Will video tapes work?

[BathTub]

I figured my videos and "cheap-o" versions would do just fine. Well, they DIDN'T. (First I should tell you that I live in PAL country, but I naturally got the PAL downloads.) I bought four rifftrax recently and so far I've seen/listened to three of them. First Night of the Living Dead, where I had a colorized version on tape. The rifftrax sped away so much I couldn't get it to sync. Second I tried Plan 9 having a very cheap-o DVD version. No good here either. The rifftrax was running ahead at an alarming rate. Pausing was futile. I was beginning to despair. But when I reluctantly tried Lord of the Rings with the recommended PAL DVD version it worked like a charm.

Unfortunately the public domain films like NOTLD have different versions and of course the rifftrax are very specific. However at least in NOTLD's case you can actually download the correct version (well in NTSC) from archive.org. A few of the earlier PAL releases aren't yet as good as they could be, check the appropriate films sub-forum and you should usually find a note if there is anything helpful available.

[Scrivener]

Darn.  Phantom Menace was one of the three tapes I had. The other two are Matrix and Star Trek V. They should be okay then?

To answer from personal experience, Rifftrax works perfectly with the VHS version of "Star Trek V".  At least, my ancient circa-1990 box-set VHS version.  I assume they didn't add or subtract anything in other editions, and since the current DVD version works the same with Rifftrax (or we'd have heard about it), that's a safe assumption.

Scrivener
Writing marginally salable stuff since 1996.