Dear Diary: Sometimes I Miss Video Rental Shops

A thing of the past that I wanted to relive.......the excitement

I could remember the time that my brother bought our very first VCD and we were ecstatic because at that time DVDs weren't being offered yet for rentals because VHS cassettes were also still widely offered by our popular local rental shop at the center of our town. So It was the early 2000 then and after church my brother and I with a few friends would drop by the video rental shop and we would ask for the latest movies to rent to watch.

We would then go home with a very heavy stash of VHS cassettes and later during those years, VCDs. At that time my brother also bought a PC which is the sole purpose is for me to be able to play some PC games so I won't get bored because at that time I was already a dialysis patient.

I had no clue on how to operate a PC at first and the first question I asked my brother really is how to turn it on. He also showed me how to play movies and start some applications and play some games.. Then he told me to copy the VCDs that we rented into to PC itself. So I have no clue how I could do it considering that I am just a few days in getting in hand of a computer. So after I explored and deleted some items in the C partition because they seem to have no use. I finally had it all figured out, how to copy and paste.

That is how we made use much of our renting without paying a penalty for not returning in time because we just copy the VCDs and have it watched later. But I noticed that there was a deteriorated video quality after copying and putting it in a separated disc but it doesn't matter anyways because I cannot do anything about it anyways.

And so, I made a lot of copied movies for our entertainment purposes and my brother also bought a lot of blank discs for the purpose. I also spent a lot of time converting raw videos into a playable form. Then I started to see that the rental shops are starting to dwindle and our favorite video rental shop finally capitulated when the Internet went into being more used for downloading movies.

Now I couldn't help but missed not only the video rental shops that closed for good but also those moments of the feelings of excitement when we drop by the rental shop and would carry back a collection of movies we would watch in our homes and sometimes with friends tagging along to enjoy the movies in our house, such a nostalgia I wanted to relive.

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