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.
So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread.
The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably.
I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.
I think archive.org holds onto copies of websites, even if they're no longer accusable on the wayback machine, as long as they don't get a direct deletion request.
If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.
I only started to really appreciate having a web page archive after cataloging the coffee I drank, which often have pages full of detail about the beans until they sell out and then, poof!, they’re taken offline.
I find it interesting to think about this while listening to historical content like the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Tl;dr, if you want something to survive for millennia, it needs to be carved in stone or you need to arrange for monks to keep transcribing it
A storyied ephemera shop "plan b",Halifax,ns was closing,and a 3/4" brodcast vhs machine was gifted to me,and much latter upon investigation revealed
a tape inside,with "Doctor Who" and an episode
that is too blurred to read
Also have an ancient steel wire recorder with a role of wire,and going back even further a pair of
wax drum dictaphone recorders with drums
there are of course ,truely monsterous collections
out there lurking with the epic storys known to
just a few or perhaps only one disinterested guardian/custodian,and these will keep cropping up
for centuries
new motszart piece popped up recently was sitting
on a shelf safe and sound for all this time
My Observation: If the item is kept long enough, just about EVERYTHING becomes valuable. (I guess that's because other similar items are lost or destroyed over time )
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.
Yup. See also, the massive underdiagnosis of autism in women, especially ‘attractive’ women (I shit you not!). We’re only just now beginning to clear up decades and decades of brushing things off as ‘quirky girl’ traits. Everyone has a grandparent that obsessed over collecting something or other. It’s really just a question of how incidentally racist the collection is :).
I know a lady hoarder. She would buy lots and lots of thrift shop stuff, some to just have and appreciate, some to use as raw materials for artsy projects.
Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.
Lonely women are also found to be hoarding trinkets and plastic furniture for a home they don't have and for a family and or relationship they dont have - but hope or think will come in the future.[0]
0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).
I think it's fairly common that people keep/collect/hoard stuff against a future lifestyle that they eventually realize that they don't even want. When my dad was clearing out a former house for an estate sale, I definitely took too much stuff against a day when I would have formal dinner parties like my parents did--but, of course, never did.
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."
At least the tendency seems more pronounced in men, but that might just be perception. Anyways:
> Apparently there were so many tapes because the original owner, a now elderly man, had made the recordings for his neighbour.
Really made me chuckle. "hey Billy, can you like, record 500 days of continuous TV program for me that would be great, thanks!"
Likely asked him to record a few shows in the beginning and then the hoarding kicked in? Otherwise I'm wondering why a) the tapes were still at his place and not his neighbor's and b) why he didn't keep taping over the same few tapes. :-)
That's awesome, what a treasure trove :-) thanks for sharing.
You can also download a huge number of shows via the John Peel Wiki [1] and look out for Phil's Mighty Database. There's also a torrent out there, a huge archive of Peel shows known as The Motherlode, well worth nabbing.
Thankfully my semi-hoarding of digital media takes up no space aside from on my server's hard drives and organizing is easy and pleasant. I definitely feel the pull to add to the collection. It's a sort of joy.
I used to collect many things, also on my pc in digital forms. then oneday my hard-drive just straigh-up died, no backups ofcourse the smart teenager i was. I was super sad, for like 1 hour, and re-installed and started 'clean'. That really felt like a big relief, and i got rid of all of my collections of useless stuff. loads of old pcs, laptops, tapes, cds, whatever. Ended up at somepoint only having a desktop, some speakers and a bed. now i have a little more again, but no collections, i just throw everything that's not usable to me anymore, or give it away if it might be usable to someone. feels great not having so much clutter and stuff around me anymore. real easy to clean the house too now :D
Whenever I upgrade computers, I never transfer, just start fresh. I keep old hard drives around and have backups in case I need stuff but... all that stuff I accumulate I don't actually need.
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.
With current storage technology, it's almost impossible for physical media size or price to become relevant, the human's ability to add to the collection just can't keep up, unless there are some truly extreme conditions, like they automate the collecting, or insist on uncompressed video.
This is true, but some may not realise the important distinction of "actual stuff you personally archive", not "I downloaded this from somewhere".
I suppose even DVR platforms such as MythTV recording off of TV would be excluded here, as per your 'automated'... although it's a bit of a grey area, VCRs could be automated, but not really without changing the tape in a home setting.
Another grey area is more detailed "collecting", such as older video/audio, rarer stuff which does often disappear from torrent sites and such. An example being old TV series recorded direct from TV, to tape -> digitized. But even this, with personal intervention at each collection event, fits in terms of it being hard to fill up drives.
Really, preservation is the cost. Primary live/online, along with a RAID method (hardware over software raid typically) capable of per-disk patrol reads and overall raid consistency checks are vital*. Checksums of all files are a requirement too, and an offline secondary server with a full backup synced every so often.
Otherwise bitrot sets in, and you don't know. Either at the disk level, the raid level, or the filesystem level. And that's where the secondary comes in.
Of course, that doesn't help in case of explosions, aliens, or fire. One needs a secondary offsite for that. But my point is, actual real archival isn't simple.
* if you have a raid, even software raid and you're not doing patrol reads and consistency checks regularly, you're not really doing it right. LSI cards tend to require patrol reads and consistency checks set on, and consistency checks schedules (say, Sundays).
And of course if you don't have a script to dump megacli logs to syslog or what not, you don't really know if the raid is having issues. And you don't even know if consistency checks and patrol reads are running.
(In LSI terminology, patrol reads scan entire disks individually, looking for block read errors, and if found, that block is re-written from redundant data in the array. Consistency checks look at the status of the raid, especially checksums of all disks per virtual disk block. Different checks, both required.)
I think most data hoarders aren't technically knowledgeable enough to get that deep into futureproof archival strategies. I suppose priorities are individually different, though. Some might obsess over preservation, others are happy just accumulating stuff without backups, and data loss is a brief pain, quickly forgotten. The key problem of hoarding is the reluctance/inability to deliberately dispose of things.
A new ycomb application; platforms to enable safe data hording.
Play on fears of losing everything. How it's too difficult to secure data. How the risks are too high.
It's really no different than convincing people they need all sorts of weird lotions, pills, or gadgets, lest their lives will fall apart, their health decline.
The bonus here is, it's a client base unable to help themselves. Akin to selling medicine to a hypochondriac. I envision entire divisions doing deep-research into clients, with sliding scale cost. The ultra rich hoarder will have their collection stored on the back side of the moon, SpaceX delivered data pots, with solar, redundancy, robotic maintenance, and more.
It can consume _a lot_ of time. An mental space. Which is much more precious in life than storage space.
Those that get really afflicted by hoarding can have all the issues associated with other forms of addiction. Like not taking care of relationships, work, money - organizing their entre lives around getting their fix.
And it can happen very gradually, making it hard to notice wen it has gotten to far, and try to stop.
I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point. The Media Hoarder metadata thread this week rightfully gave the author crap because he refused to say whether his tool worked with the common organization ways or required you to ruin the organization of your library just to get a few stats.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.
But parent said what if there is no issue with it. Time and effort are no issue if it's a hobby you enjoy. Quite the opposite. You're probably saying that it can be a slippery slope but that can be said about anything if it turns into unhealthy obsession.
> Luckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
It doesn’t have to, but it can.
I rate my 8 bay Synology. It’s probably the least cost effective storage option, but it’s a pleasure to use and isn’t too loud as long as it hides in the basement. The options you see on DataHoarder are rather more extreme, and well worse perusing.
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.
I keep my DVDs on those spindles that recordable discs come on. I take the paper and the disc, and throw out the case unless it's a really special one.
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.
For a while I was trying to gentle a feral cat in a room in my other house (rental property under renovation), I moved the XBOX and all my DVD/Blu-Ray discs there (unlike books, I'm not afraid of having any of these get sprayed on) -- for a weeks the house was a SCIF but pretty soon I set up one of these
for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center.
I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.
> 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.
The outwardly visible status is that just a small portion of the recordings have been made available[1]. The Archive is not commenting about this for years now.
I've donated to archival efforts before and, as many, would be happy to chip in for this one. It doesn't seem possible though and we don't know why it appears stalled.
A friend of mine (Japanese - relevant because the cost of music CD's was higher there) in high school would have side jobs so he could buy music. His mom - possibly undiagnosed mental health issues - every few years would throw away his CD collection which he'd spent the equivalent of 30-40k USD on. This happened twice.
Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.
My godfather has about 50,000 VHS tapes of TV recordings - all catalogued and neatly stored in huge pull-out racks that ⅔ of his three bedroom apartment (he’s single) are dedicated to. He wrote a cataloguing system in qbasic, having never coded before - these days he’s got a web app.
I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
It’s collections like this that sometimes turn out to have the only surviving copy of the Apollo moon landing broadcast. I would digitize the report of what is in there and make it available on the Internet as fast as possible, so that people who are interested in this stuff can see if there’s anything that is not available elsewhere
Yeah, this is my likely approach - it’s not impossible he’s got some BBC stuff that’s otherwise lost, as he pretty much ran two VCRs continuously for a quarter of a century, from the early 80’s to early 10’s - but it’s mostly just hoarding.
If and when it’s a relevant problem for me I’ll go through his catalogue, digitise anything worthwhile, and then dispose of the lot, be it through sale as recordable media (they should all be in great shape, as he stores them well) or otherwise.
I recommend contacting the local retro computer or cinephile (or generic "geek') scene and see if you can recruit volunteers to digitize them for you. I would volunteer for this, take a crate home and pop in tapes while I go about my normal day.
That's a colossal number of tapes. The few I found that had been stored in boxes since the 80s had mould on them, hopefully the collection doesn't have mould.
Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.
That's been my strategy with photos for the last couple of decades. I don't bother organizing them, figuring ML/image classification will do the trick eventually.
I'll probably never bother, but it has saved me the time of organizing it.
(Apple does let me search based on its object classification, and I have searched for tag that came on my apple tree based on a word that appears on it, so I guess that strategy has worked somewhat.)
What's the purpose of going to the extreme of having no stuff, anyway? I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. As a child, I could find books in our collection at home, and when visiting friends with a book collection, I like to browse it and ask about some of the books. I have and use an e-reader, but the reading experience is a little worse and browsing is much worse.
> I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books.
But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them?
What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?
Not owning would not make much difference, but selection does. The tools are for the things that I like to do, and for the books, selection is even more important becase there are so many to choose from and so relatively few that are "mine".
Generally it’s more about earthly possessions that we should not have too much of but from that to nothing is a bit of a stretch. I want to own a few personal things but not enough to produce physical or psychological clutter
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.
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.
You're assuming that people can't get along. Is there some reason the BBC and archive.org can't work together to satisfy both of their wants and needs?
I like the sentiment but I think most people I know would be better off freed from their hoarded items and actually able to be somebody.
Your comment does remind me of the replicants from Blade Runner and how they need their “precious photos” that aren’t even real as a touchstone to link them to the implanted memories.
What makes you think people are burdened by their belongings? I'm not talking about heavy hoarders. Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.
> Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.
I can't tell if this is facetious or not, but be the person that they are. The whole rest of the person besides the obsession. Maybe with some extra freedom and time they can build up their other interests and relationships. Grandfather comment or so said the guys wife was upset with him. Without the piles of tapes he could replace "tape guy" with "happier relationship" and "successfully moved". Literally everything else about the person is who they are. Narrowing a persons whole identity down to a collection of objects is a neurotic and reductive take on personhood, in my opinion
> The person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them.
> The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
Does the person cease to be if the collection is trashed? Or is the collection just detritus from the process, something that could have been discarded instead of hoarded?
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.
A 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).
Even after they stop being really sold, people still used them because the convenience of take it out of the recording device put it in your player should not be understated.
> VHS was released in 1976. VHS-C was released in 1982.
So? The first commercial camcorder came out in 1983 (Betamax). VHS-C predates the camcorder of any format (the first VHS-C VCR JVC HR-C3 coming out the same time).
> The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.
I told you a specific make and model.
Do you actually have a reference to any make and model of VHS camcorder commercially available prior to 1984? The NiCd 10kg “portable” JVC HR-4100 shoulder strap VTR came out in 1978, tis not a camcorder.
To be clear I’m (consistently) using “camcorder” with the commonly accepted definition of a camera and video recorder in a self-contained unit. With that definition the earliest commercially available VHS format camcorder was the JVC VHS-C mentioned, with Matsushita coming out with the full size M1 a few months later.
Prior to the GR-C1 there was a neat accessory to shoulder carry the aforementioned VHS-C portable, but not a camcorder (regardless the first VHS on your shoulder was VHS-C). This was sort of a poor man's Betacam setup.
Prior to that your options for portable VHS were the heavy carrying strap separate VTR like the JVC HR-2200 and the HR-4100 (sometimes referred to as “Portapaks” which was a genericization of Sonys open reel systems from the 60s). They were heavy and inferior to the contemporary Betamax and U-Matic S options, pros didn’t really use them and few enthusiasts were up for lugging 20 kilos of shit around. Hitachi made a few units as well.
Prior to 1985 there were just a handful of VHS licensees. JVC/Victor, Matsushita, Hitachi and Sharp with the other names like RCA as rebadges. No camcorders I’m aware of. I think you’re mistaken, but would be very interested in being corrected with specifics (as would the Rewind Museum).
The thing about hardware/electronic technology history in general is that the difference between 1976 and 1983 is not subtle. While VHS came out in 1976, and video tape in the 1960s, the technology to mass produce the level of integration for a camcorder did not exist (or at least was not cost effective) (not to mention the power efficiency leaps necessary as we were stuck with NiCds). Anyone that regularly dismantles any kind of electronic equipment from the 1970s to 1980s is aware of the extreme shift in integration that occurred during that time period, LSI ASICs, surface mount, things that were nearly unheard of in a commercial device in 1976, took hold in the 80s. It took a great deal of further engineering to make a camcorder possible, the tape format being around wasn't the issue. VHS-C like Betacam was developed in anticipation of this, not the other way around.
The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very affordable until about the 2000s. VHS was definitely still widely used for several years after multi-GB hard drives were common in the consumer market.
Even then, in the late 90s flash media was horrifically expensive. I seem to recall my family buying a 16MB Smartmedia card in the late 90s (massive for the time) for ~$150 or so on sale. You'd be storing a few minutes of highly compressed video on a card like that compared to the several hours of video you could put on a VHS tape. Direct-to-DVD camcorders wouldn't be a thing until the 2000s at which point 40+GB hard drives were starting to become common and flash cards were starting to get to several dozen MBs at least for ~$100 or so.
I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s.
Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002.
Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.
Understandable. Sometimes such a small window of history a while ago gets blurry. Sometimes I need to look things up as well to remember the order of things.
VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s.
Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.
vhs decode is not for the faint of heart. To use it you have to open up the vcr and soldier some tap points onto it and the software is all command line.
I wasn't able to get it to work. I mean to try it again but I haven't gotten back to it yet.
Oh, there's loads of those. For some reason I've seen the best results with a composite->HDMI upscaler followed by HDMI capture. Composite-only capture devices seem to be flaky.
The whole point of VHS-Decode is to bypass as much of the VCR's output circuitry as possible; capture from the read heads and apply modern digital reconstruction from there.
Have the same experience. Also the composite to SD card recorders are supposedly quite good. But nothing beats tapping a VCR into vhsdecode and the soldering looks quite simple. Even cheap VCRs work fine for this. I will find time for it at some point...
There are and you can get cheap noname Chinese ones for as low as $10.
Unfortunately most of them are terrible. I've played with it on and off for years and even gotten individual tools for $100+ but still have issues. It's a bit of a mess with PAL/NTSC, different recommended settings, and at the end of the day you still need a high quality VCR to extract all the data. Those tend to go for hundreds of dollars here. You also need a time base corrector (some VHS have them built in I believe) to avoid dropping frames and causing desync.
A common suggestion is to just get a VHS->DVD recorder and then rip the DVD. You lose out on quality but it usually works and will save you a ton of time.
The suggestion by OP is probably if you truly want to maximize the quality.
Yes. VHS-decode is an attempt to get the signal direct from the tape for high quality transfer. It is basically just using the heads on the vcr to pick up the raw signal and the software then decodes it.
There are some high end vcrs that can do a better job (according to those who have them.) but they are getting old and even broken ones can go for a couple hundred on ebay.
For home movies it isn't worth it since the starting quality probably isn't that great. I've messed around with it for a couple movies that were only released on VHS.
even the non-cheap recorders produce a huge quality loss. It would be slightly easier, but if you're considering archiving something, why not do it as good as possible
That kind of requirement is the exact thing that someone can make some money on by doing the conversion and then selling them on eBay. I would gladly spend a couple hundred dollars for something like that if I needed to do VHS conversion.
Everyone used to book their summer holidays from Teletext. The Peter Kay sketch about this is quite amusing.
I thought, though I might be wrong, back in the UK we broadcast on 650 lines, and the top or bottom 25 lines were reserved for teletext and also IIRC timing signals, that could start/stop VCRs automatically but was never used in the UK. The teletext signal was tiny in modern terms, it was extremely similar to the BBC Micro 'Mode 7' in size.
The article mentions that VHS 'compressed' the signal. I don't think that was the case, I think it filtered the analogue signal and chopped off the teletext info, but some of it used to leak through, hence the opportunity to recover it.
Then there was Macrovision that fiddled with those not-quite filtered lines to add bursts of colour that would leak through to stop tape-to-tape piracy.
Fun fact: a magazine published a circuit that would remove Macrovision that was then widely photocopied and distributed in the UK. You could order the parts from Tandy or RadioShack, and we took it to school and had (a lot) of help from the teacher putting them together as part of our CDT/tech classes. The rest, is as they say, history.
Right? Here in the Netherlands, Teletext is still very much alive and has several millions of users per week. [1]
In fact, at the end of 2023 our public broadcaster rewrote the Teletext backend system using modern programming practices to keep it running into the future. [2] Before that it was running on software from the 80's.
We 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.
I may have had that same zenith tv. In my town we had 2 channels that did anything with it. One was basically a static summary of whatever was on. The other was pretty cool with stocks and weather and news. But mid 90s they turned it off. Never tried TBS. Guess I should have.
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.
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.
A similar quote, paraphrased, is "Every one dies twice. The first time is when they stop breathing, and the second is when their name is spoken for the last time".
In terms of actually _known_ in the meaning meant (people have some awareness of what they did) probably the Pharaohs Djoser (born 2686BCE) who built the stepped pyramid at Saqqara.
Maybe Gilgamesh, who may well have been a historical king of Uruk sometime between 2900 – 2350 BCE.
Enmebaragesi[1] probably existed around 2600 BCE but not much is known about him other than he was a King of Kish.
Figures in the old testament Bible are hard to track but the stories of Nimrod (grandson of Noah) seems to have been placed around 2000 BCE
If you mean "Who is the earliest known recorded individual in human history?" wikipedia says "The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record transactions of barley." [0]
What if you say the name of the entity 2000 years later, so they are remembered again? Would they have a 2nd revival? What is the second death timeout?
I think the gist of the "last time the name is spoken" idea refers to people who knew the deceased, their personal history, character, etc., so their existence ceases not just with the biological death, but also with the social, when the last person who remembers them dies.
If one discovers the name some millennia later, the character and its quirks are at best reconstructed rather than remembered, so you have the equivalent of a Frankenstein simulation of the original.
After researchers lose interest in them, that's the third death. At that point, the entity waits in inexistence without hope for some future PhD candidate with a good idea/proposal. The citation count is probably what's left until then, until Google shuts Scholar down.
Eventually, most graveyards will simply erode away. The average erosion rate is 0.2 mm/year, so 2 meters down will be exposed in about 10,000 years. YMMV
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Can you explain what causes you to say that we will be the last generation to say this? Not rhetorical, although this caused me to question it because I think that this is probably a constant wrt generations passing onto the next and unlikely to change.
He means after the advent of the phone camera. Practically anything anywhere is available to view on video or image of some kind. Used to be reserved for important planned events.
We now face a kind of reverse problem though where we're drowning in so much content that some interesting things can be missed or lost.
Once 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.
Thank 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.
:) 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)
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.
Just 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 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.
To 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.
A 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yea, 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…
If 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.
Great 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!
I 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.
Write 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.
"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.
Well 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!
Having 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?
Just 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.
AI! 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.
It may be overkill, but it's an archive. Overkill is permissible.
Remember, there's no going back to do it again -- once the video is digitized, the tapes will go away forever.
That said, I think a bitrate of about 0.78GB/hr may be better. It may still be overkill, but will let a T120 tape recorded in SLP mode (6 hours) to fit into one single-layer M-Disc DVD-R, which may make sense for some media.
But whatever the case, bits are cheap these days. Data storage is definitely the least expensive part of any operation like this and it tends to get cheaper over time.
The most expensive part of things like this is the time it takes to make it happen, and bitrate (whether high or low) doesn't have a substantial impact on that time.
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.
I 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.
On 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.
There'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.
Hah. 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.
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.
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...)
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?
"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.
I 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.
BBC 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.
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.
I 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 :(
If 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.)
My 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!
I 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.
I 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If 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 :)
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.
I 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.
Got 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.
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.
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.
So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread.
The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably.
I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.
Edit: here's today's "keep forever" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593
Myself, I hoard in moderation and don't even have a home media server.
Case in point: Marion Stokes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
a noted Philadelphia legend who also made a large fortune on early Apple stock! she's as close you can get to a modern folk tale
I've started saving web pages, since several of my favorite websites went offline, and some even self-deleted from WayBack Machine.
The impression I get is that if I want something to continue existing, it's my responsibility to make that happen.
On a darker note, this appears to be true of civilization in general...
I think archive.org holds onto copies of websites, even if they're no longer accusable on the wayback machine, as long as they don't get a direct deletion request.
If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.
I only started to really appreciate having a web page archive after cataloging the coffee I drank, which often have pages full of detail about the beans until they sell out and then, poof!, they’re taken offline.
I find it interesting to think about this while listening to historical content like the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Tl;dr, if you want something to survive for millennia, it needs to be carved in stone or you need to arrange for monks to keep transcribing it
A storyied ephemera shop "plan b",Halifax,ns was closing,and a 3/4" brodcast vhs machine was gifted to me,and much latter upon investigation revealed a tape inside,with "Doctor Who" and an episode that is too blurred to read Also have an ancient steel wire recorder with a role of wire,and going back even further a pair of wax drum dictaphone recorders with drums there are of course ,truely monsterous collections out there lurking with the epic storys known to just a few or perhaps only one disinterested guardian/custodian,and these will keep cropping up for centuries new motszart piece popped up recently was sitting on a shelf safe and sound for all this time
My Observation: If the item is kept long enough, just about EVERYTHING becomes valuable. (I guess that's because other similar items are lost or destroyed over time )
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
It's certainly not a male thing, just open any woman's wardrobe.
I think GP was referring to 'hoarding media' specifically, not just hoarding in general.
Yup. See also, the massive underdiagnosis of autism in women, especially ‘attractive’ women (I shit you not!). We’re only just now beginning to clear up decades and decades of brushing things off as ‘quirky girl’ traits. Everyone has a grandparent that obsessed over collecting something or other. It’s really just a question of how incidentally racist the collection is :).
I know a lady hoarder. She would buy lots and lots of thrift shop stuff, some to just have and appreciate, some to use as raw materials for artsy projects.
Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.
Looks like one of the shows she recorded was the Oprah Winfrey Show. Wonder if she has a taped copy of the Trump interview from 1988 that seems to have been erased from the internet. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/j7l8y5/bounty_....
If women get known for their hoarding, its typically for animals, not living things. Which is, if you think about it long enough, a lot more creepy!
Lonely women are also found to be hoarding trinkets and plastic furniture for a home they don't have and for a family and or relationship they dont have - but hope or think will come in the future.[0]
0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).
I think it's fairly common that people keep/collect/hoard stuff against a future lifestyle that they eventually realize that they don't even want. When my dad was clearing out a former house for an estate sale, I definitely took too much stuff against a day when I would have formal dinner parties like my parents did--but, of course, never did.
Did you misspeak? Animals are generally living things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_hoarding
Most animals are dead.
Indeed, most things are gone.
Rather for shoes, or for clothes.
[dead]
Dang! You beat me to it.
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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."
At least the tendency seems more pronounced in men, but that might just be perception. Anyways:
> Apparently there were so many tapes because the original owner, a now elderly man, had made the recordings for his neighbour.
Really made me chuckle. "hey Billy, can you like, record 500 days of continuous TV program for me that would be great, thanks!"
Likely asked him to record a few shows in the beginning and then the hoarding kicked in? Otherwise I'm wondering why a) the tapes were still at his place and not his neighbor's and b) why he didn't keep taping over the same few tapes. :-)
And today you can listen to (most of?) those John Peel sessions again:
https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session...
The circle has been closed!
That's awesome, what a treasure trove :-) thanks for sharing.
You can also download a huge number of shows via the John Peel Wiki [1] and look out for Phil's Mighty Database. There's also a torrent out there, a huge archive of Peel shows known as The Motherlode, well worth nabbing.
[1] https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki
Thankfully my semi-hoarding of digital media takes up no space aside from on my server's hard drives and organizing is easy and pleasant. I definitely feel the pull to add to the collection. It's a sort of joy.
Digital hoarding can be obsessive in its own right. But, as you say, it doesn't take up space, doesn't cost much, and isn't a physical weight on you.
Not a bad idea given the BBC would just record over their archive tapes.
I used to collect many things, also on my pc in digital forms. then oneday my hard-drive just straigh-up died, no backups ofcourse the smart teenager i was. I was super sad, for like 1 hour, and re-installed and started 'clean'. That really felt like a big relief, and i got rid of all of my collections of useless stuff. loads of old pcs, laptops, tapes, cds, whatever. Ended up at somepoint only having a desktop, some speakers and a bed. now i have a little more again, but no collections, i just throw everything that's not usable to me anymore, or give it away if it might be usable to someone. feels great not having so much clutter and stuff around me anymore. real easy to clean the house too now :D
Whenever I upgrade computers, I never transfer, just start fresh. I keep old hard drives around and have backups in case I need stuff but... all that stuff I accumulate I don't actually need.
There was a guy who collected tanks ! Had his collection up top of Portola Valley. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Vehicle_Technology_Fo...]
It was incredible. One of the things we saw randomly that we wish we could see again.
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.
With current storage technology, it's almost impossible for physical media size or price to become relevant, the human's ability to add to the collection just can't keep up, unless there are some truly extreme conditions, like they automate the collecting, or insist on uncompressed video.
This is true, but some may not realise the important distinction of "actual stuff you personally archive", not "I downloaded this from somewhere".
I suppose even DVR platforms such as MythTV recording off of TV would be excluded here, as per your 'automated'... although it's a bit of a grey area, VCRs could be automated, but not really without changing the tape in a home setting.
Another grey area is more detailed "collecting", such as older video/audio, rarer stuff which does often disappear from torrent sites and such. An example being old TV series recorded direct from TV, to tape -> digitized. But even this, with personal intervention at each collection event, fits in terms of it being hard to fill up drives.
Really, preservation is the cost. Primary live/online, along with a RAID method (hardware over software raid typically) capable of per-disk patrol reads and overall raid consistency checks are vital*. Checksums of all files are a requirement too, and an offline secondary server with a full backup synced every so often.
Otherwise bitrot sets in, and you don't know. Either at the disk level, the raid level, or the filesystem level. And that's where the secondary comes in.
Of course, that doesn't help in case of explosions, aliens, or fire. One needs a secondary offsite for that. But my point is, actual real archival isn't simple.
* if you have a raid, even software raid and you're not doing patrol reads and consistency checks regularly, you're not really doing it right. LSI cards tend to require patrol reads and consistency checks set on, and consistency checks schedules (say, Sundays).
And of course if you don't have a script to dump megacli logs to syslog or what not, you don't really know if the raid is having issues. And you don't even know if consistency checks and patrol reads are running.
(In LSI terminology, patrol reads scan entire disks individually, looking for block read errors, and if found, that block is re-written from redundant data in the array. Consistency checks look at the status of the raid, especially checksums of all disks per virtual disk block. Different checks, both required.)
I think most data hoarders aren't technically knowledgeable enough to get that deep into futureproof archival strategies. I suppose priorities are individually different, though. Some might obsess over preservation, others are happy just accumulating stuff without backups, and data loss is a brief pain, quickly forgotten. The key problem of hoarding is the reluctance/inability to deliberately dispose of things.
A new ycomb application; platforms to enable safe data hording.
Play on fears of losing everything. How it's too difficult to secure data. How the risks are too high.
It's really no different than convincing people they need all sorts of weird lotions, pills, or gadgets, lest their lives will fall apart, their health decline.
The bonus here is, it's a client base unable to help themselves. Akin to selling medicine to a hypochondriac. I envision entire divisions doing deep-research into clients, with sliding scale cost. The ultra rich hoarder will have their collection stored on the back side of the moon, SpaceX delivered data pots, with solar, redundancy, robotic maintenance, and more.
"My word, it's time to hoard!"
But if there isn't an issue with it, why stop?
It can consume _a lot_ of time. An mental space. Which is much more precious in life than storage space. Those that get really afflicted by hoarding can have all the issues associated with other forms of addiction. Like not taking care of relationships, work, money - organizing their entre lives around getting their fix. And it can happen very gradually, making it hard to notice wen it has gotten to far, and try to stop.
I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point. The Media Hoarder metadata thread this week rightfully gave the author crap because he refused to say whether his tool worked with the common organization ways or required you to ruin the organization of your library just to get a few stats.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.
But parent said what if there is no issue with it. Time and effort are no issue if it's a hobby you enjoy. Quite the opposite. You're probably saying that it can be a slippery slope but that can be said about anything if it turns into unhealthy obsession.
The failure of that limit when real world "collecting" is the Hallmark of having a problem hoarding...
> Luckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
It doesn’t have to, but it can. I rate my 8 bay Synology. It’s probably the least cost effective storage option, but it’s a pleasure to use and isn’t too loud as long as it hides in the basement. The options you see on DataHoarder are rather more extreme, and well worse perusing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
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.
I keep my DVDs on those spindles that recordable discs come on. I take the paper and the disc, and throw out the case unless it's a really special one.
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.
For a while I was trying to gentle a feral cat in a room in my other house (rental property under renovation), I moved the XBOX and all my DVD/Blu-Ray discs there (unlike books, I'm not afraid of having any of these get sprayed on) -- for a weeks the house was a SCIF but pretty soon I set up one of these
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/li...
for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center.
I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.
> 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.
Surely someone in this thread can give an update on the status of that digitization project?
The outwardly visible status is that just a small portion of the recordings have been made available[1]. The Archive is not commenting about this for years now.
[1] https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment
That’s rather disappointing. Expected more from the internet archive.
Expectations are free, actual work costs time and money though.
I've donated to archival efforts before and, as many, would be happy to chip in for this one. It doesn't seem possible though and we don't know why it appears stalled.
Please donate to them if you want them to meet your expectations
So it can go to settle their court fines? Or fund their next harebrained legal adventure?
Yes, so they can continue doing their mission, including digitalizing archives and fighting legal battles.
A friend of mine (Japanese - relevant because the cost of music CD's was higher there) in high school would have side jobs so he could buy music. His mom - possibly undiagnosed mental health issues - every few years would throw away his CD collection which he'd spent the equivalent of 30-40k USD on. This happened twice.
Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.
My godfather has about 50,000 VHS tapes of TV recordings - all catalogued and neatly stored in huge pull-out racks that ⅔ of his three bedroom apartment (he’s single) are dedicated to. He wrote a cataloguing system in qbasic, having never coded before - these days he’s got a web app.
I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
It’s collections like this that sometimes turn out to have the only surviving copy of the Apollo moon landing broadcast. I would digitize the report of what is in there and make it available on the Internet as fast as possible, so that people who are interested in this stuff can see if there’s anything that is not available elsewhere
Yeah, this is my likely approach - it’s not impossible he’s got some BBC stuff that’s otherwise lost, as he pretty much ran two VCRs continuously for a quarter of a century, from the early 80’s to early 10’s - but it’s mostly just hoarding.
If and when it’s a relevant problem for me I’ll go through his catalogue, digitise anything worthwhile, and then dispose of the lot, be it through sale as recordable media (they should all be in great shape, as he stores them well) or otherwise.
I recommend contacting the local retro computer or cinephile (or generic "geek') scene and see if you can recruit volunteers to digitize them for you. I would volunteer for this, take a crate home and pop in tapes while I go about my normal day.
That's a colossal number of tapes. The few I found that had been stored in boxes since the 80s had mould on them, hopefully the collection doesn't have mould.
Digitise, digitise, digitise!
To what end? Digitizing is a huge amount of work.
Sadly, it's simple, you pay someone to come and dispose of it.
VHS tapes sell at easily more than $1 a pop. That's 50k dollars.
Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.
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.
That's been my strategy with photos for the last couple of decades. I don't bother organizing them, figuring ML/image classification will do the trick eventually.
I'll probably never bother, but it has saved me the time of organizing it.
(Apple does let me search based on its object classification, and I have searched for tag that came on my apple tree based on a word that appears on it, so I guess that strategy has worked somewhat.)
I used to have a pretty granular hierarchical store. These days I mostly figure that if I need it I’ll find it with some key exceptions.
I hoard interesting digital media a bit since stuff does disappear from the Internet, but don't hoard anything physical. Takes up too much space.
https://archivebox.io/ For those with an interest. My del.icio.us collection (what was still online) lives on my NAS now.
I sometimes buy random cassettes. I find listening to radio shows from the 80s quite relaxing and having different vibe.
>Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.
This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!
What's the purpose of going to the extreme of having no stuff, anyway? I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. As a child, I could find books in our collection at home, and when visiting friends with a book collection, I like to browse it and ask about some of the books. I have and use an e-reader, but the reading experience is a little worse and browsing is much worse.
> I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books.
But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them?
What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?
Not owning would not make much difference, but selection does. The tools are for the things that I like to do, and for the books, selection is even more important becase there are so many to choose from and so relatively few that are "mine".
I think GP was referencing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_...
I think it would, when you use a thing you attach memories to it. Makes people sentimental.
Generally it’s more about earthly possessions that we should not have too much of but from that to nothing is a bit of a stretch. I want to own a few personal things but not enough to produce physical or psychological clutter
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.
You're assuming that people can't get along. Is there some reason the BBC and archive.org can't work together to satisfy both of their wants and needs?
You sound like you've never worked with multiple vendors essentially needing the same thing but want different things.
No need to draw on past experience. I'm watching it unfold right here. Quite hilarious.
[dead]
Those stored things are your digital roots. Without them, you are nobody.
I like the sentiment but I think most people I know would be better off freed from their hoarded items and actually able to be somebody.
Your comment does remind me of the replicants from Blade Runner and how they need their “precious photos” that aren’t even real as a touchstone to link them to the implanted memories.
What makes you think people are burdened by their belongings? I'm not talking about heavy hoarders. Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.
> Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.
Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.
> and actually able to be somebody.
be who?
I can't tell if this is facetious or not, but be the person that they are. The whole rest of the person besides the obsession. Maybe with some extra freedom and time they can build up their other interests and relationships. Grandfather comment or so said the guys wife was upset with him. Without the piles of tapes he could replace "tape guy" with "happier relationship" and "successfully moved". Literally everything else about the person is who they are. Narrowing a persons whole identity down to a collection of objects is a neurotic and reductive take on personhood, in my opinion
The person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them.
The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
People who didn’t do this are someone else
> The person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them.
> The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
Does the person cease to be if the collection is trashed? Or is the collection just detritus from the process, something that could have been discarded instead of hoarded?
"Always be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
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.
A 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).
Even after they stop being really sold, people still used them because the convenience of take it out of the recording device put it in your player should not be understated.
> The first VHS camcorder (a combined camera and recorder unit) was VHS-C
VHS was released in 1976. VHS-C was released in 1982. The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.
> VHS was released in 1976. VHS-C was released in 1982.
So? The first commercial camcorder came out in 1983 (Betamax). VHS-C predates the camcorder of any format (the first VHS-C VCR JVC HR-C3 coming out the same time).
> The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.
I told you a specific make and model. Do you actually have a reference to any make and model of VHS camcorder commercially available prior to 1984? The NiCd 10kg “portable” JVC HR-4100 shoulder strap VTR came out in 1978, tis not a camcorder.
To be clear I’m (consistently) using “camcorder” with the commonly accepted definition of a camera and video recorder in a self-contained unit. With that definition the earliest commercially available VHS format camcorder was the JVC VHS-C mentioned, with Matsushita coming out with the full size M1 a few months later.
Prior to the GR-C1 there was a neat accessory to shoulder carry the aforementioned VHS-C portable, but not a camcorder (regardless the first VHS on your shoulder was VHS-C). This was sort of a poor man's Betacam setup.
https://www.totalrewind.org/cameras/C_SFP3.htm
Prior to that your options for portable VHS were the heavy carrying strap separate VTR like the JVC HR-2200 and the HR-4100 (sometimes referred to as “Portapaks” which was a genericization of Sonys open reel systems from the 60s). They were heavy and inferior to the contemporary Betamax and U-Matic S options, pros didn’t really use them and few enthusiasts were up for lugging 20 kilos of shit around. Hitachi made a few units as well.
Prior to 1985 there were just a handful of VHS licensees. JVC/Victor, Matsushita, Hitachi and Sharp with the other names like RCA as rebadges. No camcorders I’m aware of. I think you’re mistaken, but would be very interested in being corrected with specifics (as would the Rewind Museum).
https://www.rewindmuseum.com/vintagecamcorder.htm
The thing about hardware/electronic technology history in general is that the difference between 1976 and 1983 is not subtle. While VHS came out in 1976, and video tape in the 1960s, the technology to mass produce the level of integration for a camcorder did not exist (or at least was not cost effective) (not to mention the power efficiency leaps necessary as we were stuck with NiCds). Anyone that regularly dismantles any kind of electronic equipment from the 1970s to 1980s is aware of the extreme shift in integration that occurred during that time period, LSI ASICs, surface mount, things that were nearly unheard of in a commercial device in 1976, took hold in the 80s. It took a great deal of further engineering to make a camcorder possible, the tape format being around wasn't the issue. VHS-C like Betacam was developed in anticipation of this, not the other way around.
> really old hard drives (anywhere from 10G to 40G)
VHS was already totally obsolete when 1+GB HDD came to consumer market...
I don't think I agree with that.
The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very affordable until about the 2000s. VHS was definitely still widely used for several years after multi-GB hard drives were common in the consumer market.
Even then, in the late 90s flash media was horrifically expensive. I seem to recall my family buying a 16MB Smartmedia card in the late 90s (massive for the time) for ~$150 or so on sale. You'd be storing a few minutes of highly compressed video on a card like that compared to the several hours of video you could put on a VHS tape. Direct-to-DVD camcorders wouldn't be a thing until the 2000s at which point 40+GB hard drives were starting to become common and flash cards were starting to get to several dozen MBs at least for ~$100 or so.
I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s.
Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002.
Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.
Yeah. Memory failed me a bit here so i agree with you and stand corrected
Understandable. Sometimes such a small window of history a while ago gets blurry. Sometimes I need to look things up as well to remember the order of things.
VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000
Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.
vhs decode is not for the faint of heart. To use it you have to open up the vcr and soldier some tap points onto it and the software is all command line. I wasn't able to get it to work. I mean to try it again but I haven't gotten back to it yet.
Wouldn’t it be far easier to record downstream of the output? There must be cheap analog video recorders.
Oh, there's loads of those. For some reason I've seen the best results with a composite->HDMI upscaler followed by HDMI capture. Composite-only capture devices seem to be flaky.
The whole point of VHS-Decode is to bypass as much of the VCR's output circuitry as possible; capture from the read heads and apply modern digital reconstruction from there.
Have the same experience. Also the composite to SD card recorders are supposedly quite good. But nothing beats tapping a VCR into vhsdecode and the soldering looks quite simple. Even cheap VCRs work fine for this. I will find time for it at some point...
VCRs are just ancient enough that soldering is easy.
There are and you can get cheap noname Chinese ones for as low as $10.
Unfortunately most of them are terrible. I've played with it on and off for years and even gotten individual tools for $100+ but still have issues. It's a bit of a mess with PAL/NTSC, different recommended settings, and at the end of the day you still need a high quality VCR to extract all the data. Those tend to go for hundreds of dollars here. You also need a time base corrector (some VHS have them built in I believe) to avoid dropping frames and causing desync.
A common suggestion is to just get a VHS->DVD recorder and then rip the DVD. You lose out on quality but it usually works and will save you a ton of time.
The suggestion by OP is probably if you truly want to maximize the quality.
Yes. VHS-decode is an attempt to get the signal direct from the tape for high quality transfer. It is basically just using the heads on the vcr to pick up the raw signal and the software then decodes it.
There are some high end vcrs that can do a better job (according to those who have them.) but they are getting old and even broken ones can go for a couple hundred on ebay.
For home movies it isn't worth it since the starting quality probably isn't that great. I've messed around with it for a couple movies that were only released on VHS.
even the non-cheap recorders produce a huge quality loss. It would be slightly easier, but if you're considering archiving something, why not do it as good as possible
That kind of requirement is the exact thing that someone can make some money on by doing the conversion and then selling them on eBay. I would gladly spend a couple hundred dollars for something like that if I needed to do VHS conversion.
I 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.
Everyone used to book their summer holidays from Teletext. The Peter Kay sketch about this is quite amusing.
I thought, though I might be wrong, back in the UK we broadcast on 650 lines, and the top or bottom 25 lines were reserved for teletext and also IIRC timing signals, that could start/stop VCRs automatically but was never used in the UK. The teletext signal was tiny in modern terms, it was extremely similar to the BBC Micro 'Mode 7' in size.
The article mentions that VHS 'compressed' the signal. I don't think that was the case, I think it filtered the analogue signal and chopped off the teletext info, but some of it used to leak through, hence the opportunity to recover it.
Then there was Macrovision that fiddled with those not-quite filtered lines to add bursts of colour that would leak through to stop tape-to-tape piracy.
Fun fact: a magazine published a circuit that would remove Macrovision that was then widely photocopied and distributed in the UK. You could order the parts from Tandy or RadioShack, and we took it to school and had (a lot) of help from the teacher putting them together as part of our CDT/tech classes. The rest, is as they say, history.
The start/stop VCR thing was called PDC, and IIRC it worked in the UK, as long as you'd set your VCR to the exact scheduled times of the program:
https://625.uk.com/pdc/
Thanks for that. I hadn't realised it was a feature in UK VCRs. I can't say I remember anyone ever using it.
The Netherlands still has it. They even updated it recently because a lot of people are still using it.
Right? Here in the Netherlands, Teletext is still very much alive and has several millions of users per week. [1]
In fact, at the end of 2023 our public broadcaster rewrote the Teletext backend system using modern programming practices to keep it running into the future. [2] Before that it was running on software from the 80's.
[1] https://over.nos.nl/nieuws/teletekst-kan-weer-jaren-vooruit-... [2] https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
US didn't have it to my knowledge, so it was indeed a novelty when visiting Europe in the 90s to experience it.
We 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.
I may have had that same zenith tv. In my town we had 2 channels that did anything with it. One was basically a static summary of whatever was on. The other was pretty cool with stocks and weather and news. But mid 90s they turned it off. Never tried TBS. Guess I should have.
I think most of the TV stations in germany still have it. At least the big ones. And it's still filled with mostly ads.
For ARD (Das Erste) you can find it here: https://www.ard-text.de/
>Teletext. And damnation on the manufacturers of the red button that never worked.
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.
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
A similar quote, paraphrased, is "Every one dies twice. The first time is when they stop breathing, and the second is when their name is spoken for the last time".
Still, everyone's causation cone forever will continue to extend across the universe.
This raises an interesting question: Who is the oldest person still alive to us that we know of by name?
In terms of actually _known_ in the meaning meant (people have some awareness of what they did) probably the Pharaohs Djoser (born 2686BCE) who built the stepped pyramid at Saqqara.
Maybe Gilgamesh, who may well have been a historical king of Uruk sometime between 2900 – 2350 BCE.
Enmebaragesi[1] probably existed around 2600 BCE but not much is known about him other than he was a King of Kish.
Figures in the old testament Bible are hard to track but the stories of Nimrod (grandson of Noah) seems to have been placed around 2000 BCE
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmebaragesi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iry-Hor
If you mean "Who is the earliest known recorded individual in human history?" wikipedia says "The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record transactions of barley." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)
That's pretty remarkable that Kushim holds the title, and not for anything other than dealing in barley.
The novel The Brief History of the Dead explores this idea as if it were real.
What if someone is born with the same name?
Different entity altogether.
What if you say the name of the entity 2000 years later, so they are remembered again? Would they have a 2nd revival? What is the second death timeout?
I think the gist of the "last time the name is spoken" idea refers to people who knew the deceased, their personal history, character, etc., so their existence ceases not just with the biological death, but also with the social, when the last person who remembers them dies.
If one discovers the name some millennia later, the character and its quirks are at best reconstructed rather than remembered, so you have the equivalent of a Frankenstein simulation of the original.
After researchers lose interest in them, that's the third death. At that point, the entity waits in inexistence without hope for some future PhD candidate with a good idea/proposal. The citation count is probably what's left until then, until Google shuts Scholar down.
Eventually, all our graves disappear.
But for some reason most of NYC’s green spaces are still graveyards…
Many graveyards in NYC are forgotten or have been removed.
https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hid...
Eventually, most graveyards will simply erode away. The average erosion rate is 0.2 mm/year, so 2 meters down will be exposed in about 10,000 years. YMMV
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.
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 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.
> 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!
Babylon 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.
> 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.
Can you explain what causes you to say that we will be the last generation to say this? Not rhetorical, although this caused me to question it because I think that this is probably a constant wrt generations passing onto the next and unlikely to change.
He means after the advent of the phone camera. Practically anything anywhere is available to view on video or image of some kind. Used to be reserved for important planned events.
We now face a kind of reverse problem though where we're drowning in so much content that some interesting things can be missed or lost.
Once 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://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Should probably mention that it's your own software and that it cost $5. Not that the money really matters.
Also should mention that it's MIT licensed, not MIT software.
But a cool program nonetheless!
Thank 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.
It 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
:) 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)
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?
A startup idea
I would imagine that the Archive Team would be interested in these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team
Logistics in progress.
Just 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 :-)
Includes a fascinating story of how teletext images can be recovered from VHS recordings using a TV capture card.
I 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.
To 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.
A 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.
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.
You might want to try the UK national archives:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
or get in touch with the enthusiast community, people like
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.
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.
Yea, 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…
If 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.
Reminds me of the documentary Kim's video https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/ recommended!
Great 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!
I 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.
Write 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.
Sure, but the author is interested in archiving the Teletext pages hidden in the recordings of the TV shows, not the TV shows themselves.
"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.
Send them all to http://www.everythingisterrible.com/
They collect all VHS tapes.
There are people who put old VHS on Youtube that seems to be a pretty gruesome job. See Swedish achivist 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.
Give them to Found Footage Fest or Everything is Terrible!
https://www.foundfootagefest.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@FoundFootageFest
https://www.youtube.com/@EVERYTHINGISTERRIBLE
Well 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!
2000 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.
Having 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?
Just 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.
AI! 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.
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode + 10 of those $35 a pop https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode/wiki/RSP1 + 10 VHS players + someone on a night shift feeding tapes every couple hours = ~100 days
A gig an hour seems a bit high for VHS resolution and HEVC.
It may be overkill, but it's an archive. Overkill is permissible.
Remember, there's no going back to do it again -- once the video is digitized, the tapes will go away forever.
That said, I think a bitrate of about 0.78GB/hr may be better. It may still be overkill, but will let a T120 tape recorded in SLP mode (6 hours) to fit into one single-layer M-Disc DVD-R, which may make sense for some media.
But whatever the case, bits are cheap these days. Data storage is definitely the least expensive part of any operation like this and it tends to get cheaper over time.
The most expensive part of things like this is the time it takes to make it happen, and bitrate (whether high or low) doesn't have a substantial impact on that time.
I thought the same but then I remembered that the noise will make it pretty hard to compress (no?)
Would be interested to have a more quantified idea of the sizes involved.
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.
Try and use this system if you have the resources:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664109
If you're in Ontario or Quebec I can help you out.
I 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.
Post them to the BBC with a note saying you never paid for your TV license and you never will.
On 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.
I would recommend reaching out to the Wellcome Trust, London. https://wellcome.org/
There'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.
Hah. 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.
Throw 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.
Funny but VHS is probably the most accessible obsolete medium. This place
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...)
I really want to import a minidisc player from japan for my r53 mini cooper. I probably should before they are all gone forever.
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?
"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.
I 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.
BBC 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.
You'd be very surprised.
You would think so, but take a look at Lost Media Wiki - https://lostmediawiki.com/Category:Lost_TV
Lot of stuff from 90s-2010s in there.
What is most likely of value besides the teletext on there is the live stuff and any commercials.
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.
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
James should donate it to the UK’s version of Australia’s: https://youtube.com/@davidthegreen
I 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 :(
If 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.)
You can send them to YouTube user “Dr VHS Rip” if you wish. He digitizes all manner of vhs. All manner except porn I think.
I put all our home videos from the 80s on youtube https://www.youtube.com/@ashodapakian2788/videos
My 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!
Whenever I see old low res grainy footage like this I wonder how well the latest image gen & AI can restore it
I 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.
My experience trying to upscale Lexx from DVD copies is… not well…
This isn't about the video part of the recordings
It will only get better. Especially with increasing corpus sizes.
For home, VHS, I wonder if there's an open source model to help denoise and reconstruct her levels of detail.
I 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?
How else are they going to simulate everything in the future with incredible detail?
That'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
[dead]
I will encourage you to save them. I use them to train local AI models.
There 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.
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?
As long as you have them you are allowed to keep a digital copy as well? Can you also rent out your digital copy?
If those ate not copyrighted materials then I think it can be monetized as a content.
Is it possible to rent a well maintained hi8 8mm player and digitize old videos?
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.
ugh, 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.
Why dvd though? You create a new problem!
Picture is unimportant, its about teletext, DVD recorder wont transfer that
ah the signal is stripped ?
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.
Make a TV console out of them.
oh my that video promoting Gary Glitter going on Live and Kicking made me feel very uncomfortable
I read that as 2000 year old VHS tapes somehow...
1-800-GOT-JUNK
Hot take- VHS has terrible quality, I just watched some old animated tapes from my childhood and they look bad. Thank goodness for DVD remasters.
Upload to youtube
Send them to the Victorville Film Archive care of film buff Gregg Turkington.
Make a deep time capsule? concrete, inert gas?
Send them to Red Letter Media :-), or find a landfill near you...
Seconding the Red Letter Media suggestion.
They’re often able to convert these potential landfills into comedy gold.
Build a VHS tape pyramid and charge people $3 to see it. duh.
And then pave paradise, put up a parking lot.
rm -rf
lol
digitize -> vectorize
Throw them away!
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.
You'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.
2000 vhs tapes on the wall 2000 vhs tapes take one down pass it around 1999 vhs tapes on the wall
If 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 :)
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.
People pay $5 for a blank VHS tape?
You can boil the tape and make some tea; so I've heard.
This is a joke, please don't do that.
I 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.
Got 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.
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
Is that paper on arXiv?
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
A hybrid solution with AI and Blockchain would work best (for the very long term).
That way the content can be monetized using Bitcoin as the payment backbone.
You laugh, but all TV will work this way in the future. Micropayments. Think Grameen, but for Video Clips.
I don't know why people are worried about storage. You can just store it on the cloud.
s3 solid nitrogen glacier in deep space tier.
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.