A few years ago, I had video files on my computer, which I burned onto DVD's so I could then delete those files, thus making more room on my computer. Now, I'm ripping the files from those same DVD's and placing them on my computer, in order to place those files onto YouTube, thus removing the need for those DVD's. (This is perfectly legal. These are old home movies that include me and my family. If there is any copyright, I or family members own it.)
So, while waiting for a disc to be ripped, I started thinking of all the different forms of audio and video technologies that I've lived through. Now, I'm in my 40's, so some of you may remember more and some of you may have never heard of these, either. (Whipper Snappers, get of my lawn! Shakes cane)
Let me start with video. Many of these home movies started as actual film. I remember watching them on a 8mm movie projector. For those who don't remember, it looked something like this:
I remember watching scenes from Star Wars on this thing. No sound, so we made our own soundtrack. It took forever to set up and if the lightbulb blew, you're screwed. Sure you could by a new bulb, but really?
Then came the VCR. I remember going to a store (Colortyme, if my memory serves) and renting a player and movies. Then we bought our first VCR.It looked something like this:
Finally, we could record TV shows! It only could record from 20 different channels, but you could program which channels to get by turning these extremely small wheels. Once you had that set, then you could return to it just by hitting a button. Later VCR's you could get all the channels and programming meant telling it what time to start recording. In order to tell the old one to record, you hit "Record." To stop, you hit "Stop." Wow. Such technology.
Of course, all this meant you had to buy the right type of machine. There was Betamax and VHS. For the longest time, there were both. You had your fans of both and stores had to carry both. Until, finally, sales of Beta fell. VHS became the standard and it reigned the video throne for a long time.
Then came DVDs. I was married by the time DVDs came out. Now, your movies wouldn't look like crap after repeated viewings. No more accidentally recording over your wedding video. You could put bonus stuff on the disc, so you could watch behind the scenes of your favorite movies. Perfect picture! Perfect sound! Until HDTVs came out. Then that perfect picture wasn't so perfect.
So then we come to Blu-Ray. Now, I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. My son has one (actually he watched them on his Playstation 3), but I'm still in the DVD camp. For a while, there were two different formats: Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. But HD-DVD went the way of the dodo and the Betamax and Blu-Ray is now the standard. Much better picture. Better sound.
Now, however, the trend is to remove the physical medium. The public is no longer going to buy film or tape or disc. All content is going to be in the "cloud" and we download it to our computers to watch. Quality can be anything from perfect to potato. All in the name of ease of use (and corporate dollar).
We've come to where I began. I'm taking my old home movies. I had them transferred from film to VHS. Then from VHS to DVD. Now, I'm going from DVD to YouTube.
What's next?
No comments:
Post a Comment