Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 129 posts

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

allovernow wrote: post #34
Spooky23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what archivists do - copy. The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does that for electronic media. That includes getting things like photos printed.

How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scal…

There are different schools of thought. And it depends on what the scope of the discussion is. If you’re talking about preserving PDF/A or PNG files, you’re probably talking about media preservation. If you’re worried that your important document written in some version of PFS:Professional Write (an obscure word processor from the 80s) being readable, conversion and access become a problem.

I recall working with a group of archivists where one camp was in favor of conversion to standard formats like PDF for certain documents, another wanted to preserve documents in the original format, and still another wanted to do both.

It’s a hard problem and purity of thought makes it worse.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#92

Post by Spooky23 »

allovernow wrote: post #83
xvector wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I am not sure I understand. Isn’t the error rate zero? And wouldn’t you be using checksums to verify perfect copies?

Can't be zero. At the very least if bits can be randomly flipped during storage from wayward radiation, they can be flipped on copy. Error correction only works if the number of flipped bits are below a threshold. But I don't know the order of magnitude of the error rate, I assume it's quite small given that computers work.

It can be very close. You can get durability of data equal or greater than something like Amazon S3.

I’d be more worried about disasters and budget cuts than cosmic radiation.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#93

Post by m463 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them. Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes anything could happen because they got reused. So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would suddenly switch over to a shuttle launch or a music video or a documentary or something cause someone decided to record something else at that point. I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I…

  #!/usr/bin/python
  from random import choice
  c=["Miss Scarlet","Mr. Green","Colonel Mustard","Professor Plum","Mrs. Peacock","Mrs. White"]
  w=["candlestick","dagger","lead pipe","revolver","rope","wrench"]
  r=["kitchen","ballroom","conservatory","dining room","cellar","billiard room","library","lounge","hall","study"]
  print("%s did it with the %s in the %s."%(choice(c),choice(w),choice(r)))

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#94

Post by danbolt »

EwanG wrote: post #82
FillardMillmore wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek, but if you happen to find a way to copy Mario 64 to a stone tablet, I'd love to hear about it.

Not THAT difficult - assuming you have enough stone tablets. I mean the program code exists. The problem I think you'd have (and true of most of these digital artifacts) is all the other hardware and software you would have to similarly encode to be able to recreate the machine and OS capable of running it...

Not to mention a large amount of the artifacts involved to play those games aren’t necessarily documented or accessible. The Nintendo 64’s CIC chip was only reverse engineered quite recently and required a serious reverse-engineering effort. [1]

[1] https://recon.cx/2015/slides/recon2015-19-mike-ryan-john-mcm...

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#95

Post by allovernow »

WalterBright wrote: post #56
allovernow wrote: post #3

How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity.

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sur…

Ironically the Punch cards will probably Outlast literally everything else that's digital.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#96

Post by hcs »

allovernow wrote: post #34
Spooky23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what archivists do - copy. The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does that for electronic media. That includes getting things like photos printed.

How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per copied bit. I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data types because they statistically compress high level abstract data which can then be used to fill in regions with high error rate, although if you did that at a large scal…

> How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades beyond error correction?

The idea is to act as a repeater, or like dynamically refreshed RAM, detecting and amplifying the signal at each copy before it degrades too far. You still have the error rate of reading and writing each time, but it's often cheaper to get the same error rate by refreshing cheap media than by using a more permanent medium.

Interleaved error correction (such as on a CD) kind of works as you describe, spreading out the error from a single physical point across the logical data so that it can be corrected by intact data elsewhere. This works because it's designed to recover from burst errors, corresponding to a localized scratch across the track.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%9...

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#97

Post by incompatible »

olivermarks wrote: post #70

What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.

Presumably they are all copyrighted, and presumably IA will take them down if it gets a DMCA notification. Perhaps they could then use a library workaround and make them available to one person at a time, or whatever.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#98

Post by olivermarks »

epanchin wrote: post #73
olivermarks wrote: post #70

What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube (assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.

Don't you think 20 years is enough time to profit from a creation? Copywrite law lasts so long, it makes little sense.

It's a tricky one. If I flew around the world with expensive camera gear and edited up some kind of big budget travel video I'd be a lot more upset about seeing it free than if I had made a 'origami how to' video in 1989 that was very low budget...

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#99

Post by WalterBright »

einpoklum wrote: post #66
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sur…

But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

A chunk I've made open source on Github. Other stuff all fits on one drive, and I'll just give it to a family member(s) who wants it.

Re: Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

#100

Post by WalterBright »

allovernow wrote: post #95
WalterBright wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media. My oldest files are from 1977 - proof: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10 My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-increasing size. (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.) I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sur…

Ironically the Punch cards will probably Outlast literally everything else that's digital.

Sure, but nobody wants to deal with a terabyte of holes.
Post reply on HN