by Flack » Fri Jul 03, 2020 5:09 am
AArdvark wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:30 pm
And yes, bootleg VHS tapes count, it's pretty much the same thing.
In the early 90s, I was shopping at a flea market and ran across a VHS copy of a local concert I had attended. I was familiar with audio bootlegs, but this was the first video bootleg I had ever run across. I ended up buying four or five VHS bootlegs from that dealer over a few different trips. I paid $20-$30 per tape, which was pretty expensive when you're delivering pizzas.
Fast forward to the mid/late-90s and a couple of my friends got into the tape trading scene (all videos). People were putting up websites with their lists of videos. You had to list the artist, the date of the concert, the length, the generation of the copy, and then a quality rating (from A to F). Most people only traded one tape for one tape, but some traders would do 2:1 blanks, which meant if you sent them two blank tapes, they would copy a bootleg for you on one, and keep the other blank as payment. There were all kinds of rules in this world. If you initiated the trade you had to send first, which meant you had to mail your tape(s) first and then hope that they eventually mailed their tapes to you (usually they did, sometimes they didn't). Also, all tapes had to be recorded in LP (two hour) mode, for best quality.
One of my friends was into alternative music, the other was into classic rock, and I was into heavy metal, so we decided that if we combined all three of our lists into one big list, we would have more to trade with other people. So, that's what we did. Over several years, my collection grew to a couple hundred tapes. I had Metallica tapes, Pantera tapes, Marilyn Manson tapes... just this huge tape collection. I got so into tape trading that I bought a $300 double-decker VCR just for dubbing tapes. All you had to do was press one button and it would rewind both tapes, copy the tape in the top deck to the bottom one, and then eject them both.
Toward the end of this particular hobby, a local Blockbuster went out of business and I discovered that they were throwing all their plastic clamshells out in giant trashbags. I drove over there and took two or three large bags of them. Then I used photoshop to make custom covers for all my bootlegs.
Somewhere in this post I should mention that I very rarely watched these tapes more than once. Many of them were very poor quality. Some were recorded by people standing in the audience, so the video would be all jumpy and blurry.
In 2012 (according to my blog), I ended up tossing out the entire collection (save for about five tapes). Tapes that were super rare (and super expensive) just a few years earlier were being uploaded to Youtube. I had half a dozen Metallica shows; now there are literally hundreds of professionally shot ones on Youtube. It was a fun hobby to get involved in but like a lot of other things, the internet eventually made it obsolete.
[quote=AArdvark post_id=111511 time=1593649846 user_id=20]
And yes, bootleg VHS tapes count, it's pretty much the same thing.
[/quote]
In the early 90s, I was shopping at a flea market and ran across a VHS copy of a local concert I had attended. I was familiar with audio bootlegs, but this was the first video bootleg I had ever run across. I ended up buying four or five VHS bootlegs from that dealer over a few different trips. I paid $20-$30 per tape, which was pretty expensive when you're delivering pizzas.
Fast forward to the mid/late-90s and a couple of my friends got into the tape trading scene (all videos). People were putting up websites with their lists of videos. You had to list the artist, the date of the concert, the length, the generation of the copy, and then a quality rating (from A to F). Most people only traded one tape for one tape, but some traders would do 2:1 blanks, which meant if you sent them two blank tapes, they would copy a bootleg for you on one, and keep the other blank as payment. There were all kinds of rules in this world. If you initiated the trade you had to send first, which meant you had to mail your tape(s) first and then hope that they eventually mailed their tapes to you (usually they did, sometimes they didn't). Also, all tapes had to be recorded in LP (two hour) mode, for best quality.
One of my friends was into alternative music, the other was into classic rock, and I was into heavy metal, so we decided that if we combined all three of our lists into one big list, we would have more to trade with other people. So, that's what we did. Over several years, my collection grew to a couple hundred tapes. I had Metallica tapes, Pantera tapes, Marilyn Manson tapes... just this huge tape collection. I got so into tape trading that I bought a $300 double-decker VCR just for dubbing tapes. All you had to do was press one button and it would rewind both tapes, copy the tape in the top deck to the bottom one, and then eject them both.
Toward the end of this particular hobby, a local Blockbuster went out of business and I discovered that they were throwing all their plastic clamshells out in giant trashbags. I drove over there and took two or three large bags of them. Then I used photoshop to make custom covers for all my bootlegs.
Somewhere in this post I should mention that I very rarely watched these tapes more than once. Many of them were very poor quality. Some were recorded by people standing in the audience, so the video would be all jumpy and blurry.
In 2012 (according to my blog), I ended up tossing out the entire collection (save for about five tapes). Tapes that were super rare (and super expensive) just a few years earlier were being uploaded to Youtube. I had half a dozen Metallica shows; now there are literally hundreds of professionally shot ones on Youtube. It was a fun hobby to get involved in but like a lot of other things, the internet eventually made it obsolete.
[img]http://www.robohara.com/pix/blog/vhs_bootleg_1.jpg[/img]