this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Because VHS/CRT was such a fucking hassle even when it was the best possible format option for home media. The dawn of LCDs and DVD was a glorious thing.
The first time I experienced a DVD menu and chapter selection without having to rewind was just "Woah."
VHS wasn’t the best format even when it came out. VHS was specifically designed to be a middle ground between quality and affordability. That’s partly why it succeeded in the consumer market, both the tape and the player were cheaper than the other formats of the day. Beta and LaserDisc both had better picture and sound quality but both had their own drawbacks as well as cost. CEDs were cheaper than LaserDisc and predated VHS by several years but didn’t have the industry acceptance of the other formats and had similar drawbacks.
I had never heard of CED and researching it led me to the knowledge that laserdisc was originally called Discovision.
The dawn of LCD's sucked. They were inferior to CRT in most ways, they were bigger and lighter. They eventually got better and cheaper and that is when they took off.
DVD was a day 1 upgrade over vhs for watching movies.
I have a laptop from the mid 90s that looks like mouse trails are on even when they aren’t. This is why mouse trails exist, because early LCDs sucked that bad.
Was, "Be kind, rewind" really that much of a hassle?
Yes. So much so they made completely seperate machines to rewind vhs tapes so your one vcr could continue to do other things at the same time.
Binging movies wasn't much of a thing back then; I can't remember a single time when I wanted to immediately put another video in after just finishing one. Plus it took like 5 minutes to rewind one - I'd usually run to the bathroom and grab a snack and it'd be done by the time I got back. It wasn't any longer than a commercial break, and we were all used to that back then. I remember I once mowed the lawn 5 minutes at a time during commercial breaks because I didn't want to miss the show I was watching, haha!
And how many people actually bought one? Not us, I can tell you that much.
We had one that looked like a corvette.
Aside from rental places and the like, no one.
Evrryone in my family had one. Grandma had 2 cause i watched a lot
My grandparents had one, it made an awful screeching sound
VHS cassettes were also relatively fragile and decay on use (technically so do vinyl records but they are more forgiving). Humans are also really good at ignoring minor flaws in audio, while visual noise and low graphic resolution is much harder to ignore (though CRT messed up the image in one of the best ways possible for the human brain to fill the gaps).
It was tedious and time consuming.
Hitting a button on a device and waiting (gasp!) more than 30 seconds was so tedious!?
... no wonder people constantly pay greedy fucks like Elon than take five seconds to think about ... anything.
I still have a tiny little monophonic CRT I found at a yard sale for like $2 that I use to watch my 1985 letterboxed Star Wars VHS tapes. It's just a different vibe
I once binged IT Crowd using an old CRT monitor as my second screen. Definitely a vibe.