A friend of mine has got the craziest set up using pre-rolls built-in to Plex.
Every movie has that ratings advice video and the updated one depending on what year the movie is from as well as the copyright videos. Certain movies have movie trailers hardcoded as well Otherwise it’s trailers for upcoming movies or new releases.
Now that’s dedication!!
I miss the 1980’s BBC vhs intro…
I don’t know that I’ve ever got that to work… maybe I should look at it again 
I ripped all my physical media as title only to avoid all that extraneous crap!
I suspected this would happen soon. Apparently Franchise Entertainment Group - the business that oversaw Blockbuster, Video Ezy and EzyDVD - ended their agreement with the US trademark holder. All Blockbuster stores in Australia were then required to rebrand within a certain time frame.
That eliminated a lot of Blockbuster stores in Australia all at once around January last year, including some stores that are still trading now, albeit under different names. In South Australia, Our Video Store (Blockbuster Morphett Vale) and Movieland Firle (Blockbuster Firle) continued trading until January 31st and February 28th respectively. Fairview Video (Blockbuster Fairview Park) is still trading.
Blockbuster Morley was the last remaining Blockbuster in Australia because they continued using the Blockbuster branding as long as possible. According to Ten News, it sounds like the trademark holder called time on that, and sealed their closure in the process.
Also, some of the last pieces. Some membership cards and keychain tags, the genre signs and some pricing cards, among other things.
Also another 100 or so DVDs that I haven’t had a chance to catalogue and shelve yet.
I also managed to track down and backup the MS-DOS based computer cataloguing and rental tracking system used by Blockbuster Australia, VideoMinder, from another long-defunct store (that shall remain nameless).
Now THAT is a keeper. I would’ve wanted to grab the Video Ezy one if I thought to do so at the time
Edit: Video Ezy used software called EzyRetail
If you’re thinking of a DOS based system, this might actually be it:
In late 2000, Video Ezy introduced EzyRetail, a video store specific point of sale Windows-based system exclusively used by Video Ezy. The software was first developed by Radek Soucek and Robert Gongorra and allowed information to be centrally created and pushed down the line to stores, both as real-time and locally stored data. It provided comprehensive reporting capabilities, inventory management and collection abilities, giving the store network one of the most comprehensive databases in retail history. This new system replaced VideoMinder, a then DOS-based system once used by Blockbuster and some older Video Ezy franchisees.
Yep that’s it. I would love to get a hold of it, for nostalgia.
Gawd you guys are making me feel nostalgic…
Went for a job at a video store… can’t recall which… in Logan after I graduated from Film/TV. Figured it’d be enough to keep some money coming in, but keep looking for work in the (real) industry… great knowledge of movies/etc…
Didn’t want me.
How life could have been…
I have a collection of 300-400 (maybe more) DVDs and Blyray that we haven’t even looked at or played in the last 4-5 years so I may look at selling it off but am well aware that I’ll get next to nothing for it and the target market is most likely very small here in Dunedin, NZ anyway.
Here in Oz, second hand DVDs sells for just a couple $$ - if they sell at all.
Yep its pretty much the same here, I’ll keep them as I haven’t ripped all of them yet as I simply don;t have the disk space (or the need for all of them)
Before there was Disc-mate…
Finally sorting n cleaning n digitising my VHS… those 2 piles are just the ones I thought would be interesting…
Seriously though - how did we ever tolerate VHS? Rewinding… fast forwarding… I mean - tape for Christ’s sake…
And now my Sharp VCR has died after a full 10 minutes work. Ok - I’ve had it since 1990-something… but still. Have to try the back-up AWA machine, though it needs a head-clean first. Gonna have to open it up. S’pose better involve my 11yo who has suddenly developed a love for “taking things apart”.
It was truly awful, and I’ve got Weir by Killing Heidi and “HAVE YOU GOT WHAT YOU PAID FOR?” forever emblazoned in my memory
I used to hate how commercial tapes would have previews on them… which you then need to fast forward through… And of course, every different system had different ways of doing things. Older VCRs in particular used to have those counters (feet of tape?) instead of giving an indication of time… some machines could read the time off the tape, but not always entirely accurately, and then if I recall, some machines could identify the “next” recording on a tape - if it had done the recording… But this was useless for any other tapes…
5 tapes cleaned, 1 snapped, 0 digitised. Also forgot how much fun it was opening a cassette… all those rollers flying out everywhere if you open it the wrong way (which I did)…
(Having fun, though. )
I’ve just digitised 126 VCRs… my god thank goodness its over!!! Now have 11 Blu-Rays of archived VCRs.
The most frustrating part was that my Elgato Video capture kept doing this intermittent thing with some VCRs were the video would be in slo mo for the fisrst 1-30 minutes and then the audio would suddenly catch up as soon as it left slo mo. So very annoying. I tried two different Mac Minis (early and late 2009) and a MacBook Pro (Mid 2010), with El Capitan and High Sierra. Still couldn’t work out why it happened. Having to redo a 3 hr VCR is annoying!
Luckily for me, well towards the end days of common VCR usage (Circa 2008?) we bought a new LG VCR as the Phillips one we had developed a line across the picture, that I believe persisted after a head clean.
Still have a working 1987 Panasonic VCR, which IMHO matches or bettered the 2008 LG, but it only has mono sound, and I feel like doing 127 VCRs through it (and I would say I had to do at least 40 again), might have killed it.
I used to enjoy watching videos on VHS. 
Still been meaning to get around to watching some of the cassettes I’ve picked up.
The VCR makes a difference. Some decks were trash, prone to failure and difficult to maintain, with poor picture quality. There was a period throughout the late 1980s and 1990s where machines with digital tracking, digital time counter, high speed rewind and fast-forward, automatic slow-down at end of reel, stable freeze-frame, and Hi-Fi Stereo sound became more common - not standard, but common on higher end decks. Those made a world of difference.
(And of course S-VHS decks went one better, including a built-in time-base corrector that stabilised the image and signal, on top of having a higher resolution.)
My Sony SLV-EZ77 (2000) even has a digital image processor, called the “Reality Regenerator” that supposedly does some image cleanup. Watching anything on that is a pleasure compared to the other machines.
Anyhow…
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you using to do the capture? I have some cassettes I’d like to convert to a digital format for archiving, and since I’m looking at around $45 a tape to have them done professionally, I’m thinking about giving it a shot myself.
