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

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

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

#191

Post by randomdata »

ahartmetz wrote: post #172
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the purpose of going to the extreme of having no stuff, anyway? I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. As a child, I could find books in our collection at home, and when visiting friends with a book collection, I like to browse it and ask about some of the books. I have and use an e-reader, but the reading experience is a little worse and browsing is much worse.

> I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books.

But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them?

What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?

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

#192

Post by DrBazza »

ozozozd wrote: post #141

I am shocked that no one is talking about Teletext! I am guessing it wasn’t a thing in US or I am the oldest person to comment so far? I had forgotten that Teletext existed until this post. And for those who know about BBSs, Teletext was the closest thing before modems. I don’t remember seeing the wild Teletext Ascii art etc. as seen in the post though. UK seems to have had mad Teletext.

Everyone used to book their summer holidays from Teletext. The Peter Kay sketch about this is quite amusing.

I thought, though I might be wrong, back in the UK we broadcast on 650 lines, and the top or bottom 25 lines were reserved for teletext and also IIRC timing signals, that could start/stop VCRs automatically but was never used in the UK. The teletext signal was tiny in modern terms, it was extremely similar to the BBC Micro 'Mode 7' in size.

The article mentions that VHS 'compressed' the signal. I don't think that was the case, I think it filtered the analogue signal and chopped off the teletext info, but some of it used to leak through, hence the opportunity to recover it.

Then there was Macrovision that fiddled with those not-quite filtered lines to add bursts of colour that would leak through to stop tape-to-tape piracy.

Fun fact: a magazine published a circuit that would remove Macrovision that was then widely photocopied and distributed in the UK. You could order the parts from Tandy or RadioShack, and we took it to school and had (a lot) of help from the teacher putting them together as part of our CDT/tech classes. The rest, is as they say, history.

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

#193

Post by BSDobelix »

kvmet wrote: post #152
lynx23 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If women get known for their hoarding, its typically for animals, not living things. Which is, if you think about it long enough, a lot more creepy!

Did you misspeak? Animals are generally living things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_hoarding

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

#194

Post by ssl-3 »

davidmurphy wrote: post #166
ozozozd wrote: post #141

I am shocked that no one is talking about Teletext! I am guessing it wasn’t a thing in US or I am the oldest person to comment so far? I had forgotten that Teletext existed until this post. And for those who know about BBSs, Teletext was the closest thing before modems. I don’t remember seeing the wild Teletext Ascii art etc. as seen in the post though. UK seems to have had mad Teletext.

US didn't have it to my knowledge, so it was indeed a novelty when visiting Europe in the 90s to experience it.

We did have it in the States; it just wasn't ever very broadly adopted.

Circa 1992, a friend's house had a then-fancy Zenith TV that supported Teletext, which was unusual at the time. IIRC it worked with exactly one cable channel in our town, TBS, and it had a fair variety of news and information. I enjoyed playing around with it when I visited, much to my friend's bemusement.

Eventually, TVs with Teletext (and closed captioning) became much more common, but by then the ship had sailed. The service was NLA by the time we had a TV with these capabilities in our own home.

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

#195

Post by krisgenre »

I had quite a few episodes of "Johnny Sokko and his flying robot" recorded on VHS and also of one interesting TV series about a group of children living all by themselves in an old caravan (the opening credits shows them jumping through a hole in a fence). My mom gave them all away long back but even now I miss them :(

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

#196

Post by walthamstow »

chongli wrote: post #64
fallinditch wrote: post #21

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…

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

It's certainly not a male thing, just open any woman's wardrobe.

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

#197

Post by fecal_henge »

kvmet wrote: post #152
lynx23 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If women get known for their hoarding, its typically for animals, not living things. Which is, if you think about it long enough, a lot more creepy!

Did you misspeak? Animals are generally living things

Most animals are dead.

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

#198

Post by appendix-rock »

chongli wrote: post #64
fallinditch wrote: post #21

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…

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

Yup. See also, the massive underdiagnosis of autism in women, especially ‘attractive’ women (I shit you not!). We’re only just now beginning to clear up decades and decades of brushing things off as ‘quirky girl’ traits. Everyone has a grandparent that obsessed over collecting something or other. It’s really just a question of how incidentally racist the collection is :).

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

#199

Post by appendix-rock »

madaxe_again wrote: post #177
fallinditch wrote: post #21

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…

My godfather has about 50,000 VHS tapes of TV recordings - all catalogued and neatly stored in huge pull-out racks that ⅔ of his three bedroom apartment (he’s single) are dedicated to. He wrote a cataloguing system in qbasic, having never coded before - these days he’s got a web app. I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.

Digitise, digitise, digitise!

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

#200

Post by pjc50 »

etrautmann wrote: post #138
jccalhoun wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn’t it be far easier to record downstream of the output? There must be cheap analog video recorders.

Oh, there's loads of those. For some reason I've seen the best results with a composite->HDMI upscaler followed by HDMI capture. Composite-only capture devices seem to be flaky.

The whole point of VHS-Decode is to bypass as much of the VCR's output circuitry as possible; capture from the read heads and apply modern digital reconstruction from there.

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