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I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
- protocolture 2y agoPost them to the BBC with a note saying you never paid for your TV license and you never will.
- keybits 2y agoIncludes a fascinating story of how teletext images can be recovered from VHS recordings using a TV capture card.
- brunoqc 2y agoDrop them in front of the Red Letter Media warehouse in the middle of the night.
- Molitor5901 2y agoeBay! My brother used to tape bicycle races and has hundreds of them. He's been blanking them and selling them on eBay for about $5 each.
- roywiggins 2y agoI somehow think that may be the exact opposite of what the author is going for...
- Molitor5901 2y agoTrue but at some point.. unless someone takes them off his hands he's going to have to face a decision. Better to recycle and sell them, than toss them in the bin.
- MonkeyClub 2y agoYou're getting downvoted, but you have a point. Digitizing and blanking them out and selling the tapes aren't mutually exclusive, OP may have an opportunity to recuperate the digitization costs that way.
- metalman 2y ago2000 vhs tapes on the wall 2000 vhs tapes take one down pass it around 1999 vhs tapes on the wall
- MonkeyClub 2y agoIf you pass one around long enough, it'll sure enough generate at least a couple of copies of it, so in the end you'd have 2002 VHS tapes on that wall :)
- dylan604 2y agoI used to work in a VHS duplication facility, and spent plenty of time with a degausser to erase tapes. Not a fond memory. Plus, if you forgot about your wallet, you could ruin your credit cards and license.
- kmoser 2y agoPeople pay $5 for a blank VHS tape?
- caboteria 2y agoI would imagine that the Archive Team would be interested in these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team
- toomuchtodo 2y agoLogistics in progress.
- airstrike 2y agoDon't miss Pete's comment on that post. Such a cool YT channel!
- agumonkey 2y agovhs to dvd drives are fun https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=vhs+to+dvd&_sacat=0 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313...
- urbandw311er 2y agoI wonder if the conversion software would have the unwanted side effect of filtering out the teletext content.
- dylan604 2y agoI know at least the brands of NTSC units like this I had the misfortune of using that did not retain the line 21 data, so I'd be shocked if teletext was preserved. I could at least see some adventurous attempt of a VHS->DVD unit attempting to translate to embedded 601 captions to the MPEG streams. I guess that was way beyond the scope of what most users of these devices would want/need.
- dylan604 2y agough, 608 captions. too many similar numbers with 601 being the color space. it didn't improve with HD with 708 captions and 709 color space.
- aiaiaiaiaiai 2y agoWhy dvd though? You create a new problem!
- rasz 2y agoPicture is unimportant, its about teletext, DVD recorder wont transfer that
- agumonkey 2y agoah the signal is stripped ?
- npunt 2y agoWhenever I see old low res grainy footage like this I wonder how well the latest image gen & AI can restore it
- godzillabrennus 2y agoMy experience trying to upscale Lexx from DVD copies is… not well…
- bahmboo 2y agoThis isn't about the video part of the recordings
- ziml77 2y agoI looked into upscaling for the original episodes of Police Squad. Paid a good chunk of money for an AI upscaler because I was too curious how good of a job it could do. The results were not great. When there's too many different things impacting the quality of the source, the AI just can't do a great job. In the case of Police Squad DVD rips, they were low res and noisy. When I eventually found a higher resolution Bluray version, I ran that through just to denoise it and got much better results. My understanding is that it also would have been able to do a good job upscaling given a source that wasn't noisy. Maybe you can use a chain of models to handle both problems. I didn't try anything like that. Though I would expect the tool to have that as an option if it is something that worked well.
- qingcharles 2y agoIt will only get better. Especially with increasing corpus sizes.
- urbandw311er 2y agoOne of the major broadcasters like C4 might be intersted. Potentially there may even be some valuable deleted old shows on those tapes, like a lost episode of something.
- cj 2y agoSide note: any recommendations for digitization services for ~80 mini DV tapes? Currently planning to try out LegacyBox, but the reviews are mixed.
- DaveChurchill 2y agoGet a FireWire cable and rip the data straight from a dvcam to get the raw video files. Then compress with desired settings
- cj 2y agoAh actually they’re 8mm cassette tapes and vhs-c. From 20-40 years ago
- actionfromafar 2y agoCheap? Get one of those chinese composite video to SD card mp4 rippers. Perfect? A linux PC with 400 dollars RF capture card plus vhsdecode software.
- Clamchop 2y agoThe advice for video 8 when I did this was to buy a quality camcorder for the desired format (note, there's Video 8, Hi 8, and Digital 8, all using the same cassette form factor), in good condition, and capture the S-video output. Results were surprisingly good. VHS-C can be played in a normal VCR, with an adapter cassette, but the process will otherwise be the same. Excellent VCRs in good condition had gotten expensive last time I checked, though. When I did it, vhsdecode didn't exist and I know nothing about that, but I'm completely satisfied with the results I achieved. if they're digital 8, then of course ideally you would get a digital capture.
- interestica 2y agoIf you're in Ontario or Quebec I can help you out.
- qingcharles 2y ago
- profsummergig 2y agoAI solves this. Get AI to consume the lot and store it somewhere. Then, in the future, query the AI to find out if a specific piece of footage (that you need) is contained therein.
- batch12 2y agoA .txt file solves this if this is all op needs.
- FredPret 2y agoBut an AI is a great candidate to annotate the .txt
- aiaiaiaiaiai 2y agoIs that paper on arXiv?
- antileet 2y agoI can't tell if this is satire or not. Have you considered storing it on the blockchain instead, so this way it is immutable and permanent? /s
- farias0 2y agoI don't know why people are worried about storage. You can just store it on the cloud.
- fallinditch 2y agoIt can become a compulsion to record and collect media. Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives. I met a bloke once in the 90's who made recordings on to C-90 tapes of anything interesting that was on BBC Radio 4 and 3, and he found most things interesting. He was surrounded by piles, thousands of tapes everywhere and he was desperately trying to catalog everything. As I spoke to him he was listening to the radio via an ear bud, whilst also recording the radio. He was supposed to be moving out of his house that day, having just exchanged contacts, but he was drowning in his precious tapes. His wife seemed pretty p**d off with him. I was a bit compulsive myself. I used to buy records, then CDs, and I also made tapes of albums, and recordings of the John Peel show. It was a problem to shift 100s of records and CDs and boxes of tapes whenever I moved house. I lightened my load by giving everything away apart from the Peel tapes which were the most entertaining items in the whole collection, it actually felt good. I kept hold of the Peel tapes for some years, even though my tape deck had died. There were some great shows from the 90s! But then I had to downsize again so I took them to the rubbish tip, even that didn't make me sad. Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- Sakos 2y agoWhy the BBC? It should go to archives like archive.org and publicly accessible "pirate" archives, so corporations like the BBC can't stick it in a vault and bury it.
- dylan604 2y agoBecause the BBC might actually be interested in plugging holes in their own archive.
- userbinator 2y agoThey can do that from archive.org
- stickfigure 2y agoMaybe I'm wrong, but I would assume that in the 1990s to 2000s studios were better about archiving production data, and there aren't likely to be "lost episodes" in this stash?
- DigiEggz 2y agoYou'd be very surprised.
- dylan604 2y agoyou'd be not right. things happen. tapes get misplaced. tapes get lost. tapes get damaged. the people working at the studios are merely human. and at this point, there's even fewer humans working at the studios as they keep laying people off.
- beerandt 2y agoTapes especially got recorded over.
- jccalhoun 2y agoWhat is most likely of value besides the teletext on there is the live stuff and any commercials.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoBBC famously lost their 9/11 coverage for a decade or so until they managed to find a copy they hadn’t takes over. Their policy is only six month retention.
- lubujackson 2y ago"Lost" is a relative term. I'd like to watch old episodes of MTV's "You Wrote It, You Watch It" (hosted by a young Jon Stewart!) but good luck finding that on the internet anywhere.
- qingcharles 2y agoI don't know if MTV still offer this, but about 10 years ago they still had a service where you could get them to basically burn any show to a DVD for a small cost. I got a bunch of rare shows this way.
- zdw 2y agoProbably the highest quality retrieval is with: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode which reads the raw data off a variety of tape formats and converts it to video. Grew out of the domesday project for lasterdiscs
- adamrezich 2y agoThank you for this link! My mom went through hell trying several “professional” commercial services both locally and elsewhere, just trying to get our couple dozen or so family video VHS tapes converted into some digital format. They all suck ass—not that my mom cares, of course, she's perfectly content watching videos of her children hideously stretched from 4:3 to 16:9, among many other issues. But now at least I have a weekend project to look forward to!
- ToDougie 2y agoThis was so charming. I wish my parents had more recorded content of us, but it was a rare day that someone would get out the camcorder, and even rarer that the files would get transposed anywhere. But I do think there are some really old hard drives (anywhere from 10G to 40G) sitting somewhere in a garage, full of JPEGs of us.
- dylan604 2y agoIt is something that is funny to me. By the time VHS camcorders came out, 8mm film cameras were much smaller. Almost point-n-shoot sizes. Then VHS came out with the shoulder mount bricks. It took forever for VHS-C palmcorders to make them much more portable.
- epcoa 2y agoA Super 8 cartridge is only good for 2.5 minutes at 24 fps and 3:20 at 18 though, going to 120 (or even 20-30) minutes was quite a trade up. > Then VHS came out with the shoulder mount bricks. It took forever for VHS-C palmcorders to make them much more portable. The first VHS camcorder (a combined camera and recorder unit) was VHS-C. The JVC GR-C1, released 1984, made famous in Back to the Future. Full size (VHS) shoulder units actually came a bit later as a lower cost option, and they sold more readily into the 90s. Likely in part because if you were portability and not cost conscious you opted for 8mm (video tape) at that time, 150 minutes and superior audio, slightly better PQ (color). Prior to that if you wanted to record VHS on location you carried a 10 kg “portable” VTR on your hip with a shoulder strap and a cable to the camera that was another 5 kg. But in those days (late 70s-80s) 1/2” Betamax and 3/4” U-matic(!) were more common for portable use (didn’t help that the early VHS portables were bulkier and heavier than the competition).
- schappim 2y agoJames should donate it to the UK’s version of Australia’s: https://youtube.com/@davidthegreen https://youtube.com/@davidthegreen
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jwagenet 2y agoI’m somewhat baffled as to what is taking so long to at least digitize the tapes. He alludes to perhaps some more steps than just pressing play, but it seems to me the workload could be broken up by focusing on recording the tape data and dealing with the digital editing later to eliminate the physical tape problem.
- userbinator 2y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths each tape can have up to 930 minutes of data. 2000 tapes is 1860000 minutes, or around 3.5 years of continuous playtime, and I don't know of any VCRs that can play faster than realtime. Of course there's also the question of how much digital storage that would take, which is probably in the hundreds of terabytes range.
- jwagenet 2y agoYea, I understand the limitations. TFA mentioned 6hr runtimes (rather than 15.5), which is more manageable. If you WFH I’d guess 2-3 is feasible at least 5 days a week. Of course, if the teletext requires a second run then that’s double time. I suspect any serious archival setup for this will eventually settle on multiple recording systems. wrt to storage, I hope one is running a reasonably low res for this with some moderate compression. This is vhs after all…
- rasz 2y agoIf its only about teletext you dont need whole 6 hours. Teletext loops whole content in around a minute max. It would probably suffice to capture until vhs-teletext confirms full decode, minutes per tape instead of hours. You will only miss live changes - I think there was chat and sport results.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- douglee650 2y agoSend in to southtree or similar service, get tapes plus an SSD with digital files back Run through AI and ask to transcribe, summarize, and catalog an index Store in secure S3 bucket or NAS Create a website/blog post with ask for access
- QuadrupleA 2y agoProbably an age-old theme, but as a guy now in my 40s, it's humbling and a little sad to see how many things that were so vital, alive, and relevant in my childhood (and past eras) that are now dead and almost gone from the collective memory. As the Buddha said, all is impermanent.
- throwanem 2y agoRight there with you. But hey, it's not all bad. We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it. And for all it pangs our hearts to see our ephemera tend to dust, we also I think are, of any human generation to date, probably best able to hope that the things we really love from our time will be preserved. (I hope that's a distinction we don't end up holding on to...) In just the last little while I've been getting to see that peculiarly ingenuous sort of joy again, as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs. That's a show that makes a habit of trying to tell the audience things they'll hope never to forget. It does so wonderfully. It's a story I cherish, and if someone half my age will perforce love it at least somewhat differently from how I do - so what? That the story remain loved is enough. I dunno if any of that's any use to you, but share it in the hope it'll do you the same small good it did me, thinking on this of a quiet evening.
- aspenmayer 2y ago> as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs What show are you referring to? Consider my curiosity piqued!
- throwanem 2y agoBabylon 5, but go in unspoiled. It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...) That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.
- atum47 2y agoYou can boil the tape and make some tea; so I've heard. This is a joke, please don't do that.
- atum47 2y agoI guess people did not like my joke, but growing up "chá de fita" (tea made out of vhs tapes) were a common drug heavy drug users would drink. Legend has that the effects of this type of drug never wears off. Metal poisoning, i guess.
- ingen0s 2y agoI recall there was a kid somewhere on the interent who got some fame for collecting Titan VHS tapes and has a garage full of them, you both should hook up.
- cxr 2y agoWhat is "Titan" in this context?
- gcj 2y agoThis reminded me of a friend who has a very serious form of cancer. His monitor died, so I decided to give him one as a gift, since he spends all his time at home doing nothing. I went with my girlfriend to deliver it and I reminded he used to tape and catalog F1 races and other stuff. I asked if he was watching one of these types and he proceeded to open a large cabinet and give us a tour of his meticulously catalogued and tagged 70's and 80's porn collection.
- knowitnone 2y agoso you found a gold mine?
- aiaiaiaiaiai 2y agoA startup idea
- natch 2y agoTalk to the Internet Archive. They don't just take internet stuff. If you go to their web page that describes what they do and do not accept, don't go by that. It can be, and has been, wrong in the past including the recent past (this year). Instead, try to get in touch with them by email. They might accept these as a donation. You still have the problem of how to pay for the mailing. Just trying to get you one step closer to a solution. There's no promise they will digitize it immediately, or even ever. But they might take it and then there will at least be a potential path to digitization.
- SoftTalker 2y ago"my VCR has remained on standby mode, the tapes in their boxes, gathering dust." At some point you just have to admit that they are useless and throw them away. Whatever it is, if it's been in the garage or basement for years and you don't use it and haven't dealt with it, get rid of it. Just knowing the stuff is there is a nagging mental irritant, and it won't go away until you get rid of the stuff. Nobody wants old VHS tapes. Try to put them on eBay, it will just be another huge project you'll never finish and you'll maybe cover the shipping costs. Throw them away.
- WalterBright 2y ago2000 tapes at 6 hours each, 12,000 hours. You can record them for about a gig an hour, so it ought to fit in 12 terabytes. Doing one tape a night, it'll take 6 years of calendar time. 3 years if you buy a dedicated computer to do it, at two tapes a day. The good news is that's calendar time, not your time, which is pressing "record" on your computer and "play" on the VHS machine.
- femto 2y agoHaving digitised a few VHS tapes, the (personal) time consumer was verifying whether the capture was successful and of acceptable quality. Is anyone aware of a way to automate the quality control?
- kmoser 2y agoAI! But seriously, there's probably no substitute for having a human watch the entire capture to ensure it came out right. "Acceptable quality" is subjective. To really be sure it came out right, you'd have to watch it side-by-side with the original, to tell whether glitches in the capture are in the original, or a result of a faulty capture.
- WalterBright 2y agoJust take a look at the first minute and the last minute. If they're OK, it's pretty assured the rest is. For damaged cassettes, you can move the tape from one cassette to another. If the tape is broken, packing tape will get it spliced well enough. If the leader or trailer is bad, you can cut it off and reattach the end to the spool. If the recording is lousy, cleaning the VCR heads with alcohol usually will fix it.
- rasz 2y agohttps://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode + 10 of those $35 a pop https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/RSP1 https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/RSP1 + 10 VHS players + someone on a night shift feeding tapes every couple hours = ~100 days
- 2y ago
- magicseth 2y agoJust as shipwrecks before the advent of nuclear bombs are a source of low background radiation, troves of content like this are low-ai-contamination sources of guaranteed human media. I suspect they might someday be valuable :-)
- meowster 2y agoDon't worry, AI can add a filter that makes new stuff look like old human media.
- paulcole 2y agoThrow them away!
- lesuorac 2y agoI am very surprised at how many recording programs / devices don't have an option to auto-stop on black. It's a real pain to have to hit record / stop and would be so much nicer to just start and when it stays black for like 1 minute just auto-stop.
- flykespice 2y agoI read that as 2000 year old VHS tapes somehow...
- yboris 2y agoOnce you digitize them, you'll want to browse the videos. Consider using Video Hub App - an MIT open source application (Windows, Mac, Linux) that shows you screenshots (that you can scrub through) from each video. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- suddenclarity 2y agoShould probably mention that it's your own software and that it cost $5. Not that the money really matters.
- MonkeyClub 2y agoAlso should mention that it's MIT licensed, not MIT software. But a cool program nonetheless!
- yboris 2y agoThank you for pointing out the potential ambiguity in saying "MIT open source". I can't edit my comment at this point in time - I'll be more clear next time.
- schwartzworld 2y agoIt looks like the binary is $5 but it’s an open source electron app, so pretty easy to just clone the repo and build it yourself
- yboris 2y ago:) I tried to make it as easy as possible to build your own copy. At the moment it should be as simple as `npm install` and `npm run electron` (two commands with no other setup to create the installer -- all in under 5 minutes)
- BrianRoemmele 2y agoI will encourage you to save them. I use them to train local AI models.
- rkhassen9 2y agoGot any Dr Who episodes? There are some that have never been recovered though the era may not match. People are looking for em! I wonder what other niche collections are desperately missing specific things.
- night862 2y agoYou can send them to YouTube user “Dr VHS Rip” if you wish. He digitizes all manner of vhs. All manner except porn I think.
- Animats 2y ago1-800-GOT-JUNK
- 8bitsrule 2y agoIf they're commercially-recorded tapes (labelled with entertainment value), then a thrift-store chain might extract some value. (That's what I did with my eclectic vinyl collection.) If they're empty or a random collection of this-and-that programs, then they might sell them at low prices to people who still have VHS machines and need the tape. (I'd imagine new tapes are scarce and expensive.)
- zeroonetwothree 2y agorm -rf
- consumerx 2y agolol
- staticautomatic 2y agoGive them to Found Footage Fest or Everything is Terrible! https://www.foundfootagefest.com/ https://www.foundfootagefest.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@FoundFootageFest https://www.youtube.com/@FoundFootageFest https://www.youtube.com/@EVERYTHINGISTERRIBLE https://www.youtube.com/@EVERYTHINGISTERRIBLE
- dudeinjapan 2y agoBuild a VHS tape pyramid and charge people $3 to see it. duh.
- alanjay 2y agoAnd then pave paradise, put up a parking lot.
- lynx23 2y agoSend them to Red Letter Media :-), or find a landfill near you...
- josteink 2y agoSeconding the Red Letter Media suggestion. They’re often able to convert these potential landfills into comedy gold.
- punnerud 2y agoAs long as you have them you are allowed to keep a digital copy as well? Can you also rent out your digital copy?
- ozozozd 2y agoI am shocked that no one is talking about Teletext! I am guessing it wasn’t a thing in US or I am the oldest person to comment so far? I had forgotten that Teletext existed until this post. And for those who know about BBSs, Teletext was the closest thing before modems. I don’t remember seeing the wild Teletext Ascii art etc. as seen in the post though. UK seems to have had mad Teletext.
- dailykoder 2y agoI think most of the TV stations in germany still have it. At least the big ones. And it's still filled with mostly ads.
- omnibrain 2y agoFor ARD (Das Erste) you can find it here: https://www.ard-text.de/ https://www.ard-text.de/
- casper14 2y agoThe Netherlands still has it. They even updated it recently because a lot of people are still using it.
- davidmurphy 2y agoUS didn't have it to my knowledge, so it was indeed a novelty when visiting Europe in the 90s to experience it.
- ssl-3 2y agoWe did have it in the States; it just wasn't ever very broadly adopted. Circa 1992, a friend's house had a then-fancy Zenith TV that supported Teletext, which was unusual at the time. IIRC it worked with exactly one cable channel in our town, TBS, and it had a fair variety of news and information. I enjoyed playing around with it when I visited, much to my friend's bemusement. Eventually, TVs with Teletext (and closed captioning) became much more common, but by then the ship had sailed. The service was NLA by the time we had a TV with these capabilities in our own home.
- Log_out_ 2y agoMake a deep time capsule? concrete, inert gas?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silisili 2y agoThere's a guy who I see on Twitter often, who has replied here but as a new account, named Brian Roemmele. See if you can get in contact with him, he may be interested in it.
- simplecto 2y agoHah. beat me to it. I knew someone else would be weird enough to mention this guy. A very interesting guy. I recall he has gone dumpster diving behind libraries to save information that has not been digitized.
- consumerx 2y agodigitize -> vectorize
- p0w3n3d 2y ago2000 old Sounds old
- ForOldHack 2y agoWrite the names of 40 tapes a day, for two months. Take breaks. PUBLISH the results. I used to collect 45s, until I found an MP3. Then after 3 ISPs, I no longer needed the 45s. I NEED THE LIST OF THEM.
- nanna 2y agoSure, but the author is interested in archiving the Teletext pages hidden in the recordings of the TV shows, not the TV shows themselves.
- wwader 2y agoReminds me of the documentary Kim's video https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/ recommended!
- getwiththeprog 2y agoGreat documentary, New York collector (Kim) gifts huge video library to an Italian town. When a former Kim's customer hunts it down, he finds water-damaged tapes in a disused store-room - and mafia overtones standing in his way!
- wwader 2y agoYeap love things like that, ex https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787791/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787791/ and the mystery show podcast. Let me know if you know any!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Refalm 2y agoSend them all to http://www.everythingisterrible.com/ http://www.everythingisterrible.com/ They collect all VHS tapes.
- dailykoder 2y agoI often asked myself, and so did just a few days ago, we archive so much of the internet. Just look at how huge the internet archive is, but do we actually need to do that? Why would we need all of that to save "the contents for posterity"? On the one hand I do believe that there might be some bits which might be nice to have in 50 years, but we generate so incredibly much content and it only gets more. Shouldn't we just get rid of most of it someday? It was fun, it did it's purpose, but it's okay if we forget about it. Sure, now you could argue we did that for a long long time, just look at all the anchient libraries, but our content is exponentially growing. How much trash will we have archived in 50 years?
- landswipe 2y agoHow else are they going to simulate everything in the future with incredible detail?
- dailykoder 2y agoThat's the thing. Yes, I often find all the retro stuff really cool and it's nice what was done with such little hardware, back in the days, but do we really need that? I doubt it. Yes, save the fundamentals, save part of the history, but not everything
- IntStorage 2y ago[dead]
- iancmceachern 2y agoThere are whole YouTube channels where people buy random tapes like this and watch them. I'd say donate or sell them to one of those folks.
- failedartifact 2y agoI would recommend reaching out to the Wellcome Trust, London. https://wellcome.org/ https://wellcome.org/
- krisgenre 2y agoI had quite a few episodes of "Johnny Sokko and his flying robot" recorded on VHS and also of one interesting TV series about a group of children living all by themselves in an old caravan (the opening credits shows them jumping through a hole in a fence). My mom gave them all away long back but even now I miss them :(
- ianbooker 2y agoMy first job was to write news to teletext for German public broadcast. It required the author to compact even complex news into essentially two old tweets (I think around 300 characters) and deliver some context. Very good training!
- pastage 2y agoThere are people who put old VHS on Youtube that seems to be a pretty gruesome job. See Swedish achivist https://www.youtube.com/@RosaMannen https://www.youtube.com/@RosaMannen Interesting that you can get Teletext from the VHS, and sad that it is now lost after conversion to a youtube video.
- iamthejuan 2y agoIf those ate not copyrighted materials then I think it can be monetized as a content.
- savrajsingh 2y agoIs it possible to rent a well maintained hi8 8mm player and digitize old videos?
- dnel 2y agooh my that video promoting Gary Glitter going on Live and Kicking made me feel very uncomfortable
- throw21111972 2y agoI put all our home videos from the 80s on youtube https://www.youtube.com/@ashodapakian2788/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ashodapakian2788/videos
- schwartzworld 2y agoI have a neighbor who has this problem with bootleg audio cassettes. Concert recordings mostly. I keep begging him to back them up to digital and even gave him a little usb interface he could do it with. He talks about this collection with such pride, it’s hard for me to imagine not future proofing at least your favorite ones, but there’s no convincing some people.
- stewx 2y agoTo be fair, hard drives are not necessarily more future-proof than audio cassettes. A hard drive typically lasts, what, 10 years, whereas a cassette tape is probably good for 50 years. You need to back up the digital copy onto different devices.
- yuvadam 2y agoA single hard drive can be part of a larger fault-tolerant storage cluster, not to mention much more easily duplicated and backed up. The digitization process is key.
- schwartzworld 2y agoOnce you have it digitized, making copies is trivial though. Every time you listen to a cassette the quality degrades slightly. You always run the risk of a machine eating a tape as well. Maybe the cassette will last 50 years in the box, but it won’t last 50 years of active use and you’ll want to make other copies, the earlier you make those digital masters the better.
- PaulHoule 2y agoFunny but VHS is probably the most accessible obsolete medium. This place https://ithacareuse.org/ https://ithacareuse.org/ sells decks for about $12 and Ebay prices aren't much more. Most TVs still have a composite in that will work great, and that place sells prerecorded tapes for about $2. Audio quality on VHS is surprisingly good and really pops with Dolby Pro Logic on my AV receiver. Such a deck is likely to work just fine. Contrast that to a cassette deck which often has problems a lot worse than old belts. I have been looking for one of those because my son's 96 Buick came with a broken stereo and he eventually found a working OEM stereo that had a tape player but no CD player. (He really wants a copy of Deltron 3030) After trying a few $20 decks I found locally I gave up and spent 10x that on Ebay. Blank tapes are more expensive than minidiscs in lots from Japan although prerecorded cassettes are cheap and abundant, he's already got more that he can keep in the car. (If it were my car I'd get one of those minidisc players from Japan that looks like it came out of a Gundam...)
- mmmlinux 2y agoI really want to import a minidisc player from japan for my r53 mini cooper. I probably should before they are all gone forever.
- aEJ04Izw5HYm 2y agoWell done @keybits for reaching out for help. Another option is that you could split the workload between 3-4 data archivists and start a separate archive until it finds a better home. Personally I don't have the time for this but more people might have the time for a 1 year effort if you were to provide your setup. A few other archivists have been suggested on this thread. Perhaps they would take a portion rather than the whole responsibility, it could be pretty cool to have a bi-monhtly catch up with others with the same hobby and who would all be eager to share their discoveries!
- lambdaone 2y agoYou might want to try the UK national archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ or get in touch with the enthusiast community, people like https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/ https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/ You should ensure whoever you give them to can give you a binding commitment to use for legitimate archival purposes, and not just acquire them and sit on them for copyright reasons.
- JTbane 2y agoHot take- VHS has terrible quality, I just watched some old animated tapes from my childhood and they look bad. Thank goodness for DVD remasters.
- bofadeez 2y agoSend them to the Victorville Film Archive care of film buff Gregg Turkington.
- pfdietz 2y agoThrow them out. When my dad died, he had accumulated hundreds of tapes of movies from cable. What was I to do with them? I didn't want to watch them, and selling them would have violated copyright laws. I wasn't going to go erase them to try to sell blank tapes which had little value.
- fithisux 2y agoUpload to youtube
- burningChrome 2y agoI held onto my CD collection for various reasons but the main one was my car - the 2014 Toyota Corolla was the last year they still had a CD player. All of the new cars either have Apple or Android streaming, but there's just something that isn't the same. The album art, the liner notes you can read, sometimes photos of the band or lyrics. My son now has the car, so it might be time to cast off my collection. I thought about starting a streaming service to play some of the music I have from many of the local bands who've graced the Minneapolis music scene, many of whom no longer exist. There's also a ton of bands from the early aughts that are no longer around that I also have from when I worked in the local record store. Going to shows and being emersed the local music scene was all I cared about back then. Then I start to think about the copyright issues of playing this stuff on a streaming service and instead of something nostalgic, I was caught up in the idea if its even legal to do.
- kmoser 2y agoOn a related note, I know somebody who owns a complete run of PHOTO magazine (the original French edition) and is looking to donate them. First published in the 1960s, with approximately 10 issues per year, his collection has approximately 580 issues. Contact me if you know an individual or organization that would be interested.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoMake a TV console out of them.
- FloatArtifact 2y agoFor home, VHS, I wonder if there's an open source model to help denoise and reconstruct her levels of detail.