Why care about CableLabs? I am praying for DirecTV to revive its PCI-E receiver card, which was supposed to be supported by Windows 7 until they put it on hold. Satellite TV PWNS cable TV.

And their bids were running as high as US$600 AFAIK

Dude, you're asking for some sort of professional thingy. I was once looking all over eBay for a cheap S-VHS deck, and some of my search results were for professional-grade rack-mount multi-format NTSC/PAL/SECAM S-VHS decks pulled from telecom/news-gathering warehouses. And those did really do 480i (NTSC) and 576i (PAL/SECAM) and sported S-Video.

But JVC still makes DVD/VHS combo decks (and I believe DVD-RW/VHS decks too)

There was HD VHS. Its first iteration was called W-VHS and it only existed in Japan merely for use with MUSE Hi-Vision, Japan's analog interpretation of 1080i HDTV. And W-VHS decks were (and still are) the only consumer-grade recording machines in the world that can record video via component (which, like VGA and SCART, is an analog interface unlike DVI-D, HDMI, or DisplayPort). Today, the only consumer-grade thing that has component inputs is an HDTV and it cannot record video (only display it).

Then Japan killed MUSE (then barely a few years old) and pushed ISDB, her own digital interpretation of HDTV, thus spelling the end of W-VHS. But then industry quickly responded with the second iteration of HD VHS: D-VHS. This one supported up to 1080i in digital MPEG-2 format, and the highest-capacity D-VHS tape held 52 GB (2 gigs more than Blu-ray!), large enough for 4 hours of 1080i MPEG-2 video. And best of all, unlike W-VHS, D-VHS was exported to ATSC countries like USA. It, however, lasted only a few years, most probably because of its very steep entry price (US$1000, just like Blu-ray in 2006!), its very poor adoption rate (the same bug that plagued and eventually doomed S-VHS; besides very few people was into HDTV back then, preferring to flock to DVD, TiVo, DirecTV, Dish, and digital cable instead), and the MPAA's refusal to allow the release of movies on D-VHS until some DRM could be cooked up for them (in the form of D-Theater, and they would play only on D-VHS decks carrying the D-Theater compatibility label). Only 21 D-Theater movies were ever released in America, among them one of the two Terminators.

Not if the VHS tapes have Macrovision. Those DVD-R/VHS decks can still detect Macrovision and prevent a Macrovision-ed VHS from being burned into a DVD-R, much less into a DVD-RW.

No, the epitome of video quality is 70-mm film (not exactly video, but beats video several times over and over, and still beats Blu-ray in terms of visual resolution which is in terms of grains and not pixels)

So this means there will be no Pioneer Elite Blu-ray/DVD/CD/LaserDisc player?

Sorry, it was supposed to be:

"I am falling, I am fading, I am drowning, help me breathe..."

I don't think Yoshitoshi ABe ever considered using that title for any of the 13 layers (episodes) that comprise his currently most compelling work of psychological cyberpunk called Serial Experiments Lain.