Remember how annoying winding up a cassette with your finger used to be? I thought we were past all of that nonsense, but the designers behind the NVDRS MP3 cassette tape have other plans.
While we know that media formats will come and go (be they physical or purely digital), the death of VHS is one of particular weight. Players have died, now tapes have, too.
There are gadgets, and then there are gadgets. And we could write about this Multi-Function Tape Measure in italics all day long.
Converting your old VHS tapes to DVD can be as exciting as watching grass grow, but Kaiser Bass has just released solution that aims at making the whole process simple. The Video to DVD Maker plugs into your PC or Mac and has composite and S-Video inputs for your VHS player (or any other video source like a video camera or iPod) and uses Cyberlink video editing software (or iMovie ’08 for Mac-users) to convert the video file to a digital format that can be burnt to DVD, or encoded for watching on your iPod, PSP or uploaded to YouTube. It’s $80, which sounds like a pretty good deal for anyone with the entire collection of Walker: Texas Ranger on tape in their garage – You need to get that on DVD sooner rather than later, my friend. [Kaiser Baas]
Formats never truly die, but their eras always have a few painful stages of decline. First, there’s the arrival of a promising new competitor, then its steady rise, which is invariably followed by a mourning period and the final purging of last-gen products from the market. The last stage of obsolescence for of the long-presumed-dead format is upon us: JVC has announced that production of their single remaining player will stop immediately.
If you’re looking to waste away an afternoon and get a really unique USB hub out of the deal, Instructables has a step-by-step explaining how to build your own VHS USB hub. Essentially a gutted VHS tape stuffed with LEDs and an old USB hub, the larger form factor will be seen as advantageous to anyone who’s lost their hub behind the crack between their desk and the wall. Say what you will about the superiority of DVD and Blu-ray, but until modders are poking around with optical media 20 years from now, we’re considering it a tie. [instructables via Apartment Therapy]
It’s not easy being a tape nowadays. Your only friends are all in jail, everyone inexplicably likes old-farty vinyl more than you, and now people are even using you to build furniture. This is not how it was supposed to go.
