Fool's Fire (1992)
This medium length film, (about 57 minutes), is the Crown Jewel of my VHS collection. It was broadcast once on PBS' American Playhouse in March, 1992, and has never been released officially on home video. It's directed by Julie Taymor, (Across the Universe, The Lion King on Broadway, some film adaptations of Shakespearean plays), where the only human cast members are 'little people'; the rest of the cast is grotesque puppets. There are no other films anything like this.
All existing online video of this film is based on my own 2003 .mpg video capture, (this was before divx, xvid, mp4, ts, etc. video formats existed). I still have the Standard Play VHS tape from television, and I own an S-Video VCR which has never been used. An S-video VCR plugs into separate audio and video capture cards on a computer, allowing for .VOB quality video to be created from VHS tape. It can also be used to create .VOB quality video of portions of the VHS tape, and editing such as boosting volume or removing hiss can be done. Stores that advertise VHS to DVD transfers usually have a single machine with VHS Player and DVD burner, so what you get is the whole VHS tape as a DVD, rather than selected portions. I could also make home DVDs of content that was only ever released on VHS tape, if I have them.
I haven't done any new digitizing of VHS in the past fifteen years. I'd need to have the audio and video capture cards moved from the old computer in which they're installed to another computer, then reinstall the software. I'd also need a bigger desk, or have computers in different rooms. That's a bucket list item.
I shared Fool's Fire on the pre-torrent file sharing/ trading apps WinMX and Emule, as well as one private torrent site that banned me nine years ago.
WinMX was mainly for file trading; you usually had to give to get, and you could selectively deny files to some users, or move a friend up in the queue. A common practice was to employ a 'snail' before going to bed. A snail was someone with a 56k dialup Internet connection, where the download speed never exceeded 5 kilobits per second, so it would take them hours to download a single six minute cartoon. This logjammed the upload queue to prevent people who had files you wanted from getting something for nothing.
Emule had all file types including software with crack files, but you couldn't receive more than 8.94 MB from a single user in any one session. It once took me eight months to get one 75 MB cartoon, as the only guy who had it always had 4,000+ people in his queue, and he never gave any one user more than half a megabyte in a single session. Some people who did captures from TV would share a file only until someone else had a complete copy, then it was their responsibility to distribute to other people. I got a great Amy Winehouse concert from a music festival in France that way.