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Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

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Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#31

Post by userbinator »

chrisweekly wrote: post #30
wswin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better to use a standard low-power PC with a bunch of HDDs as a NAS.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#32

Post by userbinator »

VHS VCRs have been out of production for a decade. It's worth keeping any you still have, and any that you find being thrown out, even if only for parts. Notably, while the electronics (especially with advances in DSP) and other components are probably still easy to replicate or produce replacements for, the video heads themselves are extremely specialised, and they do have a finite life.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#33

Post by wpm »

userbinator wrote: post #31
chrisweekly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better to use a standard low-power PC with a bunch of HDDs as a NAS.

If you care about the data getting something with ECC support is vital

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#34

Post by valleyer »

lldb wrote: post #7
valleyer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like Santa Clara is using the VuPoint Digital Video Converter -- not familiar with this one, so I'll have to look into it. https://www.sclibrary.org/services/other-services/vhs-conver...

Unfortunately devices like the VuPoint - while low cost and accessible - deliver impressively terrible results. It’s a composite to usb converter which will fail to handle delinterlacing and get the colors wrong. The best bet for people who aren’t going to build a domesday duplicator (which decodes the VHS signal in software), is to stick to technology from the era. Such as later released VHS players which had FireWi…

Thanks for the info on the VuPoint. In general, I actually don't mind capture cards not handling deinterlacing, since (as long as I correctly understand the format it's spitting out) I can handle it myself with e.g. ffmpeg. Color problems are a dealbreaker though.

I've looked at going down the RF capture route but haven't dipped my feet in yet. Maybe one day.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#35

Post by eru »

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…

> I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model [...]

You can turn any businesses model into a not-for-profit business model. Just don't make any profits.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#36

Post by eru »

bombcar wrote: post #17
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…

Set it up as a professional business (talk to funeral homes as adding it as a value service for well-to-do clients? Talk to estate lawyers?). Once you’re making money then you expand your helping others for free or discounted.

Yes. Lots of lawyers do some pro bono work.

There's a general saying: either work expensive or work for free. Don't work for cheap.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#37

Post by Animats »

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…

> but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too.

Whatever happened to IFPS and Filecoin? If you paid for perpetual storage five years ago, is your stuff still around?

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#38

Post by torben-friis »

throwawaytea wrote: post #19
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…

This might not be correct really, but since my family has less than 1 TB of media to backup, I simply have three 1TB HDDs with copies of all the stuff. I got the HDDs out of all the computers I upgraded to SSDs.

That doesn't sound too bad, it's close to what I do now, but it's a bit cumbersome to keep them in sync as more content is generated.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#39

Post by tuna74 »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #25

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.

You won't capture identical frames to old footage. If you want to do AI slop, just do AI slop.

Old media will have flaws, errors and low resolution (both spatial and temporal). Putting an AI filter on top of that will only make it less correct.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#40

Post by shireboy »

I’ve often thought this would be a good business for college age kids or teens. My parents and other I know are hesitant to send off to a 3rd party online. I think if someone local came and either did mobile or took and brought back they would trust that over even mailin services.
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