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I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
31–40 of 324 posts
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#32Probably 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!
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#33I’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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#34[deleted]
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#36Maybe I'm wrong, but I would assume that in the 1990s to 2000s studios were better about archiving production data, and there aren't likely to be "lost episodes" in this stash?
You'd be very surprised.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#37Maybe I'm wrong, but I would assume that in the 1990s to 2000s studios were better about archiving production data, and there aren't likely to be "lost episodes" in this stash?
you'd be 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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#38Probably 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…
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#39Send 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
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#40It 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 h…
Luckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
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.