It 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.
Not just a male thing! [1]
It might be the case that men are more likely to be collectors/hoarders in general but there definitely are women who partake. I will also say that the type of thing being collected matters. Go to an estate sale for a woman (especially one born before 1960) and you may see collections of dolls, tea services, certain types of paintings, etc.
I went to a talk once from a man who collected antique magic props. He said when he moved he needed a 1 ton container for his stuff. At the end of the talk, someone asked if his wife objected to his collection. He said "She doesn't complain about my magic stuff, and I don't complain about her Teddy Bears."
Luckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
Unluckily, that means there's no physical check on it to prompt you to stop like physical media has.
except there is a limit because each drive holds a limited amount of data because it is physical media. And you can argue cloud storage but they have a limit as well as price.
Yeah, my 30TB of digital media fits in a shoebox and even doubling that would still fit in the same shoebox. It's also not something that takes up a lot of time unless you let it take over your life. Maybe a few hours a week of gathering new media (movies, shows, games, YouTube videos, etc.), then I move on with my life and do other things.
I've effectively given up on collecting DVDs or anything else that takes up too much space, and it's such a load off my mind not having to worry about where to out it all, how to display it, or even how to transport it whenever I move.
Yeah, the correct answer is to basically chuck it all. If you have a bit of possibly unique content, perhaps contact a relevant archive (which I did recently) but otherwise accept that you don't need to find a home for everything. Books, DVDs, and CDs can go to your local library's book sale though most will end up pulped. VHSs are mostly just trash at this point even if someone, somewhere might want them.
Tangent but I've huge collection of comics. I am waiting for AI to get good enough so that I can turn it into knowledgebase
yeah, I doubt you'll scan all that into your AI. Prove me wrong.
Those stored things are your digital roots. Without them, you are nobody.
> Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
> Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire tape collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move that cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection they had ever received. The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2019, the project is still active.
If you at all know him you must get him to contact the bbc archival team.
Why 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.
Because the BBC might actually be interested in plugging holes in their own archive.
They can do that from archive.org
Your assuming that the archival format would be the same or that there's not anything else specific for their needs. Everybody thinks their snowflake is special, and definitely more special than anyone else's snowflake.
>Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.
This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!
This 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.
so you found a gold mine?
Probably the highest quality retrieval is with: 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
Thank 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!
This 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.
It 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.
Probably 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.
“Eventually, all our graves go unattended.”
— Conan O'Brien
Right 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 new friend's painstakingly handmade VHS dubs - already knowing it was a story that would stay with me forever. It's a story I love, and if someone half my age will love it differently from how I did, 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.
It's a new world by inches every moment and one day we all wake up to find that the world has passed us by. To a greater or lesser degree we're all relics of an age that no longer exists and probably didn't exist in the first place, at least how we remember it.
It's bittersweet but probably a good thing.
I would imagine that the Archive Team would be interested in these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team
Logistics in progress.
Talk 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.
"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.
One 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.
Send 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
Includes a fascinating story of how teletext images can be recovered from VHS recordings using a TV capture card.
I 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.
What is "Titan" in this context?
Post them to the BBC with a note saying you never paid for your TV license and you never will.
I’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.
According to 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.
You can boil the tape and make some tea; so I've heard.
This is a joke, please don't do that.
James should donate it to the UK’s version of Australia’s: https://youtube.com/@davidthegreen
Maybe 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?
You'd be very surprised.
you'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.
Tapes especially got recorded over.
Side note: any recommendations for digitization services for ~80 mini DV tapes?
Currently planning to try out LegacyBox, but the reviews are mixed.
Get a FireWire cable and rip the data straight from a dvcam to get the raw video files. Then compress with desired settings
Ah actually they’re 8mm cassette tapes and vhs-c. From 20-40 years ago
The 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.
Cheap? 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.
If you're in Ontario or Quebec I can help you out.
Whenever I see old low res grainy footage like this I wonder how well the latest image gen & AI can restore it
My experience trying to upscale Lexx from DVD copies is… not well…
This isn't about the video part of the recordings
vhs to dvd drives are fun https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313...
I wonder if the conversion software would have the unwanted side effect of filtering out the teletext content.
I 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.
Don't miss Pete's comment on that post. Such a cool YT channel!
Drop them in front of the Red Letter Media warehouse in the middle of the night.
eBay! 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.
I somehow think that may be the exact opposite of what the author is going for...
True 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.
I 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.
2000 vhs tapes on the wall 2000 vhs tapes take one down pass it around 1999 vhs tapes on the wall
AI 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.
A .txt file solves this if this is all op needs.
But an AI is a great candidate to annotate the .txt
I 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
I don't know why people are worried about storage. You can just store it on the cloud.
I know this guy Chad with nice shelves.
Chad's neighbor is looking pretty good at this point after Chad started enforcing retroactively added time limits that were not part of the original terms.