Is it possible to rent a well maintained hi8 8mm player and digitize old videos?
I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
211–220 of 324 posts
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#212oh my that video promoting Gary Glitter going on Live and Kicking made me feel very uncomfortable
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have the same experience. Also the composite to SD card recorders are supposedly quite good. But nothing beats tapping a VCR into vhsdecode and the soldering looks quite simple. Even cheap VCRs work fine for this. I will find time for it at some point...
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> really old hard drives (anywhere from 10G to 40G) VHS was already totally obsolete when 1+GB HDD came to consumer market...
VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#215It 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…
I used to collect many things, also on my pc in digital forms. then oneday my hard-drive just straigh-up died, no backups ofcourse the smart teenager i was. I was super sad, for like 1 hour, and re-installed and started 'clean'. That really felt like a big relief, and i got rid of all of my collections of useless stuff. loads of old pcs, laptops, tapes, cds, whatever. Ended up at somepoint only having a desktop, some speakers and a bed. now i have a little more again, but no collections, i just throw everything that's not usable to me anymore, or give it away if it might be usable to someone. feels great not having so much clutter and stuff around me anymore. real easy to clean the house too now :D
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#216I 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 start/stop VCR thing was called PDC, and IIRC it worked in the UK, as long as you'd set your VCR to the exact scheduled times of the program:
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#217Write the names of 40 tapes a day, for two months. Take breaks. PUBLISH the results. I used to collect 45s, until I found an MP3. Then after 3 ISPs, I no longer needed the 45s. I NEED THE LIST OF THEM.
Sure, but the author is interested in archiving the Teletext pages hidden in the recordings of the TV shows, not the TV shows themselves.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I keep my DVDs on those spindles that recordable discs come on. I take the paper and the disc, and throw out the case unless it's a really special one.
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#219It 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…
So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread. The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably. I suspect a lot of peo…
Case in point: Marion Stokes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
Re: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 start/stop VCR thing was called PDC, and IIRC it worked in the UK, as long as you'd set your VCR to the exact scheduled times of the program: https://625.uk.com/pdc/
Thanks for that. I hadn't realised it was a feature in UK VCRs. I can't say I remember anyone ever using it.