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About a month ago found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago. It was my own home videos. I wanted to preserve them, so wanted to upload them to Goog
by LASR 6y ago
About a month ago found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago.
It was my own home videos. I wanted to preserve them, so wanted to upload them to Google Photos.
It took me some looking around in eBay to find a camcorder to play these back. When it came home, I realized that I needed a FireWire 400 port to capture full resolution. So more digging around for a FireWire PCI-E card. I was finally able to transcode and upload some 15GB worth of video. It took 3 minutes on my gigabit internet for the upload. About a month for the whole process acquiring the hardware etc.
When I think about these tapes some 50 years from now, it might as well be completely unrecoverable, not because the tapes went bad, but because we have nothing to read them. Makes you wonder about galactic time scales like in Star Trek.
- peteradio 6y agoAnd in 2 years those tapes might be the only thing you got.
- jeffhuys 6y agoCould you elaborate?
- imoverclocked 6y agoMaybe that he uploaded them to an unpaid service which might make a policy shift to remove the data at some unknown time in the future?
- sciurus 6y agohttps://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
- trebligdivad 6y agoThat happens already; there were problems getting hold of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_ProjectApollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_P... data only 20-30 years after the missions
- throwaway201103 6y ago> found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago ... I wanted to preserve them Here's where I raise my hand and ask "Why?" They've been sitting in a box for 15 years. You never watched them, you never even thought about them. Why preserve them? It's why I stopped taking pictures and videos of things. I never watched them again. It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.
- cm2187 6y agoSome things only get interesting with time. How young we looked. How different the city looks now. Or people who disappeared.
- xahrepap 6y agoFor me it’s personal history. My kids LOVE watching videos of me and my wife when we were younger. Luckily for them, my wife’s family converted all their videos to digital and so it’s easy to watch. I’m itching to do the same to my parents’ collection so my kids can see more. I suspect their kids will enjoy the same.
- Causality1 6y agoJust because you don't doesn't mean other people don't. May as well condemn someone for following a sport you don't like.
- claytongulick 6y agoAsking "why" doesn't imply condemnation, does it? At HN we assume best intention, asking why is how we learn about other people and their reasoning. Of course it may be different than ours. But isn't that how we learn and are exposed to new ideas? IMHO we should encourage more respectful "why?" questions.
- mega_dingus 6y agoReread the post, especially this sentence, and ask yourself if it was "respectful" > It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value in sitting and looking at this old stuff again.