Live data from Hacker News

I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

101–110 of 324 posts

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#101
post #94
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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".

What if someone is born with the same name?

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#103

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 h…

>Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down. This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!

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

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#104

Earlier 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.

The failure of that limit when real world "collecting" is the Hallmark of having a problem hoarding...

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#105
post #80

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?

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.

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#106
post #11

Side note: any recommendations for digitization services for ~80 mini DV tapes? Currently planning to try out LegacyBox, but the reviews are mixed.

Try and use this system if you have the resources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664109

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and actually able to be somebody.

be who?

Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them

#110
post #23

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…

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.
Post reply on HN