Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 324 posts

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

#281

Post by foobarian »

andai wrote: post #274
pjc50 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I find it interesting to think about this while listening to historical content like the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Tl;dr, if you want something to survive for millennia, it needs to be carved in stone or you need to arrange for monks to keep transcribing it

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

#282

Post by vel0city »

egorfine wrote: post #187
ToDougie wrote: post #38

Earlier 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...

I don't think I agree with that.

The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very affordable until about the 2000s. VHS was definitely still widely used for several years after multi-GB hard drives were common in the consumer market.

Even then, in the late 90s flash media was horrifically expensive. I seem to recall my family buying a 16MB Smartmedia card in the late 90s (massive for the time) for ~$150 or so on sale. You'd be storing a few minutes of highly compressed video on a card like that compared to the several hours of video you could put on a VHS tape. Direct-to-DVD camcorders wouldn't be a thing until the 2000s at which point 40+GB hard drives were starting to become common and flash cards were starting to get to several dozen MBs at least for ~$100 or so.

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

#283

Post by ziml77 »

npunt wrote: post #9

Whenever I see old low res grainy footage like this I wonder how well the latest image gen & AI can restore it

I looked into upscaling for the original episodes of Police Squad. Paid a good chunk of money for an AI upscaler because I was too curious how good of a job it could do.

The results were not great. When there's too many different things impacting the quality of the source, the AI just can't do a great job. In the case of Police Squad DVD rips, they were low res and noisy.

When I eventually found a higher resolution Bluray version, I ran that through just to denoise it and got much better results. My understanding is that it also would have been able to do a good job upscaling given a source that wasn't noisy.

Maybe you can use a chain of models to handle both problems. I didn't try anything like that. Though I would expect the tool to have that as an option if it is something that worked well.

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

#284

Post by kmoser »

On a related note, I know somebody who owns a complete run of PHOTO magazine (the original French edition) and is looking to donate them. First published in the 1960s, with approximately 10 issues per year, his collection has approximately 580 issues. Contact me if you know an individual or organization that would be interested.

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

#285

Post by Clamchop »

vel0city wrote: post #282
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...

I don't think I agree with that. The first 1GB consumer drives came out in like 1993. I remember having a several GB (I think a little over 4GB?) hard drive on a home computer sold with Windows 95. DVD wouldn't come out for about another two years in the US and wouldn't have been widely used until at least 1998+. My 1998 desktop had something like 11GB of space. DVD burners and players wouldn't really be very afforda…

I wasn't really sure what OP meant by VHS being "totally obsolete". It would have been getting there for new camcorders by the mid 90s (replaced by 8mm and eventually DV), but VHS itself would remain relevant into the mid 2000s.

Just going by pop culture, we had the 4GB base model iMac in 1998 and a hit film about a cursed video tape in 2002.

Anecdotally, I remember my family getting a Windows 95 computer with a 1GB hard drive (Quantum Bigfoot, no less) in 1995 or 1996, and a really cool decorated box set of the Alien quadrillogy on VHS around the turn of the millennium from Tower Records.

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

#287

Post by onlypassingthru »

lulzury wrote: post #136
onlypassingthru wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raises an interesting question: Who is the oldest person still alive to us that we know of by name?

If you mean "Who is the earliest known recorded individual in human history?" wikipedia says "The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record transactions of barley." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)

That's pretty remarkable that Kushim holds the title, and not for anything other than dealing in barley.

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

#288

Post by longtimelistnr »

latexr wrote: post #219
pjc50 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

a noted Philadelphia legend who also made a large fortune on early Apple stock! she's as close you can get to a modern folk tale

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

#289

Post by ForHackernews »

lobsterthief wrote: post #260
nicolas_t wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

So it can go to settle their court fines? Or fund their next harebrained legal adventure?

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

#290

Post by ssl-3 »

sneak wrote: post #129
WalterBright wrote: post #76

2000 tapes at 6 hours each, 12,000 hours. You can record them for about a gig an hour, so it ought to fit in 12 terabytes. Doing one tape a night, it'll take 6 years of calendar time. 3 years if you buy a dedicated computer to do it, at two tapes a day. The good news is that's calendar time, not your time, which is pressing "record" on your computer and "play" on the VHS machine.

A gig an hour seems a bit high for VHS resolution and HEVC.

It may be overkill, but it's an archive. Overkill is permissible.

Remember, there's no going back to do it again -- once the video is digitized, the tapes will go away forever.

That said, I think a bitrate of about 0.78GB/hr may be better. It may still be overkill, but will let a T120 tape recorded in SLP mode (6 hours) to fit into one single-layer M-Disc DVD-R, which may make sense for some media.

But whatever the case, bits are cheap these days. Data storage is definitely the least expensive part of any operation like this and it tends to get cheaper over time.

The most expensive part of things like this is the time it takes to make it happen, and bitrate (whether high or low) doesn't have a substantial impact on that time.

Post reply on HN