So our VCR is officially borked. Evelyn worked her little one year old magic and the tape is destroyed as well as the VCR being confused as to what its job in the universe is (it won’t even boot up to show us the time). We have some VHS tapes that we don’t watch with any regularity but that Jessica and I have collected. Jessica brought to our marriage a whole slew of Disney kids tapes (Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, Dancing with the Stars, etc.) but we don’t watch those and neither do the kids. Do we buy a new VCR (Sony only, I’m going to keep a unified branding for my electronics) for the few VHS tapes we own or not? What Would’Jou Do? [sorry for the bad play on words – sort of]
I say leave the VCR behind. Then again, I’ve been hoping mine would break for the past two or three years so I’d have an excuse to dump it.
I don’t think the format is completely dead yet. But that’s just me. I don’t have a DVR nor an iPod, so my vote should probably get lost in Florida, but I say buy a duel format device (so your DVD burner and your VHS can duel with each other over which one gets more use).
For Christmas, my sister and I got my parents a sweet DVD Burner / VHS two-in-one, that has one-touch dubbing. That’s a fancy way to say they made it extremely easy to pirate VHS movies onto DVDs. With the click of a button, my mom can be a on the FBI’s ten most hated.
I’d borrow a VCR, record all the movies digitally and burn them to DVD.
That way they’d be better preserved, depending on how you keep your burned DVDs.
Or just store them on a hard drive.
We’ve been sans VCR for about 3 years now and haven’t missed it much. Phil’s idea sounds like the best deal to me – I’ve since decided that my 300+ tape library needs to be relinquished but I just can’t make myself give away the Disney since they’re so stingy about releases. Who knows when “The Sword in the Stone” will be available DVD. 🙂