Rewind Time: Watch Your iPhone Videos VHS-Style With This New App
Cassette
Toggle Dark Mode
Remember VHS camcorders, VHS tapes, and VCRs? Most of you do. For those that don’t, they’ve missed out on the unforgettable experience of having a family member shout, “Let me get the camcorder,” and watching them hoist a heavy device onto their shoulder. Capturing a precious moment like a family holiday or sporting event on video was a far more deliberate effort than whipping an iPhone out of your pocket.
Rewatching these videos was even more unforgettable. Most people recorded on the same VHS tape until it ran out of recording time. That’s right, VHS tape capacity was measured in time, not gigabytes like we understand digital media storage today. This means if you popped a VHS tape labeled “Christmas 1990” into your VCR, you might see your family opening gifts, but also have it abruptly switch to a wedding, kids riding bikes, or your brother’s baseball game.
While it was a world apart from how we watch our “home videos” today, there’s a certain sentimentality to reliving random and mashed-up family moments on VHS.
A recently launched app satisfies this nostalgia. Cassette taps into your Photos and allows you to watch your iPhone videos in a throwback VHS-style format. Whether you’re longing for the days of old or you’ve never experienced watching classic VHS home video, Cassette is worth checking out.
The simple app lets you create a specific collection of videos or select a year or album. From there, you can watch the video mashup on a tube TV for the full retro vibe, or expand it to your full screen. The videos even include the location, date, and time in a font reminiscent of the VHS days.
Cassette founder Devin Davies said in a blog post:
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. 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: Home Video Player is available for the iPhone and iPad and requires at least iOS 18.0 or iPadOS 18.0. You can also use AirPlay to watch videos on a larger screen with family or friends. Cassette is free, and also offers a premium subscription called ColorPlus. ColorPlus allows you to manually pick specific videos rather than Cassette’s automatic random selection. ColorPlus is $0.99 monthly, $5.99 yearly, or $7.99 for a one-time lifetime purchase. Kick back and enjoy rediscovering your forgotten videos!
