Cassette App Lets You Play iPhone Videos Like Old-School VHS Tapes
Cassette is a new app that lets iPhone and iPad users watch their videos as if they were playing them on a retro home VHS tape.
Cassette, which launched globally on Tuesday, aims to bring VHS-style playback to the videos that people have captured on their iPhone or iPad.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the app pulls clips from the Photos library, sorts them by year and album, and presents each collection as its own VHS tape. Users can scroll through the tapes manually or tap the Take Me Somewhere button to jump to a random year or album.
To watch, users simply select a tape and the app “loads” it into a virtual TV. Your videos then play one after another without you having to touch a thing—just like the days of sitting through a VHS. Each clip appears in its original quality with no filter applied. Furthermore, every video played through the Cassette app shows the location, date, and time in a retro pixel-style font, similar to the on-screen text seen on old VHS tapes.
Cassette’s retro interface is designed to recreate the look and feel of an old tape player, complete with handwritten-style labels. It can also be mirrored to an Apple TV for a bigger-screen experience. The app’s aim is to make it easy to revisit memories and rediscover clips that might otherwise stay buried in a user’s camera roll.
“Remember the magic days when we shot family events on a camcorder? Later when we put the VHS tape into the player, we’d get a random stream of snapshots through time, a quick clip of a birthday here, a mountain there, then 10 minutes of a 5 year old pulling faces and pretending to walk down imaginary stairs,” the Cassette app’s developer Devin Davies writes in a blog post.
“When you watch videos in the Photos app, it’s typical to hunt out a specific clip that you remember, watch it, and then move on. Which means there are hundreds, nay thousands of forgotten videos, robbed of the serendipity of being rediscovered. Cassette steals a little bit of your free will to choose and replaces it with these forgotten videos, just like the good old days.”
Cassette is available to download on the App Store. In its free version, the app plays a randomly selected video, while a paid ColorPlus premium tier subscription — priced at $0.99 per month or $5.99 per year — allows users to choose specific videos to watch. A one-time Lifetime unlock is also offered for $7.99.
Image credits: All images via Cassette.
