Developer Devin Davies is out with a new app today that can add a nostalgic twist to videos saved on your iPhone. Cassette, which is available on the App Store today, is described as a “VHS player for your home videos.”
Cassette pulls in videos from the Photos app on your iPhone, grouping them by year and album and presenting them as separate VHS tapes. You can choose to browse through your library of videos manually, or you can tap the “Take Me Somewhere” button at the bottom to watch a random year or collection of videos.
When you choose a collection or video, it virtually “loads” the VHS tape into the TV and begins playing back your videos with no interaction on your part, just like the old days of watching something on a VHS tape. You’ll even see the date and location of the video overlayed on the video.
Davies offers some details on the inspiration for the app 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.
You can download Cassette from the App Store. The free version of the app lets you play a video at random, but you can upgrade to the ColorPlus premium tier to manually choose videos to watch for $0.99 per month or $5.99 per year. There’s also a one-time Lifetime unlock option for $7.99.
I’ve found Cassette to be a wonderful way to explore forgotten videos from my iPhone’s camera roll. Not only is the interface fun and whimsical, but it’s also a practical way to relive your old family videos.
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