Web app Closed

Dany's Video

A streaming menu is a grid of posters that all look the same. A shelf of VHS tapes was something you browsed with your hands: the spines, the worn boxes, the blurb on the back. Dany's Video puts a shelf like that in a 3D room in the browser. Pull a tape out, turn it over, put it in the VCR, and the film plays on the TV, streamed straight from the Internet Archive.

Closed in October 2026, and being rebuilt as a Jellyfin plugin for your own films.

Pulling tapes off the shelf, and 12 Monkeys into the VCR.

The shelf

Real sleeves, folded into boxes.

The sleeves are scans of real VHS covers, most of them from the Retro-Daze VHS Tape Cover Collection on archive.org. Each scan is a flat sheet with the back, spine and front side by side; the room cuts it along those lines and folds it around a box, so the spine you read on the shelf is the spine that was printed. A tape added from The Movie Database without a scan gets a sleeve made from its poster instead.

Click a spine and the tape slides out towards you. Drag to turn it and read the back. The card next to it says whether it has a film to play, and where you stopped it last time, because a tape that was stopped half way is not rewound.

Double-click the bookcase, click a spine, drag to turn.

A tape of Predator pulled out of the shelf, the CBS/Fox sleeve with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the front and the title on the spine. The shelf behind it is dimmed. A card on the right reads Predator, 1987, 107 min, CBS/FOX VIDEO, a yellow label saying Not rewound, stopped at 0:14:03, a red Play on VCR button and a line saying it plays directly from the Internet Archive. — Stopped at fourteen minutes, and it says so.

The back of the Bullitt sleeve, pale green with two stills at the top, the headline How do you guard a man everybody wants dead? and the full blurb and small print, readable. — The back of the box, turned by hand.

Close up of the bookcase: three shelves of VHS spines, a handwritten label reading Jesper's Favorites under the top row and another reading Available, 68 to play, under the middle row. On the bottom shelf a few tapes in plastic clamshell cases stand taller than the rest. — Shelves are labelled, and the clamshells stand taller than the cardboard.

Shelves you makeplain or smart

A plain shelf holds the tapes you put on it. A smart shelf fills itself from rules: a range of years, some tags, with or without a film. The label under it can be a plaque, a Dymo strip or a strip of tape with the name written on.
Films added from TMDB

Search The Movie Database, pick the film, and it goes on the shelf with a sleeve printed from its poster until a real scan turns up.
Search

Type and the shelves narrow to what matches, by title, year or studio.

The VCR

Put it in the deck and it plays on the TV.

Press Play on VCR and the tape leaves its box, slides into the deck, and the TV comes on with the blue screen. The film streams from the Internet Archive, where somebody uploaded it; the page only points to it. Nothing passes through a server of mine.

The picture gets a VHS look laid over it: scanlines, grain, a slightly washed colour, a picture that jitters, and a tracking band along the bottom. The deck's buttons work, the counter counts, and rewinding and fast forwarding wind the tape. When a film is slow to arrive the screen says AUTO HEAD CLEANING and AUTO TRACKING, which is a lie, but a VCR's lie rather than a browser's.

From the box into the deck. The clip stops at the blue screen, before the film.

The tracking knob, and . on the keyboard

Every tape has its own sweet spot, off centre, so it starts out mistracked. Somewhere else on the knob, at random each time, is a bad patch where the band comes loose and rolls up through the picture. This is the most frivolous thing in the room and I would not take it out.
TV/VIDEOthe button on the set

The small round button before the black panel on the TV switches all of it off: no grain, no glare, no tracking. Press it again for the VHS look back.
Be kind, rewind

Eject a film part way and the tape remembers where it was. Next time it carries on from there; a tape watched to the end stays at the end until you rewind it.
Full screen

Double-click the picture and the film fills the display, with the VHS look still on it.

The room

The rest of the room.

On the desk is a tape recorder with a C60 in it, Genes of Fury, a mixtape of my own music, thirty minutes a side. Press the keys and they go down with the sound of a real one; at the end of side A you take the tape out and turn it over.

The light switch by the TV turns the room light off. In the dark the floor lamp is the only other light, and a TV that is on throws a flickering blue onto the room. The posters on the wall come from the films, and a film's Special Features can put one up.

The switch beside the TV.

Close up of a black portable cassette recorder on the desk under the lamp. Through the window a cassette labelled Genes of Fury, Side A. The play key is pressed down and a small light at the top is lit. — Genes of Fury, side A, playing.

Close up of a golden idol figurine, a crouching figure with a grimacing face, standing on top of the wooden bookcase above a row of tape tops. — The idol on top of the bookcase. It does nothing.

The room with the light switched off: the wall, shelf and desk in deep blue shadow, the posters dim, and the floor lamp on the right glowing and throwing light on the wall around it. — Lights off.

The Special Features screen for Die Hard, styled like a DVD menu: the red title, a tagline, and the options Play trailer, Cast and characters, Trailers and clips, Stills gallery, Posters, About the film and Back to the shelf over a still from the film. — Special Features, like the menu on a DVD. The pictures and facts come from TMDB.

The CBS/Fox tape of Die Hard pulled out, the front with the burning tower, Bruce Willis and 40 stories of sheer adventure, and a card listing the case type and rating, a Play on VCR button, a Special Features button, and where to watch it in the United Kingdom: logos of streaming, rental and purchase services. — Where to stream, rent or buy it, by country, from JustWatch.

Die Hard, the CBS/Fox sleeve, front and back.

On a phone

A list instead of a room.

The room needs a mouse or a trackpad, and a phone ran out of memory trying to draw it. So a phone gets the same films as a list: the ones with something to play first, then the rest. Tap one for a page with its story, cast and sleeve, and a player that plays it from the Internet Archive.

The list.

The phone film page for Bullitt: a video player at the top, the line Plays directly from the Internet Archive, uploaded there by its users, nothing is hosted here, then the sleeve, the title, 1968, 113 min, a tagline, and the story. — A film's page.

Limits

What it does not do well.

The films are other people's uploads

Every film is a file somebody put on the Internet Archive. Some are good copies, some are VHS rips at the wrong speed, and some are four times heavier than they need to be. About a third of the tapes have nothing to play yet.
archive.org decides how fast

A film starts in two seconds or in twenty, depending on which of archive.org's servers holds it and how busy that server is. The room can only say AUTO TRACKING and wait.
The VHS look is a layer

archive.org does not let a page read a film's pixels, so the effects sit on top of the picture rather than inside it. The colour bleeding and the curve of the glass from the first version are gone.
It wants a computer

The room is a three.js scene with a hundred textured boxes in it. On a phone you get the list. An iPad works only with a trackpad or mouse attached, and I have not tested it much.

Closed

Closed in October 2026.

Dany's Video was open to a few friends for a couple of weeks. I closed it in October 2026.

I'm rebuilding it as a Jellyfin plugin: the same shelf and VCR, filled with films from your own media server. There is nothing to try yet.