Over the decades the video and music industries have tried a wide range of ways to get consumers to buy ‘cheaper’ versions of albums and music, but then limit the playback in some way. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ones is the 2View, as recently featured by [Matt] over at Techmoan on Youtube. This is a VHS tape which works in standard VHS players and offers you all the goodness that VHS offers, like up to 512 lines of PAL video and hard-coded ads and subtitles, but also is restricted to just playing twice. After this second playback and rewinding, the tape self-erases and is blank, leaving you with just an empty VHS tape you can use for your own recordings.
As a form of analog restrictions management (ARM) it’s pretty simple in how it works, with [Matt] taking the now thankfully erased Coyote Ugly tape apart for a demonstration of the inside mechanism. This consists out of effectively just two parts: one plastic, spring-loaded shape that moves against one of the tape spools and follows the amount of tape, meaning minutes watched, and a second arm featuring a permanent magnet that is retained by an inner track inside the first shape until after rewinding twice it is released and ends up against the second spool, erasing the tape until rewound, after which it catches in a neutral position. This then left an erased tape that could be safely recorded on again.
Although cheaper than a comparable VHS tape without this limit, 2View was released in 2001, when in the Netherlands and elsewhere DVDs were demolishing the VHS market. This, combined with the fact that a simple bent paperclip could be stuck inside to retain the erase arm in place to make it a regular VHS tape, meant that it was really a desperate attempt that quickly vanished off the market
Where did 512 lines come from for PAL’s number of lines? Analogue 625/50 PAL as used across (Western) Europe (apart from SECAM France) has 575 active lines (made up of 2 x 287.5 fields).
(In digital formats like MPEG2/h.264 etc. these half lines became full lines and we ended up with 576 active lines.)
IIRC that number is the equivalent horizontal resolution due to the bandwidth.
VHS features a modest resolution, especially color resolution is poor.
It’s nowhere near to full PAL/SECAM/NTSC, it’s rather the equivalent to 240p video on Youtube.
S-VHS might be of better quality, though.
Same goes for normal, but professional VHS VCRs that use good VHS tape.
Or recordings done with pure monochrome video, without color subcarrier.
D-VHS was very good, better than DVD, but didn’t really catch on, sadly.
There even was an HD version of VHS (DTheater).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY
“This tape will self-destruct in two plays….. good luck Mr. Phelps”
I think it would be fun to 3D print the erase mechanism for a standard cassette tape and send self destructing messages to friends, or people you want ransom from.
Permanent magnet at the receiving spool side might be enough to make 1view casette.
For “view only once” message it could be simplified to only have a magnet on winding spool. So you record a message, rewind, place magnet, then when viewing message, it’s erasing as it plays.
It’s not the same without the smoke and the sparks.
I vaguely remember something like that and what a needlenose pliers would do to permanently remove the offending magnet first.
I think we can all commend the concept of a product that does not brick itself after its designed usage, but instead becomes a resource.
You’ve got a point, and I appreciate your optimistic outlook.
About the only justification I can see for such a tech is the video rental by mail services – the reduction in return postage might just justify the extra hassle of a VHS with self destruct. As I recall the lifespan of recordable VHS wasn’t huge anyway, so getting new ones to record that show on at the wrong time of day would be required fairly often. Though by the time this is reportedly doing the rounds seems like HDD filled TV recorders are becoming a thing, so probably not worth it.
I don’t even think that would have worked, keep in mind this was 25 years ago but I was in my very early 20’s and my roomate loved movies…
There was a national chain in the USA called “Media Play” that was almost giving away VHS to make room for DVD (hell my first DVD player was on a fairly budget “comp usa” branded celeron 400 laptop, my second was a PS2) Except for the hottest brand new releases, prices were like 15 bucks a tape and they gave you a few bucks back on their “media bucks” rewards system so it was like buy 3 get 1 free at that time … we had an entire wall of VHS tapes in our rental house living room.
That’s sent me ☠️☠️☠️
well, its better than the self destructing DVD’s, least you could use it as a blank tape AOL floppy disk style
Wow, somehow I seem to remember this, I think I even had one of these and tried the paperclip hack at the time. Or maybe my memory is fooling me :)
So much engineering effort to create artificial scarcity.