In honour of the play and pause button and physical media in general, what DVD do you think had the best bonus features? I swear the Elf DVD had like actual games on it.
Note that "stop" lets you remove the cassette or video tape, while "pause" keeps the tape heads in place. For VCRs, pausing would cause it to loop over a frame of video repeatedly so that the image would stay on screen (which is pretty neat for analog technology).
The Pause symbol is from editing where editors would strike a line against any cuts to be made and a line where to resume the film, so edits were marked with 2 lines as short hand,...no source, but that's what my pops told me when he was around.
In the past, when I remember correctly, "Play" meant "play from the start". There was another button called "Resume" where you play from the stop pf the video. It was represented by one vertical line with a triangle to the right on the right of it.
EXCUSE ME, NO-ONE "owns" movies on streaming video, but they do on physical media. That's why I'm going back to DVD for older movies, cos I've already had a couple of streaming purchases of mine deleted or modified. F 'em!
BD*, but yes. I’ve only ever used streaming services where there is no alternative (their own programming), or where I’m only interested in watching the content once anyway (it doesn’t matter if I lose access after I’ve finished).
It is clear that you don't have back pains or neck pains, because then you would have known what a blessing it is to be able to watch a movie on your tablet in your bed. It is very easy for people with no health issues to be picky and choosy, but I'm glad that streaming services exist and can’t go along with this criticism.
@ Physical media can easily be used on portable devices as well. Portable players exist, and the files from the discs can be imported into a computer and transferred to other devices.
@@FuriennaThere's nothing stopping you from getting a portable dvd player or getting the video onto a smaller screen. Streaming is just more convenient, but if you are willing to put up with FLOSS software designed for nerds you're able to get your content where ever you want.
The tape can also move right to left like in the device you showed. It all depends on where the play heads are. Therefore the play symbol can also point to the left. The reason the bars go left to right is because we read from left to right. It has nothing to do with any physical media which as I stated can go either way. On tape decks left to right was common but on portable devices right to left was more common having the buttons stick from the side would cause them to break easily.
So were they nationalized to mirror images in countries where they read right-to-left? Were tape players in Israel built to carry the tape from right-to-left?
@@JohnDlugoszno. Tape players in all regions could do either in “forward”, depending on whether they had it facing with the tape opening to the ground or to the ceiling. Nothing to do with reading. That came later with computers (though afaik Hebrew or Arabic video players don’t orient the bar going left.)
Yeah, I came here to say this and couldn't believe he overlooked it...are cassette players and Walkmen and the like really that unknown to so many? This isn't buried ancient history, just feels like lazy research coupled with a strange Western chauvinistic assumption about the "perception of the direction in which media played" lol like...wut
Most of other progress bars fill from left to right. A health bar empties from right to left. In other circumstances, that symbol is like a glass of water. Its filling up bottom-up.
You didn't talk about the Record-Symbol. My Idea is, it is based on the Circuit Symbol of a Microphone, that is a cricle with a cone, as opposed to the loadspeaker, wich is a box with a cone.
*loudspeaker ... from where came the circuit symbols (btw: some were using literal microphone icon for that - monotone/colorless - so it could be engraved instead of drawing).
I have seen exactly one play button that used a left-facing version of the arrow. It was on a Technics digital tape deck that I saw in a Tech Moan video. It recorded digital sound onto VHS video cassettes. I think the tape path on a VHS at least in this machine did move right to left. So the designers in this case made the play button look that way so that the audiophile users of this extremely advanced and expensive piece of home equipment wouldn't call them out on it. Also fun thing, the ID Buzz electric minivan from Volkswagen has the play and pause symbols on its accelerator and brake pedal.
Left facing buttons were the norm on portable devices like boomboxes. On a portable device it is better to put the buttons on the top as on the side they could break. That means the tape goes right to left.
@@okaro6595 And also, the heads are mounted on the top rather than on the bottom. Not sure that it has to do with button placement, but perhaps it takes up less space.
Almost every tape deck I've ever owned had both left and right facing play buttons, one for playing the cassette in one direction and the other for the other direction, only cheap ones that can't play both sides of the tape lack it
So to summarize: video gives the viewer more control over their viewing experience rather than text which people can read at their own pace, skim, or backtrack on as needed, and nobody knows why tape decks (which some of us grew up with but are apparently forgotten/ancient technology to the UA-cam generation) chose those specific symbols.
A little tidbit, many cassette decks would actually have the play button going to the left, because the mechanism relative to the buttons may be upside down, and the tape would go in the opposite direction, so the symbol indicates this. Also helps to indicate what button is actually rewind or fast forward, because those would be in the direction the tape is heading too, even when it's the other direction than one would expect. I wonder if the stop symbol could be related to the box you may see at the end of an article, unless this is maybe a relatively new thing since it was used for a continuous recording. Also an equivalent symbol I've seen on record players, though this might be more recent even than play/pause, is the symbol of a line with an arrow (think like the opposite of an eject), symbolizing the needle on or off the record. Also, no idea if it could be related as this might also be later than the pause symbol, the narrow line seems to be symbolic of a "place", like the seek buttons being a fast forward or rewind with a vertical line, indicating it's heading to a place, or like an eject symbol i guess indicating that the media is heading to some place after unloading. The 2 vertical bars could be indicating being in place. Staying where it is with no movement.
Don't forget that the word "play" in analog/digital media contexts has its origin in the phrase to "play back" what has been recorded. It's been sent "forth" to the audio tape (for instance) for storage, but now we want to "play it back" to our ears again. In German, the word is "Wiedergabe" (noun) or "wiedergeben" (verb), lit. to "give back", which is also very plausible. "Hey you, tape machine, give it back to me for my ears to listen to!" Hope this helps. 🤔
I suspect that the choice of "moving to the right" meaning play (and even the mechanical movement of tape from the left spool to the right) originates with the fact that most written languages go from left to right. I have no historical evidence for this, but it seems to make sense.
@ most reel to reels in the totality of production have been both-direction play machines. It’s tradition to put the tape on the left and the take up spool on the right, but not strictly necessary. Indeed, when transferring from one “right handed” reel to another it’s necessary. But reels could’ve all generally been “left handed”. And endless-loop tape packs have no real “direction of completion”. Tape is undeniably agnostic to direction.
Another interesting fact about the PLAY button: many Japanese tape players played from right to left with the tape head reversed. These players also had the play button reversed and fast-forward/rewind were reversed respectively.
I imagine it also pertains to film technology. Think of the long rectangular strip that is cut into squares for where the frames of the film shows the visual medium, and it's being played on a film projector. The pause symbol (two vertical lines) is when the film is stopped wherever it is but the light is still on to show the image; since the film on the reel might have some slack in it, you might be able to see the edge of the frame outlined in the light. The stop symbol (black square) is when the film stops moving and the projector's light is turned off and you can't see an image on the screen anymore, giving you a black/blank screen.
It is absolutely wild to me that this video even has to be made and that it starts by implying that these symbols are tied to playing digital video files on the internet
The written word is a far more flexible medium, if I need to reread something I just move my eyes up the page. If I need to rewatch something there are controls to manipulate and I have to search for what I am looking for - there is no way to just 'scan a video' the way you can scan a page of writing.
Video editor timeline shows a sequence of stills. This could be expanded to a multi-line format. Add to that some A.I. to pick representative stills instead of just whatever frame you find periodically, and you have a page-filled storyboard that remind you of the scenes and flow of the whole video, and you can click on any place to expand that or play there.
@@JohnDlugosz Not something I expect to see as an affordable commercial product any time soon. It would also need to be able to do things like 'display every 30th frame', 'next frame' (with the ability to control how much forward 'next frame' is), and 'every frame with (this character/object/etc.) in it'. )AI can be useful, but it should never be the only way to do research.) All of these things are abilities that the written word has without a need for any equipment more advanced than a human brain and an ability to turn pages. And it works without a power supply too! (Also, some people frequently grasp something better if they read it than if they listen to someone say it.)
@@danielkaiser8971 Hunh? I have no idea what you mean. All I know is that reading usually works better for me than trying to learn something from a video.
Echoing a red status light that turns on when recording, maybe? Plus, red is a warning color, in this case "warning" that you'd be recording over whatever was already on the tape if it wasn't blank.
From recording light, from a bulb coated in red used in studios to indicate on going recording (or a show being live) - it being switched on demanded silence and no bothering from the others. Red as warning color goes back even beyond that. Practice is still lives in contemporary studios, however they typically don't use literal bulb coated in red nowadays.
Vertical bars are better for volume and levels of various things being higher or lower. The horizontal bar moves left to right because that's how most written language works. I see the indicator moving on the line like showing where I am on the journey from the beginning to the end of the video.
The play, fast-forward, and skip forward buttons point leftward, whereäs the rewind and skip backward buttons points rightward. This is probably based on a conceptual spatial direction for time whereïn the past is on the left and the future is on the right. This is how we orient timelines and arrange pictures in order to form sequential stories. Except not "we". Studies have shown that people who read from left to right do this. But people who read from right to left orient everything in exactly the opposite manner. So, these buttons (if my hypothesis is correct) are encoding visual symbology which is natural to, for example, a lot of European languages into the linguistic and mental environments that actually should understand them in the diametrically wrong manner.
Got another theory for you on the Pause symbol… the physical gesture for telling someone to stop is to hold up your hands in front of you. If you do that, your arms form two vertical lines = Pause symbol.
i think the pause symbol may be a tape that was cut but put back together since the word for it in music is like the word cesarean section or C section where a moms abdomen is cut open to birth a child but then is sew back up. the symbol represents a whole split in to 2 halves.
Heck yeah! It's my birthday, for sure. I love stupid trivia knowledge. I'm telling everyone! I'm not kidding! Thank you for making all these awesome videos!
considering that these symbols come from someone designing audio equipment in the 60s, possibly an engineer of some sort, the "less extreme of stop" sounds more plausible. as for the stop symbol, well you just made a symbol for play, now make a different logo that does the opposite. it's a box that doesn't point in a direction. if you asked someone who has never seen these symbols (rare) to make a "stop" as opposed to this play triangle, there's a good chance they'd come up with the box on their own.
i swear to whatever all powerful being that you believe, but yesterday i watched one of your videos and thought “how did we get the word pause”. and i googled it (it means stop or something in greek) and now you release this video that is ever so close to what i was thinking yesterday, bull
On tape players where the tape moved from right to left (uncommon but they did exist) tbe play triangle would actually point to the left to relect the movement of the tape.
The tapes couldve been designed to go left or right. We're used to left-right progression from writing. If it was designed in east asia we'd have it going right to left.
There are an awful lot of scripts (such as English) which read left to right (as opposed to Arabic which reads right to left), so maybe that's why Compact Cassette tapes move that way.
Strangly back then I almost never used the pause button on the cassette player or VCR. I always used STOP instead because my parents told me that it supposedly is bad for the tape in the long run. I always wondered if this is true or only an urban legend. Can anyone tell me?
@ thank you! Its going well, i think UA-cam is still trying to direct it to the right audience maybe but its slowly growing! Sometimes I feel like I should stop but its been fun so far
I remember the symbols on our reel-to-reel "Elizabethan" tape deck. God, I feel old! Edit: I have the ⬜ on the bottom of my Android tablet (the phone has three lines like the 2 pause ones). It's literally to stop the app running. However, it doesn't work 😂. ⚪ does it!
What if the pause symbol was originally two stop symbols siee by side symbolizing the stopping of both reels and then squished toguether for it to fit on a button?
I assumed it was because we read left to right and that’s why those bars go in that direction and it just stuck. Sorry for countries like Japan that read right to left tho haha
I think something interesting to consider, though, is that there isn't necessarily a reason that tape media had to move from left to right rather than top to bottom, bottom to top, or right to left. I think the reason we tend to engineer things that way is because our notion of advancement, in a more primitive way, derives from the direction most of the world reads and writes text. It's just naturally intuitive to think about something advancing that way. As for where writing and reading direction comes from, I dunno. Brain hemispheres? Or it's just arbitrary.
> As for where writing and reading direction comes from, I dunno. Brain hemispheres? Or it's just arbitrary. There is _some_ arbitraryness, since the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets are written right-to-left, and Chinese and Japanese were traditionally written top-to-bottom. And some others (like early Greek and Etruscan) even used to go back and forth, alternating between left-to-right and right-to-left with each line. On the other hand, most people are right-handed, and (hand)writing left-to-right means their hand is less likely to smudge across what they already wrote.
@AaronOfMpls I can see how winding text would be intuitive. Less travel between lines. Not as much of a sudden motion when going back to the far left and down. I do think there must be some correlation between brain structure and the way we advance text. Even though there are major notable sections, even among relatively isolated languages with hazy linguistic origins, right to left seems to be the dominant tendency.
@@Furienna But the tape probably moves left-to-right because most writing goes left-to-right (making it a default "forward" direction) ... and thus we were discussing why most writing goes left-to-right. And to be fair, quite a few cassette recorders/players have the tape inserted upside-down (with the heads and the open end of the cassette at the _top_ of the deck instead of the bottom), and thus have the play and fast-forward symbols pointing _left_ instead of right. Plus there are auto-reverse tape decks that can play the tape in _either_ direction without flipping it over -- and some of these have play buttons pointing in _both_ directions.
I'm the opposite of what the corps intended. I will not click on a video to find information if I can have an article instead. As I read I can skim the paragraphs to get to the good stuff. Plus I don't need to hear a weirdly accented or annoying narrator. Of course, there are some good videos worth listening to.
3 minutes of showing us devices that play and pause buttons are on, which is then followed by "we don't know where the symbols come from" c'mon man, not cool, that's click bait shit
This is by far the worst video you have made. The intro doesn't make sense and the play button on a tape deck doesn't always face right. Because the mechanism can run in either direction. I'm not sure how much research you did for this video, but it doesn't seem like enough.
As an old skooler who used disks! the symbol felt this was the indicator to commit progress to a disk so work could be saved. I guess the symbol stuck as physical media gave way to digital storage. That’s just my thinking.
In honour of the play and pause button and physical media in general, what DVD do you think had the best bonus features? I swear the Elf DVD had like actual games on it.
Funny you should say "audacity", as that too is intrinsically linked to audio, too!
Yes! I love my physical media, does the company can't just snatch it away from me
I loved the Pixar DVDs the behind the scenes were so extensive.
😅😅😅
😊
Note that "stop" lets you remove the cassette or video tape, while "pause" keeps the tape heads in place. For VCRs, pausing would cause it to loop over a frame of video repeatedly so that the image would stay on screen (which is pretty neat for analog technology).
that pretty interesting 👍
The Pause symbol is from editing where editors would strike a line against any cuts to be made and a line where to resume the film, so edits were marked with 2 lines as short hand,...no source, but that's what my pops told me when he was around.
In the past, when I remember correctly, "Play" meant "play from the start". There was another button called "Resume" where you play from the stop pf the video. It was represented by one vertical line with a triangle to the right on the right of it.
Yep, also the symbol for play/pause when both functions are combined into one button.
EXCUSE ME, NO-ONE "owns" movies on streaming video, but they do on physical media. That's why I'm going back to DVD for older movies, cos I've already had a couple of streaming purchases of mine deleted or modified. F 'em!
BD*, but yes. I’ve only ever used streaming services where there is no alternative (their own programming), or where I’m only interested in watching the content once anyway (it doesn’t matter if I lose access after I’ve finished).
It is clear that you don't have back pains or neck pains, because then you would have known what a blessing it is to be able to watch a movie on your tablet in your bed.
It is very easy for people with no health issues to be picky and choosy, but I'm glad that streaming services exist and can’t go along with this criticism.
@ Physical media can easily be used on portable devices as well. Portable players exist, and the files from the discs can be imported into a computer and transferred to other devices.
@@FuriennaThere's nothing stopping you from getting a portable dvd player or getting the video onto a smaller screen. Streaming is just more convenient, but if you are willing to put up with FLOSS software designed for nerds you're able to get your content where ever you want.
@@I_Love_Learning But I don't have any problems with streaming and can't understand this aversion towards it.
It is really a blessing for me.
The tape can also move right to left like in the device you showed. It all depends on where the play heads are. Therefore the play symbol can also point to the left.
The reason the bars go left to right is because we read from left to right. It has nothing to do with any physical media which as I stated can go either way. On tape decks left to right was common but on portable devices right to left was more common having the buttons stick from the side would cause them to break easily.
So were they nationalized to mirror images in countries where they read right-to-left?
Were tape players in Israel built to carry the tape from right-to-left?
@@JohnDlugoszno. Tape players in all regions could do either in “forward”, depending on whether they had it facing with the tape opening to the ground or to the ceiling.
Nothing to do with reading. That came later with computers (though afaik Hebrew or Arabic video players don’t orient the bar going left.)
Yeah, I came here to say this and couldn't believe he overlooked it...are cassette players and Walkmen and the like really that unknown to so many? This isn't buried ancient history, just feels like lazy research coupled with a strange Western chauvinistic assumption about the "perception of the direction in which media played" lol like...wut
Most of other progress bars fill from left to right. A health bar empties from right to left.
In other circumstances, that symbol is like a glass of water. Its filling up bottom-up.
@@JohnDlugosz America developed and popularized the technology, so the symbols we chose stuck.
You didn't talk about the Record-Symbol. My Idea is, it is based on the Circuit Symbol of a Microphone, that is a cricle with a cone, as opposed to the loadspeaker, wich is a box with a cone.
*loudspeaker
... from where came the circuit symbols (btw: some were using literal microphone icon for that - monotone/colorless - so it could be engraved instead of drawing).
I'm sure that it's because of the red warning lamps in the recording booths.
@@gusamamon yes, the "live"/"on-air" indicator light! Radio too
Surely the word "play" goes much further back than that, in the sense that a musician plays music, just as a video player plays video
I have seen exactly one play button that used a left-facing version of the arrow. It was on a Technics digital tape deck that I saw in a Tech Moan video. It recorded digital sound onto VHS video cassettes. I think the tape path on a VHS at least in this machine did move right to left. So the designers in this case made the play button look that way so that the audiophile users of this extremely advanced and expensive piece of home equipment wouldn't call them out on it.
Also fun thing, the ID Buzz electric minivan from Volkswagen has the play and pause symbols on its accelerator and brake pedal.
Left facing buttons were the norm on portable devices like boomboxes. On a portable device it is better to put the buttons on the top as on the side they could break. That means the tape goes right to left.
@@okaro6595 And also, the heads are mounted on the top rather than on the bottom. Not sure that it has to do with button placement, but perhaps it takes up less space.
Reel to reel machines which could do “both sides play” (auto reverse) generally had two play buttons, one for each direction.
@@kaitlyn__L That is also true for auto-reverse tape-decks
Almost every tape deck I've ever owned had both left and right facing play buttons, one for playing the cassette in one direction and the other for the other direction, only cheap ones that can't play both sides of the tape lack it
So to summarize: video gives the viewer more control over their viewing experience rather than text which people can read at their own pace, skim, or backtrack on as needed, and nobody knows why tape decks (which some of us grew up with but are apparently forgotten/ancient technology to the UA-cam generation) chose those specific symbols.
A little tidbit, many cassette decks would actually have the play button going to the left, because the mechanism relative to the buttons may be upside down, and the tape would go in the opposite direction, so the symbol indicates this. Also helps to indicate what button is actually rewind or fast forward, because those would be in the direction the tape is heading too, even when it's the other direction than one would expect.
I wonder if the stop symbol could be related to the box you may see at the end of an article, unless this is maybe a relatively new thing since it was used for a continuous recording.
Also an equivalent symbol I've seen on record players, though this might be more recent even than play/pause, is the symbol of a line with an arrow (think like the opposite of an eject), symbolizing the needle on or off the record.
Also, no idea if it could be related as this might also be later than the pause symbol, the narrow line seems to be symbolic of a "place", like the seek buttons being a fast forward or rewind with a vertical line, indicating it's heading to a place, or like an eject symbol i guess indicating that the media is heading to some place after unloading. The 2 vertical bars could be indicating being in place. Staying where it is with no movement.
Don't forget that the word "play" in analog/digital media contexts has its origin in the phrase to "play back" what has been recorded. It's been sent "forth" to the audio tape (for instance) for storage, but now we want to "play it back" to our ears again. In German, the word is "Wiedergabe" (noun) or "wiedergeben" (verb), lit. to "give back", which is also very plausible. "Hey you, tape machine, give it back to me for my ears to listen to!"
Hope this helps. 🤔
"Which hopefully you won't be pressing in this video"
Well I did, just to scroll down and write this comment. So there.
Video starts at 4:00
I wish you would have done more to trace back the use of these symbols on players.
I suspect that the choice of "moving to the right" meaning play (and even the mechanical movement of tape from the left spool to the right) originates with the fact that most written languages go from left to right. I have no historical evidence for this, but it seems to make sense.
It is actually derived from how the tape within a cassette moved from left to right, which is explained in this video.
@@Furiennathey're saying that the choice for tapes to move left to right is because of written language reading that way
@@Fyrbolt200 but that itself depends on how the tape is oriented in the deck and there were all sorts of ways to do it.
@@kaitlyn__LGo back further in history. Before cassette tapes. To tapes on reels. Left to right, just like movie reels go front to back.
@ most reel to reels in the totality of production have been both-direction play machines. It’s tradition to put the tape on the left and the take up spool on the right, but not strictly necessary. Indeed, when transferring from one “right handed” reel to another it’s necessary. But reels could’ve all generally been “left handed”. And endless-loop tape packs have no real “direction of completion”. Tape is undeniably agnostic to direction.
Do people in countries with languages that read right to left ever find it weird that media is visualized as progressing from left to right?
Another interesting fact about the PLAY button: many Japanese tape players played from right to left with the tape head reversed. These players also had the play button reversed and fast-forward/rewind were reversed respectively.
I had an uncle who worked at Ampex back in the 60s. I wonder if he knew who came up with those symbols. He passed away six years ago in his mid 70s.
The recording was shown as a filled red circle.
I'm just surprised that the stop was a square. But a stop sign has eight corners.
11-29-24
"Look at this Stop Sign. It has 8 Sides and 8 Angles."
Sorry, couldn't resist.
The difference between a stop sign and circle would be hard to see on small buttons.
I imagine it also pertains to film technology. Think of the long rectangular strip that is cut into squares for where the frames of the film shows the visual medium, and it's being played on a film projector. The pause symbol (two vertical lines) is when the film is stopped wherever it is but the light is still on to show the image; since the film on the reel might have some slack in it, you might be able to see the edge of the frame outlined in the light. The stop symbol (black square) is when the film stops moving and the projector's light is turned off and you can't see an image on the screen anymore, giving you a black/blank screen.
It is absolutely wild to me that this video even has to be made and that it starts by implying that these symbols are tied to playing digital video files on the internet
The written word is a far more flexible medium, if I need to reread something I just move my eyes up the page. If I need to rewatch something there are controls to manipulate and I have to search for what I am looking for - there is no way to just 'scan a video' the way you can scan a page of writing.
Video editor timeline shows a sequence of stills. This could be expanded to a multi-line format. Add to that some A.I. to pick representative stills instead of just whatever frame you find periodically, and you have a page-filled storyboard that remind you of the scenes and flow of the whole video, and you can click on any place to expand that or play there.
@@JohnDlugosz Not something I expect to see as an affordable commercial product any time soon. It would also need to be able to do things like 'display every 30th frame', 'next frame' (with the ability to control how much forward 'next frame' is), and 'every frame with (this character/object/etc.) in it'. )AI can be useful, but it should never be the only way to do research.) All of these things are abilities that the written word has without a need for any equipment more advanced than a human brain and an ability to turn pages. And it works without a power supply too! (Also, some people frequently grasp something better if they read it than if they listen to someone say it.)
Reading and observing are not as comparable as you are making it seem.
@@danielkaiser8971 Hunh? I have no idea what you mean. All I know is that reading usually works better for me than trying to learn something from a video.
The pause symbol is showing the frames of a film strip. Stopped between two frames so content on each side.
I'd have to see this symbol on a pre-1960's movie projector before I'd buy into that interpretation
2:23 Patrick confirmed as a Weekly Wackadoo!
What about the circle (sometimes colored in red) to represent "record"?
Echoing a red status light that turns on when recording, maybe? Plus, red is a warning color, in this case "warning" that you'd be recording over whatever was already on the tape if it wasn't blank.
Circles roll like wheels. Squares do not roll.
@@danielkaiser8971 That makes perfect sense.
@@AaronOfMplsRed is warning you not to record over your wedding video. 😂
From recording light, from a bulb coated in red used in studios to indicate on going recording (or a show being live) - it being switched on demanded silence and no bothering from the others. Red as warning color goes back even beyond that. Practice is still lives in contemporary studios, however they typically don't use literal bulb coated in red nowadays.
Vertical bars are better for volume and levels of various things being higher or lower. The horizontal bar moves left to right because that's how most written language works. I see the indicator moving on the line like showing where I am on the journey from the beginning to the end of the video.
The play, fast-forward, and skip forward buttons point leftward, whereäs the rewind and skip backward buttons points rightward. This is probably based on a conceptual spatial direction for time whereïn the past is on the left and the future is on the right. This is how we orient timelines and arrange pictures in order to form sequential stories. Except not "we". Studies have shown that people who read from left to right do this. But people who read from right to left orient everything in exactly the opposite manner.
So, these buttons (if my hypothesis is correct) are encoding visual symbology which is natural to, for example, a lot of European languages into the linguistic and mental environments that actually should understand them in the diametrically wrong manner.
Do countries where the primary language reads from right to left have the arrows pointing in the opposite direction?
Got another theory for you on the Pause symbol… the physical gesture for telling someone to stop is to hold up your hands in front of you. If you do that, your arms form two vertical lines = Pause symbol.
i think the pause symbol may be a tape that was cut but put back together since the word for it in music is like the word cesarean section or C section where a moms abdomen is cut open to birth a child but then is sew back up. the symbol represents a whole split in to 2 halves.
Wow, I haven't even thought about this.
I guess the stop icon could be like two hands saying stop, while the arrow icon is going forwards meaning go
@2:09 And now I have dedicated buttons for streaming services I will never use directly on my remote control. Which time would you prefer to live in?
Heck yeah! It's my birthday, for sure. I love stupid trivia knowledge. I'm telling everyone!
I'm not kidding! Thank you for making all these awesome videos!
considering that these symbols come from someone designing audio equipment in the 60s, possibly an engineer of some sort, the "less extreme of stop" sounds more plausible.
as for the stop symbol, well you just made a symbol for play, now make a different logo that does the opposite. it's a box that doesn't point in a direction. if you asked someone who has never seen these symbols (rare) to make a "stop" as opposed to this play triangle, there's a good chance they'd come up with the box on their own.
I like to think of the pause symbol as two walls, where the video can't go backwards, nor forwards, which is pretty genius when you think about it.
i swear to whatever all powerful being that you believe, but yesterday i watched one of your videos and thought “how did we get the word pause”. and i googled it (it means stop or something in greek) and now you release this video that is ever so close to what i was thinking yesterday, bull
internet brainrotted me to a point that i thought the thumbnail was a 911 joke
On tape players where the tape moved from right to left (uncommon but they did exist) tbe play triangle would actually point to the left to relect the movement of the tape.
Does tape not move right to left, so it can be READ from left to right?
In that vein is there tape that goes the other way like language can?
At least one model of car now has "play" and "pause" symbols on the accelerator and brake pedal.
A few cars have the play and pause symbol embossed into the accelerator and brake pedals respectively. Cute.
I think that the record button is supposed to be the front of a camera lense
The jump to next/previous audi/video as play plus a line also merits an explanation.
It's Phineas and Ferb!
OMG you're so right!
This guy-uh
Loves to add-uh
so many pauses-uh
and weird extra syllables-uh
to every line-uh
I was definitely thinking hawk tuah a few times.
so annoying
@@joshuanesbit yeah. I love the content, but he's a bit of a chore to listen to
Can you do better? 🤔
@MeteorMark yes
The tapes couldve been designed to go left or right. We're used to left-right progression from writing. If it was designed in east asia we'd have it going right to left.
I always liked the eject button symbolising the tape coming out of the machine.
Sometimes the play and pause symbols even appear on things like washing machines and clothes dryers.
There are an awful lot of scripts (such as English) which read left to right (as opposed to Arabic which reads right to left), so maybe that's why Compact Cassette tapes move that way.
Maybe the direction from left to right is also influenced by the fact, that "we" read from left to right? ;)
Strangly back then I almost never used the pause button on the cassette player or VCR. I always used STOP instead because my parents told me that it supposedly is bad for the tape in the long run. I always wondered if this is true or only an urban legend. Can anyone tell me?
Hold on, what does the stop button do again? I had it on one of my remotes back then but never really pressed it.
The stop button increases your intelligence quotient.
Great video friend, you inspired me to start my channel
Nice one! Hope the channel is going well!
@ thank you! Its going well, i think UA-cam is still trying to direct it to the right audience maybe but its slowly growing! Sometimes I feel like I should stop but its been fun so far
Who remembers the pause symbol being "paws" 🐾 in the Lemmings games?
I remember the symbols on our reel-to-reel "Elizabethan" tape deck. God, I feel old!
Edit: I have the ⬜ on the bottom of my Android tablet (the phone has three lines like the 2 pause ones). It's literally to stop the app running. However, it doesn't work 😂. ⚪ does it!
Play, rewind, and fast forward, has always made sense to me. Pause not so much.Stop should be an octagon.
What if the pause symbol was originally two stop symbols siee by side symbolizing the stopping of both reels and then squished toguether for it to fit on a button?
I assumed it was because we read left to right and that’s why those bars go in that direction and it just stuck. Sorry for countries like Japan that read right to left tho haha
feels like the thumbnail should say "dunno."
0:58 phineas and split ferb
Regarding the fishing meaning for "play": You have never said "give it some play" before, while fishing?
Answer to title: no one knows.
There. Saved you a video.
New drinking game, take a shot every time the words Play, Pause or Video is said. Haha
🐾
^^^ THIS is what should have been the universal symbol to pause a recording.
Anything you cannot separate from the place you got it from, you do not own.
the progress bar and to play button because we read from left to right.
Arrow to the right might just reflect how English readers read written language.
I'm using these buttons right now!
I knew it! A fellow weekly wackadoo!
2:31 goated
We also read from left to right. . .
the weekly planet!
Weekly planet mentioned
@NameExplain you're a Weekly Wackadadoo too!
😅
😊
@@mingfanzhang8927 #KFC #Islam
I actually asked myself that a few months ago lol
😅😅😅
😊
I think something interesting to consider, though, is that there isn't necessarily a reason that tape media had to move from left to right rather than top to bottom, bottom to top, or right to left. I think the reason we tend to engineer things that way is because our notion of advancement, in a more primitive way, derives from the direction most of the world reads and writes text. It's just naturally intuitive to think about something advancing that way. As for where writing and reading direction comes from, I dunno. Brain hemispheres? Or it's just arbitrary.
> As for where writing and reading direction comes from, I dunno. Brain hemispheres? Or it's just arbitrary.
There is _some_ arbitraryness, since the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets are written right-to-left, and Chinese and Japanese were traditionally written top-to-bottom. And some others (like early Greek and Etruscan) even used to go back and forth, alternating between left-to-right and right-to-left with each line.
On the other hand, most people are right-handed, and (hand)writing left-to-right means their hand is less likely to smudge across what they already wrote.
@AaronOfMpls I can see how winding text would be intuitive. Less travel between lines. Not as much of a sudden motion when going back to the far left and down. I do think there must be some correlation between brain structure and the way we advance text. Even though there are major notable sections, even among relatively isolated languages with hazy linguistic origins, right to left seems to be the dominant tendency.
It is actually derived from how the tape within a cassette moved from left to right, which is explained in this video.
@@Furienna But the tape probably moves left-to-right because most writing goes left-to-right (making it a default "forward" direction) ... and thus we were discussing why most writing goes left-to-right.
And to be fair, quite a few cassette recorders/players have the tape inserted upside-down (with the heads and the open end of the cassette at the _top_ of the deck instead of the bottom), and thus have the play and fast-forward symbols pointing _left_ instead of right. Plus there are auto-reverse tape decks that can play the tape in _either_ direction without flipping it over -- and some of these have play buttons pointing in _both_ directions.
@@AaronOfMpls Yeah, now I remember that you had to put the tape upside down in some cassette players.
What was up with up that?
The constantly flashing background in this video is so distracting.
Tio bad they're going away. More and more we are getting shorter videos with no payse or rewind, and many even autoplay. Enshittification of video.
I'm the opposite of what the corps intended. I will not click on a video to find information if I can have an article instead. As I read I can skim the paragraphs to get to the good stuff. Plus I don't need to hear a weirdly accented or annoying narrator. Of course, there are some good videos worth listening to.
3 minutes of showing us devices that play and pause buttons are on, which is then followed by "we don't know where the symbols come from" c'mon man, not cool, that's click bait shit
I feel so much stupider after watching this video.
Weird speech patternnsa...
3:38
Too-ah
This is by far the worst video you have made. The intro doesn't make sense and the play button on a tape deck doesn't always face right. Because the mechanism can run in either direction. I'm not sure how much research you did for this video, but it doesn't seem like enough.
🥝✔️
you take 10 min for a 30 second answer. A waste of time
Is it also a waste of time to write a comment that accomplishes nothing?
I'm sorry lad, but I can't watch your videos anymore. Your vocal fry reached an unbearable peak. Unsubbed.
Now explain why 💾 means "save". 🙂
😊
😊
As an old skooler who used disks! the symbol felt this was the indicator to commit progress to a disk so work could be saved. I guess the symbol stuck as physical media gave way to digital storage. That’s just my thinking.