Physical media has a certain amount of durability associated with it, a quality which is naturally determined by the way that they’re stored. Generally this does not involve being abandoned on the porch of a dilapidated, abandoned house where the elements and any passing critter can have their way with it.
Exactly how playable would these VHS tapes and CDs still be? Whether it was out of a sense of burning curiosity, or for a similar reason that [Brady Brandwood] has a habit of adopting former seafood critters like lobsters as adorable pets, these items got recently collected and put to the test.
Normally VHS tapes are kept safely in a little sleeve or box in a dry, cool place, similar to CDs and DVDs. These particular items had however been left for at least a decade out in the open amidst the ransacked remains of abandoned homes. This meant that the VHS tapes were full of dirt and debris, and at least in one case with a spider nest that jammed up the thrift-store VHS/DVD combo player.
The CDs were cleaned and tried in a G5 iMac, with the obvious results there being that as long as the shiny layer with the data was intact, they worked fine. While a damaged disc tried to play somewhat, even the amazing audio CD error-correcting algorithms can not compensate for see-through gashes.
Perhaps the real surprise came from the VHS tapes, none of which had any protection from the elements other than the little plastic flap that keeps human paws from touching the tape directly. Although one tape looked somewhat moldy, after evicting a spider nest and some general clean-up, it played mostly fine.
One tape apparently it had a copy of The Land Before Time movie on it, while others contained various recordings, including of a concert with [Jerry Lee Lewis] and a recording of a Cartoon Network episode. Although the VCR’s head needed to be cleaned once during this whole test to remove some black gunk, none of the tapes seemed to show any signs of sticking, delaminating or any other issue commonly associated with degraded tapes.
This difference in physical durability between CDs and VHS tapes ought to not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever dropped a CD and saw the Scratch of Death™ on its shiny surface, yet the fact that the tapes survived what must have been years of Appalachian seasons is definitely somewhat impressive.
Lucky this author is. I had resigned myself to very modest expectations from the shrinking collection of VHS tapes that outlived my VCR. Even lower from my audio cassettes. Bake out residual moisture and play only once, all the experts say.
“Severely neglected” like all those “tool restoration” videos shot in some 3rd world country where they take a perfectly good and working device, destroy it, make it rust and dirty, then produce content on how amazing job they did “restoring” it.
Somehow I don’t think the abandoned house full of debris in this video was a set, nor do I think the spiders were paid actors. Not saying it’s always the case though.
While the removal of humans from the house might make this a play on words, I suspect the word Maya wanted here was “dilapidated”. (Although, for the structure between the house and the barn, “decapitated” could also apply.)
Depleted of lipids is also possibility, bwahahaha. I have lot of VHS in garage waiting for replay too, but not so heavily depleted of lipids as in this article.
Brand name for chain of low rent liposuction clinics: “Delipidator”?
recording from TV is not bootleg..
Only if it involved boot commercials.
Or maybe moonshine.
CD’s failed to live up to their potential, mainly people are often incapable of caring for them. However, imagine being alive in the 80s and using 750MB media, would be mind blowing
We enjoyed it at the time…