in your hands. Recording high res DSD music onto 8 to 9 bit metal cassettes. You like pain.

This is the most incorrectly used term of our generation.

They were built well FOR ANY TIME, escpecially THIS TIME. My TOTL "ES" Sony universal player is built like garbage in the 2020s. My 1990s Sony DVP was built WELL. NOT FOR ITS TIME. FOR ANY TIME!!!!

That's ridiculous! cassettes don't have "bits" of course.

What? "MakeMKV"? Lossless without menus? But that program is probably only for professionals and costs thousands of dollars right?

Google is your friend: it's a free download.

There's really nothing about it that would make it professionals-only. Every byte on the disc is there for the computer to read--it's just file-wrangling and DRM-circumvention, nothing like capture or re-encoding, which would affect quality. It supports Blu-ray too, and even UHD Blu-ray if you have a jailbroken UHD drive.

EDIT: Just in case there's any confusion about the term "lossless" in this context, I of course mean no loss of what's on the disk, which like virtually all digital video is already lossy. It's simply putting the disk's video and audio streams into more convenient containers. If one were so inclined, one could also save off the trailers and FBI warnings in separate files as a time capsule.

DVD is ultimately just a disc that holds files.