VHS to me was the best in usability, put the tape into the VCR and it turned the VCR on and start playing, also (this is true for European TVs connected with the SCART connector) it would switch the TV to the correct input (and in some TVs even switch on the TV itself) because SCART used a +12V signal in addiction to the video to control automatic video switching (something I miss these days in HDMI, yes there is CEC but I was never able to make it work like the old SCART, and it's quite frankly a mess). And when you finished you turned off your VCR and it started playing TV again.

And controls were basic, play, stop, forward and back, nothing else. You could operate it with 4 buttons on the player without the need for a remote. It was as simple as operating a audio cassette player. Something that was easy to understand even for my grandparents, that after VHS gave up recording and playing stuff because DVDs, BluRay, etc were too complex for them to use (understand about menu and stuff they were not used to, instead of just putting the tape into the VCR and start watching).

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent [-]

VHS has annoyances too. No scene selection and no chapters meant you were almost always forced to FF through trailers and ads to get the show to start and you could overshoot and have to rewind again to get to where you wanted. Pause and frame forward didn't quite work right, and stopping a movie once the credits started to roll meant that the next time you wanted to watch the move you had to sit there for 10 minutes while you rewound the entire length of the film. That annoyance was only made slightly better if you bought an entire separate device for rewinding tapes at faster speeds (at the risk of breaking them as they got older)

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sam1714 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So the best solution would be Video CD. The original VCD worked like an audio CD: random access, time search, chapters, trick play (in forward).

Later on, they added menus, called Playback Control, but many players let you turn that off.

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magic_hamster 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You knew the movie was about to begin because there usually was a copyright slide before the actual movie would start (anyone remember the scary FBI warnings?).

So it was a sign to stop the fast forward and get ready to watch the movie.

Either way it was honestly pretty fun. It was simple, cozy and slow, not in a bad way. When you got together to watch a movie with friends or family, it was the moment when anticipation was building up.

None of that exists with streaming.

	▲	autoexec an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Even going to a video store and picking a movie off the shelf to take home and watch was more fun than browsing streaming services. Streaming services have basically gone out of their way to make selecting a movie annoying and frustrating. Besides prime, which is an ad infested minefield of "Pay us more to watch this on top of what you already pay us every month to watch this", Netflix has to be the worst. They've expressed that they'd rather just pick what you're going to watch and so their last major redesign intentionally hid most of the titles from your view and they relentlessly push what they want to you watch by showing them in ad banners, in full screen ads, and by inserting them over and over again in whatever random categories they decide to let you pick form. If you defy them and ignore what they choose for you they'll punish you by forcing you scroll past bullshit categories like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", or "Cool Mustaches" when all you really want is "Continue Watching", "New", and "Leaving Soon" (which they refuse to give you) followed by the usual genres.