goodbye to VCR?

[ffutures]

Woke up this morning to find the mains sockets had cut out - looked in the breaker box and the RCD had tripped. So I switched on again, and eventually discovered that the VCR appears to be dead. I can only assume that it went "phut" some time last night.

This might be repairable, and I'll certainly take a look tonight, but I'm not confident of my skills in this area. Also, it has to be a couple of years since I last used it. Replacements aren't readily available, apart from hugely expensive VCR / DVD recorder combos that I don't want to buy, and a bunch of what I can best describe as crap on eBay, e.g. 25 plus postage, no remote.

Bottom line, there's maybe five or six tapes I might want to play again some time, most notably a couple of films that aren't available on DVD as far as I know - Cast a Deadly Spell and Witch Hunt. And of course I actually have about fifty tapes around the place, and they take up a LOT of space I could really use for other things.

Unless it turns out to be an easy fix tonight I think it's time to say goodbye to VCR, and look for someone who can copy a couple of tapes to disk for me.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The VCRs I was using in this room went phut one by one. A couple of days after the second phut, I was looking for a spoon at a local thrift shop and noticed several VCRs. I opted to take a chance on one for ten dollars, including a remote. Like one of the late lamented machines, it has a jog wheel on the set (though not on the remote) that lets me do fancy things with frames. I'm quite happy with it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The thing is that I'm really not watching tapes much anyway - and there's very little I have on tape now that isn't also on DVD. And I can really use the space for the Victorian magazine collection etc., so it makes sense to bring the tape era to an end.