2View: The Self-Erasing VHS tape hacked with a paperclip 

“It looks like you’re trying to bypass the content erase mechanism. Would you like help?”

Matt, you did the world a service, turning a video cassete of Coyote Ugly into a blank cassette.

"This VHS tape will self destruct in two plays" *Dramatic music plays* - *Smoke coming out of VHS machine* - Mission impossible in the video age!

"This party never ends." Well if you watch the film through this VHS it will end after the second time.

As James May once said about a completely different thing, "It's an ingenious solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place." All those silly self-destructing physical media things were stupid, cynical ideas, but this one was probably the most ingenious stupid, cynical idea. :)

The naivety of the this product's inventor is almost charming.

Oh wow this is a blast from the past. Back then I worked at a Texaco gas station in The Haque and we have a machine that dispensed these for a short while. It was barely used and was there for a very short time. It was like a pillar thing so people could do it themselves.

"The Third Miracle" was actually a film about someone who was able to watch a 2View movie three times due to the intervention of God.

I’d pay more for a tape without coyote ugly on it.

I remember those. The price of 12 guilders was pretty much in line with the price of a rental plus the price of a blank table, so it wasn't unreasonable. Much better than those DivX discs that ended up in the rubbish bin 48 hours after opening

What a beautiful piece of plastic clockwork.

I remember being in college and broke but I built a DVD collection by free monthly trials of Netflix burning the DVD as fast as I could and sending it back that day so I could get as many as I could in that period of time. I was a bad boy lol.

"Not my cup of tea" - very polite. Bloody horrible - accurate

A great idea had it come out in 1982 when tapes cost quite a bit more.

Aah, this would have been perfect for a puppet sketch - I can imagine that after getting a long and complicated explanation about the system, Dad would answer : "But why not just buy a blank casette in the first place - then you would not have to watch 'Coyote Ugly' *twice*" followed by the usual "flippin' eck" from the son.

That kind of solution with the paperclip is generally called a "hack" because that's what "hackers" were originally doing-and are still mostly doing, except for a few criminals that gave the category a bad name-that is, finding creative ways of making technology do something that they knew it could do, but was programmed or designed not to do. Overcoming limitations that they personally perceived as unfair with creativity.

A self erasing format is perfect for a "film" like Coyote Ugly. Subjecting someone to it more than twice would violate the Hague Convention.

Thank you Mat for being you. Your channel is consistently great.

A bit less wasteful than the self-erasing DVDs as you could use this as a blank tape.

Reminds me of those disposable DVDs that fortunately failed to take off.

I am willing to bet that someone who worked on the 2View tapes leaked that paperclip trick to a (close) relative, just because they wanted to be the good guy to let at least their family view prerecorded tapes for cheaper or even free. Except it quickly got out of their control, which is ironic, considering that looking at it now, the 2View was a method of asserting control!

Reminds me of "Copy Control", the failed attempt to stop people ripping the audio off a CD and burning copies for their friends. Unfortunately, it never worked on a Mac, and it was fairly easy to defeat on a PC, so it was a lot of effort for very little gain.

The idea that info on hacking a VHS was circulated ON the internet as we know it just highlights how much the emerging technology was already overwhelming the legacy technology. This was perhaps the last time anybody bothered discussing VHS on the web, because chatter moved on to hacking DVD players. Anyway, this concept of "limited views unless you pay again" is still the wet dream of Hollywood. They would LOVE to charge each and every person for every view of every media they consume. No more buying a movie to own it. You pay forever. Streaming is where they want to go next, if they can ever figure out those pesky expiring content licenses...

At least they let you keep a blank tape instead of becoming a coaster like Flexplay discs.

I once got a one-view ... preview? Focus group? A yet-to-be-aired sitcom with a questionnaire to fill out to decide whether it would go to production VHS tape that, upon disassembling after watching, had a magnet beside one of the screws at the top. If only I'd taken it apart and removed the magnet before watching, 25 years later I could upload that pilot to youtube ... No great loss. I don't remember anything about the show, other than there was a reason it didn't get picked up for production.

I was kinda expecting something completely different... Like a tape you send to a loved one or something that automatically erases so no one else could watch it...

Mission Impossible tape had the advantage of self-destructing with satisfying smoke.

A friend dragged me to see Coyote Ugly in theaters, saying he wanted to check it out because of the "hot babes". Afterward I said I was surprised he wanted to see a chick flick, which he took offense to and insisted he thought it was about "hot babes". The next week we went to go see Hollow Man... except he bought tickets to Coyote Ugly again, which he said was an accident. When he came out some time later, the man was genuinely confused why nobody in the friendgroup was surprised by the revelation. All of that out of the way: Mat, you are officially the second person I've ever known of to have willingly watched Coyote Ugly twice. Be proud, buddy!

_Coyote Ugly_ stars Piper Perabo, whose father (George Perabo) was the dean of my college's English department. That's not enough to make me want to see the film, though.

It's a bit like car manufacturers locking out features if you don't pay their -ransom- subscription. Sooner or later someone will figure out how to hack them to work permanently (if they haven't done already) and this silly idea will feature in a Techmoan video a few decades later.

I got a DVD player in 2000 when I got a PS2 as I expect many people did, which wouldn’t have helped a format like this in 2001.

Such a clever mechanism in service of such a whiff of an idea!

The manufacturer went to the effort of creating the tape so only having it only being able to watch it twice has no benefit to the retailer. It’s not like a rental where it’s cheaper because it can be rented out multiple times with income each time.

Man, companies have been trying _forever_ to defeat the right of ownership and trying to sell it as a _good_ thing.

12:20 I'd be interested to see you look at the tape again with a different capture system (or just on a TV). The tape isn't completely blank, at least not right at that moment, it's just so noisy that the capture software is deciding to blank it out instead of showing you a bunch of static.

I was ready for disappointment when you mentioned rivets, I really wanted to see how it worked on the inside. Very clever mechanism

What a film to demo the system with.... The irony is strong.... Coyote Ugly :- The Party That Never Ends... Well it does on 2View

Amazing. So every-time it plays - even after it's erased - it's got a big spring loaded plastic leaver scraping along the tape! Hopefully not on the oxide side...

Bring back the puppets! 😂

If this had been released today, there would be a hundred RU-vid videos on how to circumvent the mechanism by this evening 😊.

In theory, with ×2 VHS tapes and a recorder, you can play the movie and record it on to a blank tape. Then play the movie twice and erase the original tape. And then re-record the movie back onto the 2way vhs. I miss the 90's

0:50 Buena vista are the adult movie branch of Disney, figures they be the ones to try push for a format where they control ownership of the movie

Knew they made self destructing DVDs. Didn’t know VHS tapes as well. Basically, it’s the VHS version of FlexPlay. Only difference is with the DVDs, if they were exposed to air for 48 hours or more, they would become unusable.

"NU IN DE BIOSCOOP" Dutch is wild

Seriously fascinating that! Such a random product! So cool ❤

Two views would be optimistic for much of Hollywood's output nowadays!

"this party never ends" buena vista: "that's what you think" 😂

You will own nothing, and you will be happy.......once Coyote Ugly has been erased.

I like the idea, say the orginal was 20 quid, but to rent was 3 quid, but this was say 6 quid. Incredible. How much was 11.99 in pounds back then though? I should really post after watching it all, ah well, it's done now.

Folks have said that companies have become more evil over the years- and that's true. For sure. But the reality is they've only been able to become more evil because the options have become available to them. A tape you can only watch twice that you can easily hack and likely hacks were found fast. Ok, great. The anti-consumer attempt thwarted. Now today you "buy" a movie that's in "Your library" and the company decides that it's not yours anymore, it was only a license. Despite it saying "Buy" and "your library" it was never yours because you didn't read the 50 page EULA, and it's on their server so they just yoink it. And you get people even arguing this is how it is. "It's just a license" or "You think you own the copyright??" No- I own the copy I purchased, they said buy and it's my library. Not "My license". It's just a load of BS that they want to try to enforce. Sony even tried this recently by removing discovery videos from people who bought it. The backlash was so big they had to reverse it. Because people BOUGHT the movie. It's not rented, there's no time limit. Because if they said any of that- it wouldn't sell. Media is a mess today. They tried back then with crap like this and those disposable DVDs but this isn't what consumers want it's not what they're advertising either But yes, even back then they were willing to spend a ton of money R&Ding this PoS, making new molds to make all this possible and then all the advertising to sell you on this 'great new product' that was not worth your money. Much like a lot of today's digital 'licenses'

20 minutes of ads at the beginning? That’s disgusting. Digital Restrictions Management never fails to be hostile towards the consumer in as many different ways as possible.

Ah....Saturday afterrnoon where I am....and here comes Techmoan. A highlight of the week, really. Just one question.....Ever plan to review vintage Soviet era HiFi stuff? Nothing would make me happier.

Gen-X'er from the Netherlands here, I've never heard of this system. Ever.

Another episode in the series "Techmoan destroys priceless art" 😜

The trusty Paperclip proves its versitility yet again. Interestingly, the Nintendo Switch security was defeated by a Paperclip.

This is one of those charming analogue/mechanical copy protect devices that was a delight to try and defeat back in the day. The paperclip 'cheat' is superb. I guess without this knowledge, if I had one of these, I would have just destroyed the case, without damaging the tape reels and just put them into another standard blank cassette which cost less than a pound, or free if you have them all over the place like I did. :)

I got rid of My Tape collection and most of My DVDs due to having most of them as Digital rips on a harddrive that is sized smaller then half of a DVD case. 50 tapes and over 100 DVDs space freed up.

So you end up with a tape that has your own recording on it, but it has a magnet inside as well? No thanks. I would never use such a tape for anything.

Reminds me of your old stuff! Love odd formats

I'm not keen on this. Using a permanent magnet is not the same as properly erasing a tape because the tape will have all of the magnetic field in one direction, not random. There is a possibility that if you used tapes like this frequently, it could magnetise your deck and in particular audio / control heads. The biggest hazard would be if a machine were left on auto-play by accident, so it never used its own erase head to properly erase the tape for a new recording, which is probably a fairly unlikely eventuality. The paperclip over-ride may not work on all machines. The extra thickness of the base of the tape will foul up on the cassette carriage of some models and it could even do damage if the paperclip fell off.

💀🎶Re-record after fade away, re-record after fade away🎵💀

Pity this concept didn’t take off…there were a lot of crappy late 90’s (& 00’s) films that should’ve disappeared forever 😂😂

"The point of no return" idiom makes sense here.... :) Great video and one really odd item which I never seen!

All these self-destructing formats studios created to cut out rental fascinate me. Love your channel been watching it for years but have you covered DivX DVD by circuit City? Imagine a DVD player that required you to hook up a modem. Wild.

I'm Dutch and - now I think about it - I can remember seeing these for sale at gas-stations, although I never gave them a 2nd thought at all; always thought they were just 2 movies on 1 tape; as you said, by the time it got released, nobody cared about VHS anymore; only cheap DVD movie deals ...

Coyote Ugly only really gets good on the 3rd viewing. :)

If this was a thing where I grew up, I would've absolutely picked a first tape I didn't like (like Coyote Ugly), let it go blank, and then use the first play of every subsequent one to tape-to-tape copy its contents onto the previous (now blank) tape. Basically unlimited movies you can watch forever, all for the cost of the first tape in the cycle.

Never have I ever heard of this. VHS was my teen years in the early late 90's. Good stuff.

While it may be a stupid product, I do like the spring-loaded maze that gets navigated by a roll of tape. It's a cool concept.

As you said, respect to the designers for coming up with the idea and implementation, but it was a solution to a problem that basically did not exist at the time of launch.

Who else was _dying_ to see what was inside this cassette ??!!

It´s because of this videos that I love your channel! Another brilliant one showing some little known "brilliant" thing!

You're a legend, Sebastian - dank U wel.

I like the idea, that that kind of tape could be used as a blank tape afterwards. Other systems leave a lot of unuseable waste.

They might have well labelled it "Crap film with Free 5Min Puzzle included!" Human nature regards anything like this as a challenge to be defeated and only an elderly studio bean-counter would think this was a good idea.

Where should we make our test market for this device which relies on a high-trust, rule following, technically naive consumer? How about the Netherlands, highly libertarian and home to the world's biggest lock-picking community? Sounds good.

The mechanism is really ingenious in its simplicity 😮

awaken friends, techmoan has uploaded

Even during the VHS period companies didn't want you to own the media you had bought. Power to the pirates.

Ok , that's ridiculous . Who watches "Coyote Ugly" more than once ? 😂

I had already watched Coyote Ugly twice before watching this video

There are two types of engineers. Some make things last as long as possible. Others make those same things disposable.

There was a novel by Dick Francis which involved the plot device of a computer program on a tape which had been hacked with a magnet so that it would only play once, erasing it in the process. Thus the person who thought they had got hold of it and tried it to make sure they hadn't been palmed off with a blank, hadn't. I wonder if the inventors of this had read it?

Did not know about. Great vid!

Another great vid! Thankyou! Entertaining as always!! IF you lived through the 60s to now you realise looking back how technology evolved in so many ways. To be honest, I loved certain parts of that experiencing, loving, enjoying what it over the decades offered. NOW technology moves so fast the love, the excitement, the longing for, the saving your hard earned pennies for; is lost. You buy that new mobile and within a year its superceded by another model.. If I had the chance to relive an era ? IT would NOT be the late 20th century to now!

😂 “the party never ends”

I can't believe they were pushing a new vhs device like this at this time. Funny thing is Rental vhs like redboxes were available in private communities in Florida and DVDs were on it's way in to replace the vhs around this time. Yes, redbox wasn't the first.

Same here. After I got my Panasonic A0310 in 1998, I never purchased another new VHS movie.

There are a number of films that should be blanked after 5 minutes. 😂😂

Inspector Gadget should have been released on this format

They should have thought of the defeat mechanism and worked out how to stop the product self destructing. Almost as silly as Nespresso not realising their coffee pods could be freely copied.

In the US my friend had a sega promotional tape that came with a game magazine in around 96. It was meant to play once but he knew it would erase and he took the magnet out

I think the price was another problem. 12 guilders for a prerecorded tape was ridiculous.

The Third Miracle. On a two view cassette. Get it? I laughed so hard.

Matt you sure had a nice time with this one but wait until you find out you just destroyed the last originally sealed 2view cassette in existence which could've bought you a small island had you put it on auction instead XD

7:19 I was like "What could he possibly mean by this?" but then I saw the clips and... Well yeah, I did not expect that.

That's why they used Coyote Ugly as a movie for this concept; nobody wants to see it more then once. Hell, I saw it in the movie theater because it was the only thing with a decent airco that summer.

The way this would have worked for the company was a great solution. The way customers came up with the hack was even more impressive. I wonder, how do you ever come up with the idea to use a paperclip?

With VHS quickly turning into a dead format in 2002 you have to wonder why they put so much effort into creating this thing.

Great vid, never heard of this product and clever use of the mechanism to erase the tape thwarted by a little paperclip😂😂 Love cleaning old vhs tapes that are mouldy and have used drills to gain access to them in the past as the brass head screws are hard to drill. Finally realised after doing a couple and making a right mess that the brass heads are near impossible to drill through without the right bit and I was merely heating up the head and melting the plastic😂 Now I use the soldering iron. Far less messy if a bit smelly with the burning plastic. They tried everything to keep people from opening the tapes to stop swapping the spools, but where theres a will theres always a way😂