Video Recordings

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once ubiquitous home video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past. After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

Warner Music Group's videos began disappearing from YouTube this weekend, the casualty of a contract impasse between the music company and the Internet's dominant video site. Negotiations broke down last week over licensing fees for Warner's music and videos, say people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

When University of Central Florida junior Nicole Nissim got stumped in trigonometry, she checked out what was showing on YouTube. Nissim typically scours the video-sharing website for clips of bands and comedy skits. But this time she wasn't there to procrastinate on her homework. It turned out YouTube was also full of math videos. After watching a couple, the psychology major said, she finally understood trig equations and how to make graphs.

Abraham Biggs Jr. announced his intention to overdose on pharmaceuticals to members of an online discussion board to which he'd been frequently contributing for two years. And then he invited users to watch. "Ask a guy who is gonna OD (again) tonight anything," he wrote, adding a link to a live video feed from his bedroom webcam. Perhaps as strange and unsettling as Biggs' invitation last week is the lengthy record of the discussion had by the dozens of virtual onlookers who accepted it.

The U.S. military, with help from Seattle start-up Delve Networks, has launched a video-sharing website for troops, their families and supporters, a year and a half after restricting access to YouTube and other video sites. TroopTube, as the website is called, lets people register as members of one of the branches of the armed forces, family, civilian Defense Department employees or supporters. Members can upload personal videos from anywhere with an Internet connection at www.trooptube.

"She's a snake," says former ballerina Yvonne Mounsey, describing the Siren in George Balanchine's 1929 ballet "Prodigal Son," a role that ranks as classical ballet's most fearsome dominatrix. In 1950, Balanchine restaged the work for New York City Ballet and cast Mounsey as the cool man-crusher he had created in retelling the New Testament parable about an errant youth. She was an early version of a female archetype he would return to again and again. "The Siren is an evil, alluring seductress.

We already know this is the year of the first "YouTube election," where the most reliable place to find the latest footage everyone was talking about was no longer CNN, Fox News or the broadcast networks but rather from one of 10 dozen websites that undoubtedly already had the clip parsed, posted and ready for inhalation. The Web has become a political junkie's cornucopia, overflowing with excerpts of every kind. If you're like me, you yearn for the good old days, when October meant being bombarded with a small number of expensive political advertisements -- the ones that just told us what to believe already, so we didn't have to waste time figuring it out. But all is not lost.

Grant Johnson, a 49-year-old traffic engineer who lives in the Sierra foothill town of Coarsegold, passionately supports Proposition 8, which would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage. In past elections, Johnson might have written a letter to the editor about his views. This year, he had a better idea. He made a video and put it up on YouTube.

Previously unseen footage emerged Thursday showing Republican presidential candidate John McCain as a prisoner of war in Hanoi on the day his Vietnamese captors released him to the U.S. military. Erik Eriksson, a former reporter from Swedish broadcaster SVT, told the Associated Press he found the video in the network's archives while conducting research for a book about his experiences as a Vietnam War correspondent. A North Vietnamese photographer, working under contract with Eriksson, filmed the release.

Al Qaeda released a video Monday accusing Iran of collaborating with the United States. Ayman Zawahiri, the terrorist network's second in command, claimed that Tehran was "cooperating with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan," and denounced Iran for recognizing the two governments. Al Qaeda, a militant Sunni Muslim network, often criticizes predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran, which has good ties with Afghanistan's anti-Taliban leaders and Iraq's Shiite-led government.