Changing Technologies and Video Files

I was saying, to my old friend Nigel, the other day, that when it comes to the saving and sharing of movies, the technology we use has changed beyond all recognition.

It wasn't that long ago that Video Tape was the only way to go and thirty years ago, we jumped in and over the years, between the self recorded tapes and the prerecorded tapes, we amassed quite a few of them.

Well, then came DVDs, well technically, the Video CD came somewhere in there but the quality was not great but DVDs were the best.

It seemed to take quite a while but eventually the venerable VCRs started to lose ground and once the recordable and re-recordable DVDs arrived, their days were numbered.

Of course, almost overnight, we all became accustomed to HUGE Hard Drives and Multi GigaByte Thumb Drives and by then we were simply saving videos as computer files.

Then, to muddy the waters, Netflix arrived, in 1997 and with almost limitless access to old movies, old TV shows and the like, these days, many people don't feel the need to actually own their own copy of anything.

Things changed so much that Blockbuster, the destination for millions of us to rent videos and DVDs, went bankrupt in 2010.

The point of all this is:

Over the course of the last few weeks, I simply sent my huge collection of VHS video tapes to the landfill.  It was not an easy decision to make but in the end, no longer having a large sized CRT TV set to show them on and the fact that showing them on my computer screen, via my Elgato video device, only highlighted their grainy quality... it was time!

 Now, instead of a thousand, thick, bulky and heavy VHS tapes, which took up a lot of space, we have less than a hundred DVDs and less than fifty Blu-Ray Discs...

Everything else is saved as computer files and that has turned my computer into a Movie Jukebox, which is great and very convenient.

It has certainly changed the way that I watch movies.

I used to want to watch a movie, from start to finish, all at one sitting because video tape was supposed to stretch out of shape, especially if one didn't completely rewind the tape, before removing it from the machine.

But with advent of watching digital video files, it is easy and none damaging, to simply stop and resume watching, any old time, that I find myself, these days, watching movies in much the same way that I used to read books... one chapter at a time.

Freedom is a great thing.

I try not to think of all of the dollars that we invested in those old video tapes because in the early days, they were not exactly cheap and even averaging out the costs, over the years, it would represent a tidy pile of cash!

C'est la vie.