{"id":562093,"date":"2026-04-03T11:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/562093\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T11:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:50:11","slug":"my-favorite-way-to-watch-classic-vhs-movies-is-in-retro-rewind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/562093\/","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Way To Watch Classic VHS Movies Is In Retro Rewind"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few nights ago, I was playing rental store simulator Retro Rewind when I got distracted by the final 20 minutes of The Terminator. As I watched the movie in my store on a tiny CRT screen in the corner, I forgot I was supposed to be running the place. Thankfully, the digital employee I\u2019d hired a few days before checked customers out. And if you, too, want to watch old movies in a digital recreation of a \u201990s-era rental shop, well, I can help you out.<\/p>\n

I love Retro Rewind,<\/a> a recently released video rental store simulator out now on Steam. As someone who grew up loving trips to our local Blockbuster, Retro Rewind is a very cozy game for me. Something about being surrounded by shelves filled with movies and garish carpet covered in stars and cartoon cameras makes me happy. And like any good rental store, your store in Retro Rewind has TVs. But by default, these play short, fairly generic clips created in-game. One video clip, however, tells you to replace this file with your own video file.<\/p>\n

When I saw that, I got excited. Could I play any \u201990s movie I wanted on these TVs? The answer was yes. Yes indeed.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real purpose of these TVs. And I\u2019ve taken advantage of this nifty feature to, as mentioned above, put all of The Terminator (via VHS rip) as well as a bunch of \u201990s trailers and more into my humble rental shop. If that sounds awesome to you, then let me walk you through the fairly easy steps to get this working in your own store. Just be careful you don\u2019t get distracted watching a movie while you should be working.<\/p>\n

Decide on and download the video you want to play on your in-game TVs <\/p>\n

First off, you need to figure out what you want playing on your TVs in Retro Rewind. There really isn\u2019t a limit to what you could add to the in-game TVs, assuming you can find a digital video of it online. I\u2019ve seen people put \u201990s-era cartoons, movies, commercials, and trailers into the game. You could do music videos. Or create your own complication of stuff that will then loop endlessly on your shop\u2019s TV screens.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d recommend checking out the Internet Archive for cool VHS rips if you want to keep your content appropriate for the era, and hitting up YouTube for trailers and ads. For the purpose of walking you through how to do this, I\u2019ve selected this two-hour-long Blockbuster TV in-store promo tape I found on the Internet Archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One thing to keep in mind is that at the moment, you can only get three videos, each with its own channel, working in Retro Rewind. So you can\u2019t dump 50 trailers or TV episodes into the game. Instead, they\u2019ll need to be combined into one longer video.<\/p>\n

Converting videos to work in Retro Rewind <\/p>\n

Okay, once you\u2019ve downloaded a video to add to the game, you\u2019ll next need to convert it so it works properly in Retro Rewind. This isn\u2019t too tricky. The easiest way to go about this is downloading and installing the free program Handbrake, which is a very useful video conversion and porting tool.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a9 Kotaku <\/p>\n

Once that\u2019s installed, drag your desired video file into Handbrake. Then make sure the format is set to MP4. Next, hop over to the \u201cVideo\u201d tab and make sure H.264 is selected under \u201cVideo Encoder.\u201d Finally, go to the \u201cDimensions\u201d tab and look under \u201cResolution and Scaling.\u201d There, you should find an option to change the \u201cResolution Limit\u201d from 1080p HD to custom. That will let you set the exact size for the converted video. You\u2019ll want to go with 512\u00d7512 as this is the recommended size for video files according to Retro Rewind.\u00a0 Change the name of the file at the bottom to something memorable and take note of where it\u2019s being saved, likely your videos folder in Windows.<\/p>\n

Now hit that big green button at the top to start encoding the file. Depending on your computer and the size of the video file, this could take a few minutes or a lot longer. Wait for it to completely finish before moving on or closing Handbrake.<\/p>\n

Placing your custom videos into the game <\/p>\n

Once the file has been converted to the format and size we need, it\u2019s time to place it in Retro Rewind. Find the game in your Steam library, make sure it\u2019s installed, and then right-click its name in Steam. Look for \u201cManage\u201d and click \u201cBrowse local files.\u201d This should open up the game\u2019s install folder. Click the folder labeled \u201cRetro Rewind,\u201d then in there click \u201cContent,\u201d and then \u201cVHS,\u201d and finally open up the \u201cMovies\u201d folder within. This will bring up a list of folders that are the channels available on the TV.<\/p>\n

As of April 2, the game only supports three of these channels: Police, Sci-Fi, and Public.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a9 Kotaku <\/p>\n

Pick one of those three folders and open it. In here, you should find one file named something like \u201cRR_Channel_ Public.mp4.\u201d This is where we\u2019ll place that converted video from earlier. Grab it and drop it in here. Now, rename the original file that was in here and add a simple X, A, or 2 to the file name. Copy that file name onto the newly added video you converted, but make sure to delete the extra letter or number you added. (This step will make sure you can always go back and replace your video with the OG video easily in case you want to or something breaks later.)<\/p>\n

Now close that folder and hop to Steam. You should be able to boot up Retro Rewind and change the channel until you find your video there waiting to be watched. Now be careful you don\u2019t get too distracted by it and forget to run your rental shop. Trust me, it can happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few nights ago, I was playing rental store simulator Retro Rewind when I got distracted by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[13297,248978,74,146274,248979],"class_list":["post-562093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-mod","tag-retro-rewind","tag-technology","tag-tip","tag-vhs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}