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

Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#21

Post by bitparadox »

I've started working through a backlog of a few hundred home movie tapes, mostly MiniDV, but a few dozen 8mm and Hi8. Fortunately I have a Digital8 camcorder I've been able to use for the analog 8mm tapes to interface with dvcam over ieee1394.

A quick python script around dvcam lets me drop a tape in and type in the label on the tape, and it rewinds, captures the raw tape, transcodes it with ffmpeg, and adds it to a jellyfin library for family to view.

I also have a Sony DHR-1000 DVCAM/MiniDV deck I've been using for all the minidv tapes, but suddenly it started ejecting tapes with an error whenever I insert one. Does anyone know any good communities online that might be able to help me get the deck working again? I'm hoping it's just something that needs adjusting or cleaning, since it worked fine until now (though it is probably close to 30 years old now).

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#22

Post by wswin »

torben-friis wrote: post #18

Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general. SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior. Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be u…

Home NAS, with data redundancy and filesystem with checksums. It's great because you can access it from any device and there is a ton of FOSS for it now

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#23

Post by mysteria »

I've had reasonably good results digitizing VHSC home video with a composite to HDMI converter/scaler followed by an HDMI capture card. The converter does TBC and deinterlacing and I find the resulting footage to be much more clear and stable than what you get out of a regular composite to USB dongle.

If you have an AVR with composite or s-video in and HDMI out that could also work in place of the converter. In either case you'll downscale the footage back to 640x480 before encoding.

You have to monitor the process start to finish if the tapes are bad, there's nothing around that.

For MiniDV and Digital8 you should straight up get a lossless copy using a cheap Firewire card.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#24

Post by philoticstrand »

bitparadox wrote: post #21

I've started working through a backlog of a few hundred home movie tapes, mostly MiniDV, but a few dozen 8mm and Hi8. Fortunately I have a Digital8 camcorder I've been able to use for the analog 8mm tapes to interface with dvcam over ieee1394. A quick python script around dvcam lets me drop a tape in and type in the label on the tape, and it rewinds, captures the raw tape, transcodes it with ffmpeg, and adds it to a…

Any chance you would share your script? Also do you deal with audio sync before or after ripping?

I have a similar project in my backlog, ~100 Hi8 and Digital8 tapes to digitize before they get too old and fragile.

I already have a Digital8 camcorder and the requisite FireWire cable plus TB2 and TB3 adapters for connecting to my Mac or PC. Just need to get off my ass and start!

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#25

Post by manofmanysmiles »

I'd love to walk around with a Hi8 camera and 4K camera with a rig to record identical frames, and get a few hundred hours if footage and train a model to do intelligent upscaling and cleanup of old footage.

Possibly a 3D printed rig with a semi-transparent mirror + some crowdsourcing and this could really work.

It's in my backlog.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#26

Post by asdefghyk »

aaronax wrote: post #14
EvanAnderson wrote: post #11

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.

Maybe get it archived in wayback machine?

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#27

Post by ryanmcbride »

all2 wrote: post #13
EvanAnderson wrote: post #11

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?). You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media i…

Physically recoiling at this ceo-scum response to OPs comment

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#28

Post by chorkpop »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #27
all2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?). You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media i…

Physically recoiling at this ceo-scum response to OPs comment

I'm surprised it took a whole hour for someone to turn a charity into a SaaS

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#29

Post by all2 »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #27
all2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?). You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media i…

Physically recoiling at this ceo-scum response to OPs comment

It is a way to make money. Provide service in exchange for money. I'm not sure what's wrong with that.

If he could figure out how to do it without ever spending money, that would be amazing and I would fully support it. As it stands, I saw what he was asking, did some math to sort out how he could manage it full time, and made a recommendation.

People are tired of SaaS, I get it, so I suppose you could ship an app to do something similar; wire it to talk to every possible imaging/recording device and then automate the 'download all pictures from this device'. But it still takes time. And potentially money.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#30

Post by chrisweekly »

wswin wrote: post #22
torben-friis wrote: post #18

Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general. SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior. Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be u…

Home NAS, with data redundancy and filesystem with checksums. It's great because you can access it from any device and there is a ton of FOSS for it now

Careful! I bought a Synology NAS for this purpose and something happened w/ an apparently customer-hostile update bc the drive no longer mounts and forums are full of others complaining about Synology only supporting their brand of drives (?!) which possibility didn't even occur to me when I bought the damn thing.
Post reply on HN