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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

#271

Post by ghaff »

unixhero wrote: post #162
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!

Lonely women are also found to be hoarding trinkets and plastic furniture for a home they don't have and for a family and or relationship they dont have - but hope or think will come in the future.[0] 0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).

I think it's fairly common that people keep/collect/hoard stuff against a future lifestyle that they eventually realize that they don't even want. When my dad was clearing out a former house for an estate sale, I definitely took too much stuff against a day when I would have formal dinner parties like my parents did--but, of course, never did.

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

#272

Post by ghaff »

loufe wrote: post #222
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…

Thankfully my semi-hoarding of digital media takes up no space aside from on my server's hard drives and organizing is easy and pleasant. I definitely feel the pull to add to the collection. It's a sort of joy.

Digital hoarding can be obsessive in its own right. But, as you say, it doesn't take up space, doesn't cost much, and isn't a physical weight on you.

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

#273

Post by sumtechguy »

ssl-3 wrote: post #194
davidmurphy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 close…

I may have had that same zenith tv. In my town we had 2 channels that did anything with it. One was basically a static summary of whatever was on. The other was pretty cool with stocks and weather and news. But mid 90s they turned it off. Never tried TBS. Guess I should have.

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

#274

Post by andai »

pjc50 wrote: post #180
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…

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…

I've started saving web pages, since several of my favorite websites went offline, and some even self-deleted from WayBack Machine.

The impression I get is that if I want something to continue existing, it's my responsibility to make that happen.

On a darker note, this appears to be true of civilization in general...

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

#275

Post by pfdietz »

Throw them out.

When my dad died, he had accumulated hundreds of tapes of movies from cable. What was I to do with them? I didn't want to watch them, and selling them would have violated copyright laws. I wasn't going to go erase them to try to sell blank tapes which had little value.

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

#276

Post by agumonkey »

rasz wrote: post #93
agumonkey wrote: post #7

vhs to dvd drives are fun https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313...

Picture is unimportant, its about teletext, DVD recorder wont transfer that

ah the signal is stripped ?

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

#277

Post by Clamchop »

actionfromafar wrote: post #214
egorfine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000

Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.

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

#279

Post by burningChrome »

I held onto my CD collection for various reasons but the main one was my car - the 2014 Toyota Corolla was the last year they still had a CD player. All of the new cars either have Apple or Android streaming, but there's just something that isn't the same. The album art, the liner notes you can read, sometimes photos of the band or lyrics. My son now has the car, so it might be time to cast off my collection.

I thought about starting a streaming service to play some of the music I have from many of the local bands who've graced the Minneapolis music scene, many of whom no longer exist. There's also a ton of bands from the early aughts that are no longer around that I also have from when I worked in the local record store. Going to shows and being emersed the local music scene was all I cared about back then.

Then I start to think about the copyright issues of playing this stuff on a streaming service and instead of something nostalgic, I was caught up in the idea if its even legal to do.

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

#280

Post by throwanem »

aspenmayer wrote: post #98
throwanem wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right there with you. But hey, it's not all bad. We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it. And for all it pangs our hearts to see our ephemera tend to dust, we also I think are, of any human generation to date, probably best able to hope that the things we really love from our time will be preserved. (I hope that's a distinction we do…

> as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs What show are you referring to? Consider my curiosity piqued!

Babylon 5, but go in unspoiled.

It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...)

That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.

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