You’d be cast into the tail-end of an unknown TV show, watching a vacation recording, or viewing some other sort of home video, most (but not all!) of which had been lost when it was recorded over. Typically, however, the VCR would “realign” itself with the leftover data from the previous recording, resynchronise with the old video stream, and the messed-up, unintelligible nonsense on the screen would vanish. The cut-over was never very clean, because the VCR would typically lose track of the video signal when the first recording ended, and play back a mish-mash of slanting lines, partial frames that jumped around on the screen, blurry washes of colour, and a weird, garbled mix of different audio soundtracks.

…in which case you’d end up watching the last part of whatever was left over from the time before, and when that ended, what was recorded the time before that, or the time before that, and so on.

Unless, of course, you (or the friend who’d lent you the tape) had used it before, and recorded something longer than 45 minutes… When you watched back, say, a 45-minute show recorded on an E-60 tape, you’d get 15 minutes of video fuzz (commonly known as “static”) if you left the tape running when the show had finished, until the VCR detected the end of the reel and obligingly rewound the cassette for next time. Other devices such as the recently released Xiaomi 13 Pro appear to be unaffected.Few TV shows were exactly the length of a tape, so when you recorded a show, you’d usually have at least a bit of tape left at the end of the reel, which would be blank. Attempting to open the link on your Pixel 7 or just clicking within the YouTube app still soft reboots your device.

Having tested this out - so you don’t have to - your phone may crash before the video has even loaded. This often takes a few minutes to sort itself out, but a full reboot is often required. Some in the original thread have claimed that after rebooting, their device has temporary cellular connectivity problems. Not all Pixel 7 series handsets will crash when attempting to play the YouTube video, and it’s unclear just what might be causing this. So it’s not limited to just the latest and greatest Google phones. View all commentsĪccording to the thread, some Pixel 6 and 6a handsets also crash when loading the video. It will still crash if you download the same photo from elsewhere and set it (or any other image with the same color depth) as wallpaper on that phone. The only thing Google did was remove the wallpaper that was causing the phone to crash from the Google Wallpapers app. A few years ago, the Pixel 2 was susceptible to constant crashing due to a wallpaper bug that has since been resolved.

Pixel sorter 2 bug