The VH Trade Site Forums Archives

[jtcolumbus]

Over the last 6, maybe 7 years or so I've aquired a number of great boots from places like Napster, Mozilla, etc.... I've even amassed a collection of stuff from torrenting... After visiting this site, I see that number of folks still trade via the mail... What's the advantage vs. just being able to download/upload? It would seem to me (and my newbie brain) that once you get past the cost of a computer and internet access, you can accumulate a great collection for "free."

So fill me in on your thoughts, etc....

[ron]

a) Not everyone has a broadband internet connection
b) Not everyone can leave their computer on for extended periods of time
c) Not everyone has enough free hard drive space
d) Not everyone has a CD or DVD burner so they can enjoy their downloaded show "offline"
e) Not everyone has the technical knowledge or desire to deal with decoding/burning/etc...
f) Trading via mail is more personal
...and the list goes on....

[VHLIVE]

For me Trading is more personal and fun seeking out those shows on trade lists from traders all over the world.

Downloading..... you pretty much get whatever someone decides to upload.

I prefer the old school way of snail mail trading..... the hunt is better than the download.... :D :D :D

VHL

[voxwah0]

VHLIVE wrote:

I prefer the old school way of snail mail trading..... the hunt is better than the download.... :D :D :D

VHL

I'm of the same mind. There is some pretty cool and obscure stuff out there if you look for it. YOu can't always get what you want with torrenting either. Sure you can put in requests for a seed but that's no guarantee that you'll get it. For me it's just easier to do snail mail trades.

[jtcolumbus]

Thanks all, I appreciate the feedback. I guess I'm a little biased from working in the IT industry.... I can see the appeal of the "old school" method. At the end of the day, I'm just happy fans are sharing memories and not making people "pay" for it.

I'm going to give it a shot and see what I think...

[frankm]

Snail Mail trades is more personal and has more human interaction. Relationships are built in Snail Mail trades. Don't get me wrong. I do plenty of Torrents. But both have places in trading as far as I'm concerned.

By-the-way, please don't trade anything you may have acquired that may be lossy. I'm thinking in particular to the recordings you may have obtained via Napster or Modzilla which are probably MP3 and are lossy. It just pollutes the trading pool. It may be fine for personal listening but not for trading. Thanks!

jtcolumbus wrote: Over the last 6, maybe 7 years or so I've aquired a number of great boots from places like Napster, Mozilla, etc.... I've even amassed a collection of stuff from torrenting... After visiting this site, I see that number of folks still trade via the mail... What's the advantage vs. just being able to download/upload? It would seem to me (and my newbie brain) that once you get past the cost of a computer and internet access, you can accumulate a great collection for "free."

So fill me in on your thoughts, etc....

[jtcolumbus]

Eh, what do you mean by lossy?

[Chris UK]

VHLIVE wrote: For me Trading is more personal and fun seeking out those shows on trade lists from traders all over the world.

Downloading..... you pretty much get whatever someone decides to upload.

I prefer the old school way of snail mail trading..... the hunt is better than the download.... :D :D :D

VHL

Well put Shawn!

I find the best stuff out there for me is only available via snail mail traders. The best gems are to be found with old school VHS/Betamax collectors these days. Sadly there are too many people making shitty quality DVDs nowadays, so I prefer to hunt out tapes myself and make my own. I wish people would take the time to learn how to encode video correctly and not degrade footage by, for instance, converting PAL>NTSC or de-interlacing video. There are some great authors out there that know what they are doing (Silver Stallion, Digital Reproductions, Cato, FM, Oryo, BTB etc etc) but there is a lot of filtering to be done to get thru to the primo stuff with less well known authors or SA stuff. The filtering process works a lot better when you develop trading relationships. In getting to know like minded colectors, traders and authors I've also made a hundful of good friends along the way.

Chris.

[Chris UK]

jtcolumbus wrote: Eh, what do you mean by lossy?

A lossy format is any format that introduces a loss in quality compared to the originating format of any source. For instance if you have an NTSC TV signal going out live on air, it has an analogue video bandwidth of approximately 4.2MHZ. However when you record it to VHS that bandwidth drops to around 3MHZ because that is the maximum VHS can display. Therefore VHS is a lossy format as quality is lost resulting is a lack of video detail. However if that same NTSC TV signal was recorded to say DigiBeta which is a broadcast standard tape format, you would get virtually no losses as that tape format can handle the full bandwidth of an NTSC signal, so no detail is lost.

Hope that helps a bit?
Chris.

[Catman_3]

(I'm Johnny from Houston, I use to be THE CATMAN over here for a few years)

I've been snail mail trading for 10 years(vhs tapes,cassette tapes & cds) and I just got into downloading flac files via torrents a few months ago.

I agree with everything Chris, Ron , VOX & Frank have posted.

They both have their hits & misses,IMO.

Sometimes you can find a show from a trader and you guys can become good trading buds or you'll have nothing they want in trade so you have to keep searching for someone who'll trade with you or you can get ripped off and not have the other "trader" honor their end of the deal.

You might find something on a torrnet site that you can't find on a traders list but it needs to be reseeded and than you have to help seed the torrent and keep a good share ratio so that you'll be able to keep downloading from various torrent sites.
Don't even get me started about port forwarding and firewalls!

Just my 2 cents.

[jtcolumbus]

Thanks all. I really apprecaite the feedback and education.

Now who says you can't believe everything you read on the internet????