Blockbuster Video VHS insert template

by zdw • 2 years ago

340 86 2 years ago

wirthjason• 2 years ago

This is a great addition next to my race car VHS rewinder.

rivetsec• 2 years ago

That's right. One could erase all kinds of video tapes by running a simple magnetic degausser over them. If one were so inclined.

genghisjahn• 2 years ago

I feel like we aren’t supposed to talk about that. Like it’s a rule.

blorenz• 2 years ago

This is beautiful. What warm memories this evokes. Now I can adjust the dimensions and make some dust covers for my books in the Blockbuster video style!

donw3• 2 years ago

Renting a movie with Mom and Dad was a special kind of excitement as a kid.

Walking around the store, looking at all the covers to try and figure out what we were going to watch. Usually, you had seen a preview for any given movie, or had at least heard about it, but there was still a lot of "rolling the dice", especially if the actor was famous: I saw Battlefield Earth because the cover looked cool and I liked space sci-fi, but the movie itself made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

It was, I wonder if such physical experiences will come back in the future.

tourmalinetaco2• 2 years ago

Even renting digitally had a certain intimacy and enjoyment to it. The wait was exciting. Picking out what you wanted, waiting to get home/have it arrive in the mail let the mind explore the movie and build a personal connection to it, something that streaming just doesn’t fulfill to me.

code_duck• 2 years ago

Blockbuster does still exist and the trademarks are owned by Dish Network. The sole remaining franchisee is in Bend, Oregon.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I think that I saw a news story, that it was closed, now.

Doesn't mean the trademarks aren't valid, though. Here, there be [legal] dragonnes...

al_borland• 2 years ago

Looks like it's still open, at least based on Google Maps.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/cE9MCA7TZAdwYSkB6

jerrysievert• 2 years ago

they seem to still be getting in new releases, at least as of the end of July:

https://bendblockbuster.com/new-releases/

the Alaska blockbuster did close though.

kirbyderby47• 2 years ago

It's still open. I live in Bend and love going there to rent movies.

kaoD• 2 years ago

owned by Dish Network

That explains www.blockbuster.com linking Sling TV.

jakderrida2• 2 years ago

I feel like it should instead link to a video in the sling.com domain with almost patronizing instructions on how to convert their login to Sling and promote it as "Your very own Blockbuster at home".

davidw2• 2 years ago

Yep - it's a few blocks from where I live. It seems to attract a fair number of tourists.

solardev2• 2 years ago

Seems like there's a few of us in Bend. Anyone interested in a meetup? Hell, maybe at Blockbuster? :)

HappMacDonald• 2 years ago

I used to go to a board game players meetup at Pappy's and now it's a car wash so I dun want that happening to our Blockbuster next.

vharuck• 2 years ago

I appreciate the effort put into breaking down the barcode's information.

tisdadd• 2 years ago

I remember when that location closed, as I went to college nearby. Fun that you did the championships there. Also, really nice work.

geraldalewis• 2 years ago

I give this project five bags of popcorn and a little commemorative octocat keychain.

gedy• 2 years ago

This would make a fun Jellyfin theme, ha

olegious• 2 years ago

lol this brings back memories. Spent 5 years working in BBV in high school and college, my first day on the job was when they installed dvd shelves in the middle of the store, was there when we removed all VHS, was there when Netflix streaming began and when we launched our own streaming service. Good times.

guidedlight• 2 years ago

These look very similar to the ones used in New Zealand. I wonder what the regional differences are, particularly the barcode.

rhplus• 2 years ago

If memory serves me correctly, the main difference is that the reels on the tapes rotated anti-clockwise in the Southern hemisphere due to the Coriolis effect.

joering2• 2 years ago

As funny as it seems, I am glad nobody thought about it as a true way to prevent cross-zoning like with ridiculous unhelpful initial DVD discs/players Zoning where you could only change your zone 5 times which btw wish someone sue player makers for that.

Its just a matter of reversing the tape content, but I could imagine zoning south versus north hemi, so Australia VHS would not work in Europe :) I mean it would work but you would watch in reverse :)

anothername12• 2 years ago

Man I miss walking into a BBV and there was this dude at the counter who was absolute expert in horror movies… got me started in Dario Argento, French extreme… Can’t get that out of “max”/Netflix/prime etc

whatrocks• 2 years ago

The memories! I once wrote a short story once about the “other” last Blockbuster - a place where your VHS videos might just let you truly relive your past, at some great cost, of course. Anyway, I love when weird stuff like this comes to dwell on GitHub.

Here’s the story

https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/the-other-last-blo...

jw_cook• 2 years ago

That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing!

JeremyMorgan• 2 years ago

This brings back some nostalgia for sure!

I was a BB customer and worked for Hollywood Video for quite a while, just as Netflix started taking over. It was sad.

There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals. Looking back and seeing Netflix and the other streaming options sprouting up, and the "cut the cord" movement.. it was neat. Until you look at where we are now. We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.

We all got swindled, and it's too late to do anything about it now.

tourmalinetaco2• 2 years ago

The only thing we can do, as consumers, is stop paying for streaming, pay/rent physical media, and if we truly “need” on-demand streaming then piracy is always a moral option to abusive multi-billion dollar businesses. A $5/mo VPN is far more value than you can get out of streaming, especially if you invest the saved money into a Jellyfin server.

ikurei2• 2 years ago

There's a lot to be said about the "old school" way of movie rentals.

Please do say it! I'm old enough to remember VHS and video clubs, but may be not old enough to have a lot of nostalgia about it.

I can't think of what was better then. Sometimes you'd get a kind and knowledgeable video club owner who'd made fantastic recommendations, but more often than not it was an underpayed kid who just wanted to go home.

May be people used to take watching a move more seriously, and therefore enjoy it more, when the process was more involved and you didn't have millions of movies and shows a few clicks away, but does that count as an advantage?

We're now paying and exponential amount of money for the same level of entertainment.

This was certainly not true where I lived. The ammount of movies and shows that get watched in an average household these days would bankrupt the family in the 90s.

BrenBarn• 2 years ago

What I found better about it was the algorithm-free browsing experience. You would just look at the shelves and decide what to watch. The movies were broken down into basic genres, and sometimes there would be "staff picks" or something, but beyond that it was just you and the movies. This meant sometimes you watched really bad stuff, or good stuff, or stuff you wouldn't normally watch, or whatever.

No doubt there's a certain amount of nostalgia baked into these impressions. But definitely the thing I remember most fondly about that era was how decisions about things (movies, music, cereals, blenders, etc.) were made by looking at what was available and (maybe) doing a bit of research with external sources (like a "movie guide" book or whatever), rather than constantly wading through a morass of "recommendations", fake reviews, broken search functionality, and so on.

ffgjgf1• 2 years ago

But overall isn’t it cheaper now than it was before?

e.g. if you don’t like monthly fees it’s still possible to “rent” movies on Apple TV, Amazon etc. for $5 (so cheaper than BB inflation adjusted).

Movies hardly make any money anymore outside of cinemas while DVD/VHS used to be a significant revenue source (up to 50%).

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

Since this is a YC site, "Who really killed Blockbuster video": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-really-killed-bloc...

We SHOULD have been streaming on Blockbuster and not Netflix today, but history is just a chain of blunders stitched together.

immibis• 2 years ago

From a Blockbuster shareholder perspective, that would be good. From a user perspective, streaming is nothing like video rental and I don't see why we should expect them to be the same company. Why should a rental company that pivots to streaming be better for overall society than a native streaming company (which Netflix isn't, I note).

_heimdall2• 2 years ago

Netflix started out as a DVD rental service. The model was slightly different with a subscription that allowed you to have a certain number of DVDs at once, but it was still renting discs.

If they could pivot from rentals to streaming, why couldn't Blockbuster have done it?

hluska3• 2 years ago

The idea is that Blockbuster already had strong relationships with practically all the makers. Transitioning to streaming would have been very hard, but coming into the market with preexisting relationships would have been a huge advantage.

On the user side, the storefronts could have helped a lot of less technical people set up their first streaming accounts at home. It was a massive mental leap to go from “movies come out of that box under my tv” to streaming and the storefronts could have helped people make that transition.

It’s all to theoretical to talk about whether it would be good or bad for users. Implementing it correctly would have relied on Blockbuster being able to turn itself into a technology company without cannibalizing those things that made it attractive to makers. That is a very hard thing to do and they had to pull it off in a moving market.

coding-saints• 2 years ago

My parents owned a mom/pop video store during my childhood. It's still crazy to look back at how in-demand VHS tapes were. We lived in a super small town so there was zero competition. Cable was not common in every home yet. "Be kind, rewind" cost a buck if forgotten. Rewinding to the beginning of VHS tapes was honestly so long that nobody really forgot. The store was eventually acquired by some regional chain, and almost like magic the future started taking its form. So cool to see this.

NotCamelCase• 2 years ago

So, you needed to rewind the tape to the beginning if you wanted to return it after having partially watched it i.e. at 40%? Now I wonder, did the store owners check each tape on return for this? I hope it was a quick process..

Rewinding to the beginning of VHS tapes was honestly so long that nobody really forgot.

Hmm, if it took so long, wouldn't it have caused the reverse effect? That people would ignore it out of laziness? Maybe I'm too spoiled! :D

_m_p• 2 years ago

Interestingly, in the very first iteration of home video cassette rentals, the tapes could not be rewound at home:

These rental cassettes were red, approximately 7 inches (180 mm) high by 6.5 inches (170 mm) wide by 1.5 inches (38 mm) deep (however used the same videotape used today) and could not be rewound by a home Cartrivision recorder. Rather, they were rewound by a special machine upon their return to the retailer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision

8organicbits• 2 years ago

I recall them having a transparent window so you could see where the tape was. I think the process would have been: slide the VHS out of the sleeve and glance at where the tape was positioned. Should take just a second.

LocalH• 2 years ago

I mean, you could look at most VHS tapes and tell if they're rewound or not. Don't even need to insert them into a VCR.

eszed• 2 years ago

Further wrinkle: it only took a long time in your VCR, which (we all believed) was also bad for your VCR (I mean, maybe? But avoiding stressing the VCR's mechanism was why it took a long time). So, gadget catalogs sold standalone high-speed VCR rewinders, which just about anyone who watched a lot of movies owned. They took less than a minute to rewind a cassette.

asveikau• 2 years ago

What I remember is that it was a cultural part of movie watching to rewind when the credits hit. You'd use that time to discuss what you saw with whoever you were viewing with. That's how I did it.

dwighttk3• 2 years ago

Quick process? Just look at it… every rewound tape has all the tape on the same side.

cronix• 2 years ago

It took about 3 seconds to check. Pop open the case the tapes came in and look at the plastic window and you can easily see both reels. If the tape was all on the left reel, it was rewound. Just about all rental places did this when you returned the tape. Audio cassette tapes were the same way. The VHS cassette was basically just a larger version of an audio cassette with wider and longer tape.

Pic of rewound VHS: https://www.becomingminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...

qingcharles• 2 years ago

If you left the tape running after the end of the movie, the VCR would usually rewind it automatically when it hit the end of the spool.

ponco• 2 years ago

Our family VCR had the "EZ Rewind" setting which would automatically rewind it to the beginning once the movie ended. Saved a lot of hassle.

garfieldnate2• 2 years ago

You can tell by looking at a VHS tape if it's been rewound or not; there are two little windows that let you see the tape reels, and all of the black stuff should be in the left window.

osigurdson• 2 years ago

Lucky that your parent's shop got acquired. It was amazing to see - Blockbuster shops popping up here and there, all the while it seemed that virtually everyone could see the tsunami coming (except Blockbuster).

mentos• 2 years ago

Curious what revenue the store was generating without any competition in your small town?

itomato• 2 years ago

The logical thing now is to take in a list of UPCs and Geolocation data to generate labels for an entire VHS collection.

samstave• 2 years ago

FYI, and interesting thing one can do with this, is load it up as a template in BarTender, by Seagull Scientific, and have a table of all your video collection, and it can autogenterate all the barcodes you'd want - additionally - one can put a QRcode barcode on it pointing to the IMDB rating for it. Or a QR code going to a google sheet library of all your videos... so if you wanted a way to automate print barcodes for a bunch of custom labels, Bartender is the best.

I was making employee badges and someone said they were a "Card Carrying Conspiracy Theorist" so I was making ID badges, and though "huh - what would a "Conspiracy Theorist Badge" look like so while I was learning Bartender I made these.

https://imgur.com/a/badge-iterations-mwyjf9x

Where all the elements are driven by a table (you can connect them to xls, csv, sheets, any DB etc..

You can do barcodes in any format.

(point being you can load in the design elements of this inkscape - and make your own custom sleeves for your library super easy and have the barcodes generate correctly.)

https://www.seagullscientific.com/software/

whartung• 2 years ago

Outside of going to the movies, Blockbuster was pretty much my sole source of video.

I had a TV, but no cable and poor reception (I remember watching snowy news broadcasts of the LA riots). I honestly did be not miss it. This was pre-internet, so most of my consumption was through books.

The interesting thing was when BB would get the latest box set of the X-files. Pretty much the closest you could get to binging at the time. 4-5 tapes, 2 episodes per (it was never the entire season). Watch a tape per week. Always excited when the new set arrived.

repeekad2• 2 years ago

it’s crazy to think VHS and DVD came and went in only a few decades

I remember when Netflix started separating the DVD service from streaming and thinking they were absolutely crazy, because no one would ever want to watch movies from their computer, movies go in that box under the TV…

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

They launched their streaming service in 2007.

I think I first connected a laptop with a tv-out to a TV in like 2003. Wasn’t hard to find a desktop video card with video out.

But the people doing that probably weren’t the first to sign up for a pay streaming service.

The Boxee came out in 2010. Like an early android box for your TV and supported Netflix, but could also stream from a network drive. I remember paying ~CAD$200 (or CAD$250?) for one and got a $25 best buy gift card.

~3 years later I sold the boxee for $100 and bought a Chromecast with that gift card and another few bucks.

jayemar• 2 years ago

That profile image is top notch

mrmaloke• 2 years ago

Agreed. His hacking day of the week is definitely Wednesday

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

Now do Dr. Bronner's soap labels! ;)

Blockbuster Video VHS insert template

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