To make a true HMV/PMV, you needed two things: a copy of Top of the Pops , MTV , or The Chart Show , and a lot of patience.
Let’s rewind the tape. In the strictest sense, an HMV (Home Music Video) was a tape you made at home. You took a VHS cassette, plugged your stereo into the VCR’s audio input, and recorded songs off the radio or a CD onto the tape’s audio track. But that was just a mixtape. The Video part came next. hmv/pmv
You couldn’t just cut anywhere. VHS had a nasty habit of scrambling the image for half a second when you hit "Play" after "Pause." A master editor knew exactly where the black frames were. You had to cue the tape to the exact frame before the song started, hit pause, wait for the wobble to stop, and then—like a bomb squad technician—un-pause at the precise millisecond the drum hit. To make a true HMV/PMV, you needed two
High-end enthusiasts had RCA cables. The rest of us had a microphone placed three inches from a boom box. Recording a song from the radio meant you couldn't skip tracks easily. If the DJ talked over the guitar solo, that static was now part of your master recording forever. If you wanted to remove a video’s original audio, you had to turn your TV’s volume to zero while the VCR still recorded the input from your CD player. You took a VHS cassette, plugged your stereo
We didn't have likes. We had the blinking red light of the VCR. And that was enough.