Post them to the BBC with a note saying you never paid for your TV license and you never will.
I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
61–70 of 324 posts
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#62I 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?
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#63This 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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#64It 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…
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#66It 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…
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#68This 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 catalog…
so you found a gold mine?
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#69Talk 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.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#70I’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.