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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

#231

Post by yuvadam »

stewx wrote: post #230
schwartzworld wrote: post #228

I have a neighbor who has this problem with bootleg audio cassettes. Concert recordings mostly. I keep begging him to back them up to digital and even gave him a little usb interface he could do it with. He talks about this collection with such pride, it’s hard for me to imagine not future proofing at least your favorite ones, but there’s no convincing some people.

To be fair, hard drives are not necessarily more future-proof than audio cassettes. A hard drive typically lasts, what, 10 years, whereas a cassette tape is probably good for 50 years. You need to back up the digital copy onto different devices.

A single hard drive can be part of a larger fault-tolerant storage cluster, not to mention much more easily duplicated and backed up. The digitization process is key.

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

#232

Post by MonkeyClub »

suddenclarity wrote: post #182
yboris wrote: post #99

Once you digitize them, you'll want to browse the videos. Consider using Video Hub App - an MIT open source application (Windows, Mac, Linux) that shows you screenshots (that you can scrub through) from each video. https://videohubapp.com/ https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Should probably mention that it's your own software and that it cost $5. Not that the money really matters.

Also should mention that it's MIT licensed, not MIT software.

But a cool program nonetheless!

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

#233

Post by MonkeyClub »

readyplayernull wrote: post #101
YesBox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Different entity altogether.

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

#234

Post by david422 »

sim7c00 wrote: post #215
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…

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…

Whenever I upgrade computers, I never transfer, just start fresh. I keep old hard drives around and have backups in case I need stuff but... all that stuff I accumulate I don't actually need.

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

#235

Post by ahartmetz »

randomdata wrote: post #191
ahartmetz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethin…

Not owning would not make much difference, but selection does. The tools are for the things that I like to do, and for the books, selection is even more important becase there are so many to choose from and so relatively few that are "mine".

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

#236

Post by bombcar »

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.

It’s collections like this that sometimes turn out to have the only surviving copy of the Apollo moon landing broadcast. I would digitize the report of what is in there and make it available on the Internet as fast as possible, so that people who are interested in this stuff can see if there’s anything that is not available elsewhere

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

#237

Post by bombcar »

jccalhoun wrote: post #110
adamrezich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That kind of requirement is the exact thing that someone can make some money on by doing the conversion and then selling them on eBay. I would gladly spend a couple hundred dollars for something like that if I needed to do VHS conversion.

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

#238

Post by bombcar »

epcoa wrote: post #118
dylan604 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is something that is funny to me. By the time VHS camcorders came out, 8mm film cameras were much smaller. Almost point-n-shoot sizes. Then VHS came out with the shoulder mount bricks. It took forever for VHS-C palmcorders to make them much more portable.

A Super 8 cartridge is only good for 2.5 minutes at 24 fps and 3:20 at 18 though, going to 120 (or even 20-30) minutes was quite a trade up. > Then VHS came out with the shoulder mount bricks. It took forever for VHS-C palmcorders to make them much more portable. The first VHS camcorder (a combined camera and recorder unit) was VHS-C. The JVC GR-C1, released 1984, made famous in Back to the Future. Full size (VHS) sh…

Even after they stop being really sold, people still used them because the convenience of take it out of the recording device put it in your player should not be understated.

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

#239

Post by MonkeyClub »

Molitor5901 wrote: post #42
roywiggins wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somehow think that may be the exact opposite of what the author is going for...

True but at some point.. unless someone takes them off his hands he's going to have to face a decision. Better to recycle and sell them, than toss them in the bin.

You're getting downvoted, but you have a point.

Digitizing and blanking them out and selling the tapes aren't mutually exclusive, OP may have an opportunity to recuperate the digitization costs that way.

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

#240

Post by MonkeyClub »

metalman wrote: post #15
Molitor5901 wrote: post #4

eBay! My brother used to tape bicycle races and has hundreds of them. He's been blanking them and selling them on eBay for about $5 each.

2000 vhs tapes on the wall 2000 vhs tapes take one down pass it around 1999 vhs tapes on the wall

If you pass one around long enough, it'll sure enough generate at least a couple of copies of it, so in the end you'd have 2002 VHS tapes on that wall :)
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