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Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet

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

#101

Post by WalterBright »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #88
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…

Wow, I had no idea that Empire went back that far. My friends and I had lots of fun staying up all night playing the PC version in high school. Glad to see many before us got to enjoy your work too.

I had no idea what I was doing when I made it, I just wanted to play it myself.

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

#102

Post by 1MachineElf »

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…

You can stream Midsomer Murders if you are still in the mood for 3-hour long British murder mysteries.

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

#103

Post by rogerdpack »

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.

maybe forever.com ...

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

#104

Post by rogerdpack »

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.

I assume they're using typical DMCA technique of "if nobody complains..." (and only the copyright holder can complain) ...

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

#105

Post by supermatt »

WalterBright wrote: post #100
allovernow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but nobody wants to deal with a terabyte of holes.

Storing the holes isn’t an issue. They compact infinitely, and don’t degrade under any conditions. It’s reapplying them to some card stock that’s time consuming and error prone.

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

#106

Post by GuardianCaveman »

themodelplumber wrote: post #45
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…

> I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out. I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago. The reaction in the comments was something less than amused. (Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly non-important video in order to record...what was it, the first X-files episode? A _Wings_ episode about a favorite jet? Something l…

You’re the first person in any forum online I’ve seen reference Wings. My dads friend used to call my dad to tell him it was on and he’d switch from whatever ninja turtles / golden girls / simpsons episode we were watching. We despised wings! But actually it’s a great show.

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

#107

Post by neurocline »

xvector wrote: post #51
allovernow wrote: post #34

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 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? 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?

Back in the 2007-2008 timeframe when I added the streaming install/patch/play functionality to World of Warcraft, we also made it operate as an automatic repair system - if a disk block was read that had a hash mismatch, it just downloaded the correct block from the server (and wrote the fixed block to disk, of course). I looked at a month's worth of download logs, and estimated that 1 bit per GB per year flipped on hard disk data for our customers (we had already implemented re-reads before this point, because we had the hashes in place before we did streaming download, and so were pretty sure it was bad data on disk). Even at that fairly low rate, you can imagine that this reduced daily mysterious crashes by a nice amount. And keep in mind that hard disks already have error correction, so bits on magnetic media aren't as stable as you want. And, of course, this was not data at rest, there's lots of Wow play time going on, so lots of reads. I've been told that tape is more durable than spinning hard disks; for the sake of all those enterprise backups, I hope so.

As a side effect, this made me increase how much redundancy I used for data I really cared about.

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

#108

Post by WalterBright »

supermatt wrote: post #105
WalterBright wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but nobody wants to deal with a terabyte of holes.

Storing the holes isn’t an issue. They compact infinitely, and don’t degrade under any conditions. It’s reapplying them to some card stock that’s time consuming and error prone.

I remember paper tape being dodgy when both punching and reading the holes, meaning that once a certain number of bytes are processed, random bit errors are a certainty.

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

#109

Post by slim »

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.

I've always wondered what makes micro SD cards not suitable for long term storage. What makes them decay

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

#110

Post by LocalH »

I hope they’re capturing this at full resolution and preserving the full 60i signal. Too many times, people think VHS is 320x240 and capture accordingly, dropping half the temporal resolution from the get go. Even though there’s not a ton of horizontal evolution, a full D1 resolution capture will represent the tape much better than a half-resolution capture (but half-D1 would still be better than 320 or 352 by 240).
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