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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

#301

Post by qingcharles »

lubujackson wrote: post #119
stickfigure wrote: post #22

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would assume that in the 1990s to 2000s studios were better about archiving production data, and there aren't likely to be "lost episodes" in this stash?

"Lost" is a relative term. I'd like to watch old episodes of MTV's "You Wrote It, You Watch It" (hosted by a young Jon Stewart!) but good luck finding that on the internet anywhere.

I don't know if MTV still offer this, but about 10 years ago they still had a service where you could get them to basically burn any show to a DVD for a small cost. I got a bunch of rare shows this way.

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

#302

Post by jwagenet »

userbinator wrote: post #70
jwagenet wrote: post #33

I’m somewhat baffled as to what is taking so long to at least digitize the tapes. He alludes to perhaps some more steps than just pressing play, but it seems to me the workload could be broken up by focusing on recording the tape data and dealing with the digital editing later to eliminate the physical tape problem.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths each tape can have up to 930 minutes of data. 2000 tapes is 1860000 minutes, or around 3.5 years of continuous playtime, and I don't know of any VCRs that can play faster than realtime. Of course there's also the question of how much digital storage that would take, which is probably in the hundreds of terabytes range.

Yea, I understand the limitations. TFA mentioned 6hr runtimes (rather than 15.5), which is more manageable. If you WFH I’d guess 2-3 is feasible at least 5 days a week. Of course, if the teletext requires a second run then that’s double time. I suspect any serious archival setup for this will eventually settle on multiple recording systems.

wrt to storage, I hope one is running a reasonably low res for this with some moderate compression. This is vhs after all…

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

#303

Post by vel0city »

egorfine wrote: post #295
vel0city wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. Memory failed me a bit here so i agree with you and stand corrected

Understandable. Sometimes such a small window of history a while ago gets blurry. Sometimes I need to look things up as well to remember the order of things.

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

#304

Post by fallinditch »

achairapart wrote: post #159
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…

And today you can listen to (most of?) those John Peel sessions again: https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session... The circle has been closed!

That's awesome, what a treasure trove :-) thanks for sharing.

You can also download a huge number of shows via the John Peel Wiki [1] and look out for Phil's Mighty Database. There's also a torrent out there, a huge archive of Peel shows known as The Motherlode, well worth nabbing.

[1] https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki

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

#305

Post by rasz »

jwagenet wrote: post #302
userbinator wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths each tape can have up to 930 minutes of data. 2000 tapes is 1860000 minutes, or around 3.5 years of continuous playtime, and I don't know of any VCRs that can play faster than realtime. Of course there's also the question of how much digital storage that would take, which is probably in the hundreds of terabytes range.

Yea, I understand the limitations. TFA mentioned 6hr runtimes (rather than 15.5), which is more manageable. If you WFH I’d guess 2-3 is feasible at least 5 days a week. Of course, if the teletext requires a second run then that’s double time. I suspect any serious archival setup for this will eventually settle on multiple recording systems. wrt to storage, I hope one is running a reasonably low res for this with some…

If its only about teletext you dont need whole 6 hours. Teletext loops whole content in around a minute max. It would probably suffice to capture until vhs-teletext confirms full decode, minutes per tape instead of hours. You will only miss live changes - I think there was chat and sport results.

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

#306

Post by b112 »

brazzy wrote: post #203
b112 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but some may not realise the important distinction of "actual stuff you personally archive", not "I downloaded this from somewhere". I suppose even DVR platforms such as MythTV recording off of TV would be excluded here, as per your 'automated'... although it's a bit of a grey area, VCRs could be automated, but not really without changing the tape in a home setting. Another grey area is more detailed "c…

I think most data hoarders aren't technically knowledgeable enough to get that deep into futureproof archival strategies. I suppose priorities are individually different, though. Some might obsess over preservation, others are happy just accumulating stuff without backups, and data loss is a brief pain, quickly forgotten. The key problem of hoarding is the reluctance/inability to deliberately dispose of things.

A new ycomb application; platforms to enable safe data hording.

Play on fears of losing everything. How it's too difficult to secure data. How the risks are too high.

It's really no different than convincing people they need all sorts of weird lotions, pills, or gadgets, lest their lives will fall apart, their health decline.

The bonus here is, it's a client base unable to help themselves. Akin to selling medicine to a hypochondriac. I envision entire divisions doing deep-research into clients, with sliding scale cost. The ultra rich hoarder will have their collection stored on the back side of the moon, SpaceX delivered data pots, with solar, redundancy, robotic maintenance, and more.

"My word, it's time to hoard!"

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

#307

Post by poincaredisk »

ForHackernews wrote: post #289
lobsterthief wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, so they can continue doing their mission, including digitalizing archives and fighting legal battles.

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

#308

Post by madaxe_again »

bombcar wrote: post #236
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.

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

Yeah, this is my likely approach - it’s not impossible he’s got some BBC stuff that’s otherwise lost, as he pretty much ran two VCRs continuously for a quarter of a century, from the early 80’s to early 10’s - but it’s mostly just hoarding.

If and when it’s a relevant problem for me I’ll go through his catalogue, digitise anything worthwhile, and then dispose of the lot, be it through sale as recordable media (they should all be in great shape, as he stores them well) or otherwise.

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

#309

Post by MonkeyClub »

readyplayernull wrote: post #263
MonkeyClub wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different entity altogether.

What if you say the name of the entity 2000 years later, so they are remembered again? Would they have a 2nd revival? What is the second death timeout?

I think the gist of the "last time the name is spoken" idea refers to people who knew the deceased, their personal history, character, etc., so their existence ceases not just with the biological death, but also with the social, when the last person who remembers them dies.

If one discovers the name some millennia later, the character and its quirks are at best reconstructed rather than remembered, so you have the equivalent of a Frankenstein simulation of the original.

After researchers lose interest in them, that's the third death. At that point, the entity waits in inexistence without hope for some future PhD candidate with a good idea/proposal. The citation count is probably what's left until then, until Google shuts Scholar down.

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

#310

Post by getwiththeprog »

wwader wrote: post #164

Reminds me of the documentary Kim's video https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/ recommended!

Great documentary, New York collector (Kim) gifts huge video library to an Italian town. When a former Kim's customer hunts it down, he finds water-damaged tapes in a disused store-room - and mafia overtones standing in his way!
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