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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

#241

Post by derstander »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #186
Mistletoe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes you think people are burdened by their belongings? I'm not talking about heavy hoarders. Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories. Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.

> Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.

Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.

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

#242

Post by snowwrestler »

YesBox wrote: post #94
uptown wrote: 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".

The novel The Brief History of the Dead explores this idea as if it were real.

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

#243

Post by dylan604 »

randomdata wrote: post #189
dylan604 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming that people can't get along. Is there some reason the BBC and archive.org can't work together to satisfy both of their wants and needs?

You sound like you've never worked with multiple vendors essentially needing the same thing but want different things.

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

#244

Post by Larrikin »

jononor wrote: post #176
cortesoft wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there isn't an issue with it, why stop?

It can consume _a lot_ of time. An mental space. Which is much more precious in life than storage space. Those that get really afflicted by hoarding can have all the issues associated with other forms of addiction. Like not taking care of relationships, work, money - organizing their entre lives around getting their fix. And it can happen very gradually, making it hard to notice wen it has gotten to far, and try to s…

I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point. The Media Hoarder metadata thread this week rightfully gave the author crap because he refused to say whether his tool worked with the common organization ways or required you to ruin the organization of your library just to get a few stats.

The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.

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

#245

Post by duckson »

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.

Right? Here in the Netherlands, Teletext is still very much alive and has several millions of users per week. [1]

In fact, at the end of 2023 our public broadcaster rewrote the Teletext backend system using modern programming practices to keep it running into the future. [2] Before that it was running on software from the 80's.

[1] https://over.nos.nl/nieuws/teletekst-kan-weer-jaren-vooruit-... [2] https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...

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

#246

Post by RajT88 »

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…

A friend of mine (Japanese - relevant because the cost of music CD's was higher there) in high school would have side jobs so he could buy music. His mom - possibly undiagnosed mental health issues - every few years would throw away his CD collection which he'd spent the equivalent of 30-40k USD on. This happened twice.

Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.

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

#247

Post by dylan604 »

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…

> The first VHS camcorder (a combined camera and recorder unit) was VHS-C

VHS was released in 1976. VHS-C was released in 1982. The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.

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

#248

Post by RajT88 »

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

I know a lady hoarder. She would buy lots and lots of thrift shop stuff, some to just have and appreciate, some to use as raw materials for artsy projects.

Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.

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

#249

Post by PaulHoule »

Funny but VHS is probably the most accessible obsolete medium. This place

https://ithacareuse.org/

sells decks for about $12 and Ebay prices aren't much more. Most TVs still have a composite in that will work great, and that place sells prerecorded tapes for about $2. Audio quality on VHS is surprisingly good and really pops with Dolby Pro Logic on my AV receiver.

Such a deck is likely to work just fine. Contrast that to a cassette deck which often has problems a lot worse than old belts. I have been looking for one of those because my son's 96 Buick came with a broken stereo and he eventually found a working OEM stereo that had a tape player but no CD player. (He really wants a copy of Deltron 3030)

After trying a few $20 decks I found locally I gave up and spent 10x that on Ebay. Blank tapes are more expensive than minidiscs in lots from Japan although prerecorded cassettes are cheap and abundant, he's already got more that he can keep in the car.

(If it were my car I'd get one of those minidisc players from Japan that looks like it came out of a Gundam...)

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

#250

Post by airtag »

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.

even the non-cheap recorders produce a huge quality loss. It would be slightly easier, but if you're considering archiving something, why not do it as good as possible
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