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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

#251

Post by mmmlinux »

PaulHoule wrote: post #249

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 tha…

I really want to import a minidisc player from japan for my r53 mini cooper. I probably should before they are all gone forever.

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

#252

Post by randomdata »

dylan604 wrote: post #243
randomdata wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to draw on past experience. I'm watching it unfold right here. Quite hilarious.

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

#253

Post by aEJ04Izw5HYm »

Well done @keybits for reaching out for help. Another option is that you could split the workload between 3-4 data archivists and start a separate archive until it finds a better home. Personally I don't have the time for this but more people might have the time for a 1 year effort if you were to provide your setup. A few other archivists have been suggested on this thread. Perhaps they would take a portion rather than the whole responsibility, it could be pretty cool to have a bi-monhtly catch up with others with the same hobby and who would all be eager to share their discoveries!

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

#254

Post by throwaway48476 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #213
pjc50 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

VCRs are just ancient enough that soldering is easy.

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

#255

Post by ghaff »

appendix-rock wrote: post #199
madaxe_again wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

To what end? Digitizing is a huge amount of work.

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

#256

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

For a while I was trying to gentle a feral cat in a room in my other house (rental property under renovation), I moved the XBOX and all my DVD/Blu-Ray discs there (unlike books, I'm not afraid of having any of these get sprayed on) -- for a weeks the house was a SCIF but pretty soon I set up one of these

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/li...

for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center.

I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.

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

#257

Post by ghaff »

actionfromafar wrote: post #204
abdulhaq wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it's simple, you pay someone to come and dispose of it.

VHS tapes sell at easily more than $1 a pop. That's 50k dollars.

Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.

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

#258

Post by exitb »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #223
nicolas_t wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s rather disappointing. Expected more from the internet archive.

Expectations are free, actual work costs time and money though.

I've donated to archival efforts before and, as many, would be happy to chip in for this one. It doesn't seem possible though and we don't know why it appears stalled.

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

#259

Post by lambdaone »

You might want to try the UK national archives:

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

or get in touch with the enthusiast community, people like

https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/

You should ensure whoever you give them to can give you a binding commitment to use for legitimate archival purposes, and not just acquire them and sit on them for copyright reasons.

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

#260

Post by lobsterthief »

nicolas_t wrote: post #161
exitb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outwardly visible status is that just a small portion of the recordings have been made available[1]. The Archive is not commenting about this for years now. [1] https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment

That’s rather disappointing. Expected more from the internet archive.

Please donate to them if you want them to meet your expectations
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