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VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]
- dvh 1y agoHe should make "shorts" of his own videos that are 8 minutes long.
- haunter 1y agoThis is my main problem with the modern Youtube meta, every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...
- robertlagrant 1y agoEvening television reporting spends about 30s on any one topic, so much so that the dominant effect on the viewer is however the presenter framed the topic initially. This is nothing like that.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoTypical package in the U.K. is about 3 minutes, the main story will have 10-15 minutes on it, with probably two pieces from different correspondents on different angles, an in studio interview, and a live. There’s then the in depth programs which spend half an hour or an hour on a specific subject (dispatches, panorama etc) People are less interested in long form news though, so public service broadcasters in the U.K. have a duty to reach as many people in as many ways.
- Sesse__ 1y agoThere's a perfectly good format for long-form dives: An article. But no, everything needs to be a video because otherwise, how would anyone bother to consume it.
- TylerE 1y agoNo, for the kind of content he produces video is absolutely essential, since much of it is either demonstrating audio and video playback (including things like artifacts and color distortions), and showing how the internal mechanisms operate on partially disassembled machines.
- Sesse__ 1y agoYou can do that just fine with the occasional video inside the article, though. I mean, significant parts of the video is just panning by some device while he's talking.
- rs186 1y agoHis videos have so much higher information density than texts can offer. Videos are just much more efficient and can explain things better for those topics.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI can read an article about 10x faster than watch a video. I don't have a problem with Alec's videos per se, but it's crazy to claim that video is the medium with higher information density. Text is always going to be the better medium for transmitting information, except for cases where the unique advantages of video (moving pictures and sound) help.
- eldaisfish 1y agothere are things you can communicate well in text as well as things that make more sense with visuals. Please, stop thinking in binaries.
- Telaneo 1y agoArticles are capable of using both. The main content can be in text, with an image, a gif or a short video or audio clip here and there to help explain if an illustration is better suited. I wouldn't want to read a phone review that was text only, but one that has a set or two of images and video to show of the camera, a size comparison to a different phone, and you've got most of what you'd want to put in a video anyway. The rest of many youtube videos are just talking heads and stock footage. The substantive parts of many videos, the stuff that actually should be video for better information density, is rarely a majority of any given video. Video is definitely a more engaging form of content for me, but claiming it's more effective at information transfer as compared to text is ridiculous.
- kalleboo 1y agoSome creators still do 10 minute videos but whenever I watch one I feel I'm left with more questions than answers, I really prefer the deeper dives.
- fishgoesblub 1y agoAnd people click on the those videos, and YouTube recommends them because people like them.
- dagurp 1y agoWhy?
- rs186 1y agoPlease no. His videos are long but every minute is worth it. Let someone else make watered down videos that appear to cover everything but don't actually explain anything.
- gosub100 1y agoI respect the guy a lot but I'm not going to watch 2 45m video about gas lanterns. But that's a good thing that we have choices and people like Alec who will put that much effort into the research
- numpad0 1y agoI think the problem is that a lot of creators had ran out of low hanging fruit contents. I feel his script more repetitive than before.
- lewdwig 1y agoI have such a huge nerd crush on this guy. Witnessing the incredible skill of making even the most humble and obsolete of technologies seem like an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity is always a pleasure.
- Finnucane 1y agoBecause at the time it may have been the pinnacle of ingenuity. Engineers had to figure out a new thing, or a way to do a thing in certain constraints, with what they had on hand, and had to be clever about it.
- SirMaster 1y agoAnd they don't have to do that now designing things like folding phones to be super thin with no gap and with cameras with optical zoom and all that? The engineering of a bleeding edge folding smartphone seems pretty ingenious to me.
- justinator 1y agoI still look at every folding smartphone and you can see the crease.
- Finnucane 1y agoIt's always true, that's the point.
- pjerem 1y agoI actually think that "old tech" is pinnacle of human ingenuity. When you see the inside of a camcorder, or a VCR as per his latest videos, those were object humans had to design not only for aesthetics but also for their function. I'm not sure I'm clear but now, I feel like everything is just a randomly designed box stuffed with circuit boards. And more importantly, I really frequently feel like most objects I buy today are never tested by real people before being sent to production lines. If it was the case, somebody, somewhere would have noticed that a tactile snooze button alongside the buttons to change the hour on an alarm clock is stupid, or that the screen is too bright for you to sleep. When objects were a complex arrangement of things that moved smartly together to create a function, the people designing had to test them. They also had to think actively about ergonomics because there were real constraints to solve in creating a camcorder that you can use with only one hand so you'd better place the buttons in an ergonomic place.
- jorl17 1y agoAlec is probably my favorite YouTuber. I remember catching his videos before he really blew up and they ticked all my nerd boxes! Unlike other youtubers I enjoy, I never seem to get tired of his content — keep going!
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI can also recommend: VWestlife This Does Not Compute Michael MJD Tech Tangents Janus Cycle LGR Posy Cathode Ray Dude
- Gracana 1y agoCelGenStudios and Usagi Electric are good channels for vintage computing stuff.
- drooopy 1y agoIt's a shame that Druaga1 stopped posting on YouTube because he should be on that list.
- encom 1y agoPosy seconded. He's weird (and I'm certain he would agree), but in a fun and interesting way. The music used in his videos is composed and recorded by himself, btw. A recommendation of mine is Bad Obsession Motorsport. Two men in a shed put a Celica engine in an Austin Mini. So far it's taken 12 years and 41 episodes. Some astonishing engineering going there. If you're into cars, I'll also recommend "driving 4 answers". Very well researched and presented videos about engine technology.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>He's weird He's just Dutch :)
- wkjagt 1y agoHe's very Dutch indeed. His English is also full of dutch-isms that maybe only dutch people recognize. I'm Dutch, but live in Canada. Watching his videos make me miss my home country.
- betamaxc- 1y agoIt upsets me that so much video was recorded on tapes instead of film, because it didn’t wear well and looks awful today. The only hope we have now are approximations using AI. Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
- Uvix 1y agoVery few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project). For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.
- philistine 1y agoBlair Witch was shot and edited on tape, converted by telecine to 35mm film for release and then they did a transfer of the 35mm for release on home media. It was only last year that we got a release straight from the tape master.
- fredoralive 1y agoFilm can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness. 80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm. TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
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- tudorizer 1y agoThis video nerd-sniped me so hard. All these mechanics put a smile on my face.
- imglorp 1y agoMemory unlocked. Around 1980, our local, government mandated, public access program for cable TV would loan out the first over-the-shoulder camera he showed, along with the sorta-portable battery VHS recording rig. White balance was always a challenge with those. AV nerds could go out and tape random events that nobody would watch but it kept us off the street.
- kqr2 1y agoEvery time I hear about VHS I like to bring up Marion Stokes : https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-television-news-archive https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
- BoiledCabbage 1y agoThat's incredible - what a project!
- reaperducer 1y agoIt's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings. Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings. With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together. The future has been monetized.
- CWuestefeld 1y agoIt happened 20 years ago, so some folks around here might be too young to remember the Sony rootkit fiasco [1]. Sony decided it would be a good idea to put on their music CDs an auto-run program that would install a rootkit on your Windows computer, whose job it was to be a watchdog for Sony's copyrights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- masfuerte 1y agoI have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky. I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle. Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know. Anyway, it is very sad.
- jihadjihad 1y agoI remember as a kid we had a whole bookcase of those small cassettes for the family camcorder. I always loved getting to put the tiny one into the full-sized VHS, felt like magic that it actually worked when you popped it into the VCR.
- locao 1y agoThis video was recommended to me yesterday and I refused to watch, I believed it would take me into some kind of rabbit hole. Either this guy videos or about VHS (or worst, both). From the comments here, it seems I was right. But now I regret, I could live with a couple of hours of sleeping depravation (I guess).
- justinator 1y agoTechnology Connections always puts out quality content.
- ink_13 1y agoI suggest you start with his dishwasher content
- hmottestad 1y agoPeople at work still don’t believe me when I tell them that there’s no point using the pods that say they have rinse aid built in…
- wkjagt 1y agoI've been wanting to get off pods since that video, but I still have a Costco size stash of them.
- locao 1y agoOh boy, I foresee conflicts at home after watching it. But a person who runs away from conflicts is a coward :)
- masklinn 1y agoTechnology Connections is a rabbit hole of its own, and if you let it it will send you into a billion more. You watch 2h30 about RCA's CED (video disc format from the mid 60s which didn't see production before the early 80s at which point it was DOA), and when the playlist ends you're sad and wonder if you should watch it again. It's great.
- don_searchcraft 1y agoI wish I never got rid of my VCR and tapes.
- snvzz 1y agoPreferred video8 and its successors, they were so much better. We had VHS and used it just to ingest tapes into Video8, keeping our collection purely video8.
- kristianp 1y agoInteresting that camcorders were produced before the widespread use of ccds. The early models used cathode ray tubes to detect the image. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube
- qwesfjttihrdkne 1y ago[flagged]