I watched my second movie on the new VCR: The Big Lebowski. Probably hadn’t seen that since college. Weird, but funny movie.
I was reminded of what pre-movie previews are like on VHS. No way to jump to the menu. They were really long. There had to have been 8 previews, and maybe two of them were for movies I vaguely remember hearing of, none that I saw. I could’ve fast forwarded through, but that either would’ve required still fairly slow careful watching or fast guesswork.
My VCR isn’t quite as good as I thought it was. It has an HDMI out port, but it doesn’t even work for the VCR side, only the DVD. The rewind didn’t automatically slow down when rewinding this time, though that may be because I accidentally ejected mid-movie, so the timer was off. The auto-tracking wasn’t very good on today’s VHS, and even playing around with the manual adjustment, it was still not great. May just be the tape is worn too much though. The tracking adjustment is just up and down buttons and has no indicator on screen or anywhere else about where the adjustment is or even that it’s doing anything. But otherwise the VCR gets the job done.