I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
takes.jamesomalley.co.uk
takes.jamesomalley.co.uk
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 he was listening to the radio via an ear bud, whilst also recording the radio. He was supposed to be moving out of his house that day, having just exchanged contacts, but he was drowning in his precious tapes. His wife seemed pretty p**d off with him.
I was a bit compulsive myself. I used to buy records, then CDs, and I also made tapes of albums, and recordings of the John Peel show. It was a problem to shift 100s of records and CDs and boxes of tapes whenever I moved house. I lightened my load by giving everything away apart from the Peel tapes which were the most entertaining items in the whole collection, it actually felt good. I kept hold of the Peel tapes for some years, even though my tape deck had died. There were some great shows from the 90s! But then I had to downsize again so I took them to the rubbish tip, even that didn't make me sad.
Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.
I've effectively given up on collecting DVDs or anything else that takes up too much space, and it's such a load off my mind not having to worry about where to out it all, how to display it, or even how to transport it whenever I move.
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 "collecting", such as older video/audio, rarer stuff which does often disappear from torrent sites and such. An example being old TV series recorded direct from TV, to tape -> digitized. But even this, with personal intervention at each collection event, fits in terms of it being hard to fill up drives.
Really, preservation is the cost. Primary live/online, along with a RAID method (hardware over software raid typically) capable of per-disk patrol reads and overall raid consistency checks are vital*. Checksums of all files are a requirement too, and an offline secondary server with a full backup synced every so often.
Otherwise bitrot sets in, and you don't know. Either at the disk level, the raid level, or the filesystem level. And that's where the secondary comes in.
Of course, that doesn't help in case of explosions, aliens, or fire. One needs a secondary offsite for that. But my point is, actual real archival isn't simple.
* if you have a raid, even software raid and you're not doing patrol reads and consistency checks regularly, you're not really doing it right. LSI cards tend to require patrol reads and consistency checks set on, and consistency checks schedules (say, Sundays).
And of course if you don't have a script to dump megacli logs to syslog or what not, you don't really know if the raid is having issues. And you don't even know if consistency checks and patrol reads are running.
(In LSI terminology, patrol reads scan entire disks individually, looking for block read errors, and if found, that block is re-written from redundant data in the array. Consistency checks look at the status of the raid, especially checksums of all disks per virtual disk block. Different checks, both required.)
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!"
As others have pointed out, time and mental attention become the cost when you remove physical space from the equation.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.
Thinking that various tools existing means no time or attention is paid to organization anymore seems like a very optimistic view towards those tools. To your point with the Media Hoarder thread, relying solely on a single tool to organize your stuff isn't a common practice, anyway.
I have a NAS with 42TB of capacity at the moment. I'm running about ten web services to present or organize certain types of media. It still takes time to add new media to the appropriate service, and there's still a ton of data that doesn't fit into any of those services and must be organized manually on the filesystem (if it's organized at all).
When I think of "data hoarding," I'm not just talking about scraping torrents for commonly available TV shows into your Plex instance. I'm thinking of any possible data on the internet-- that includes one-off videos from not only YouTube but lots of smaller websites (Vimeo, Dailymotion, Yahoo! Screen, etc), software of various types (OSes, games, miscellaneous apps), images that may or may not be grouped together and may or may not include textual accompaniment, documents that might be in one of half a dozen different formats, etc. And then of course, you also have original content that you create in the course of living, whether that's photo albums from your phone, receipts you scan, or whatever else, which you probably don't want mixed in with other peoples' stuff that you downloaded.
It doesn’t have to, but it can. I rate my 8 bay Synology. It’s probably the least cost effective storage option, but it’s a pleasure to use and isn’t too loud as long as it hides in the basement. The options you see on DataHoarder are rather more extreme, and well worse perusing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
> Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire tape collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move that cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection they had ever received. The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2019, the project is still active.
This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!
But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them?
What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?
I'll probably never bother, but it has saved me the time of organizing it.
(Apple does let me search based on its object classification, and I have searched for tag that came on my apple tree based on a word that appears on it, so I guess that strategy has worked somewhat.)
It might be the case that men are more likely to be collectors/hoarders in general but there definitely are women who partake. I will also say that the type of thing being collected matters. Go to an estate sale for a woman (especially one born before 1960) and you may see collections of dolls, tea services, certain types of paintings, etc.
0, There has been many examples of this on hoarding TV shows and also finance distress aid TV shows (Luksusfellen (NO, DK) Lyxfallan (SE) ).
Okay, I'm a little bit bummed about it.
Her father was a computer hoarder. She never saw a parallel there.
Your comment does remind me of the replicants from Blade Runner and how they need their “precious photos” that aren’t even real as a touchstone to link them to the implanted memories.
be who?
The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
People who didn’t do this are someone else
> The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around.
Does the person cease to be if the collection is trashed? Or is the collection just detritus from the process, something that could have been discarded instead of hoarded?
Try it, experience it. It's like walking on grass bare footed.
Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.
> Apparently there were so many tapes because the original owner, a now elderly man, had made the recordings for his neighbour.
Really made me chuckle. "hey Billy, can you like, record 500 days of continuous TV program for me that would be great, thanks!"
Likely asked him to record a few shows in the beginning and then the hoarding kicked in? Otherwise I'm wondering why a) the tapes were still at his place and not his neighbor's and b) why he didn't keep taping over the same few tapes. :-)
https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session...
The circle has been closed!
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.
I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
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.
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 people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.
Edit: here's today's "keep forever" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593
Myself, I hoard in moderation and don't even have a home media server.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
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...
If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.
Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/li...
for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center.
I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.
which reads the raw data off a variety of tape formats and converts it to video. Grew out of the domesday project for lasterdiscs
> Then VHS came out with the shoulder mount bricks. It took forever for VHS-C palmcorders to make them much more portable.
The first VHS camcorder (a combined camera and recorder unit) was VHS-C. The JVC GR-C1, released 1984, made famous in Back to the Future.
Full size (VHS) shoulder units actually came a bit later as a lower cost option, and they sold more readily into the 90s. Likely in part because if you were portability and not cost conscious you opted for 8mm (video tape) at that time, 150 minutes and superior audio, slightly better PQ (color).
Prior to that if you wanted to record VHS on location you carried a 10 kg “portable” VTR on your hip with a shoulder strap and a cable to the camera that was another 5 kg. But in those days (late 70s-80s) 1/2” Betamax and 3/4” U-matic(!) were more common for portable use (didn’t help that the early VHS portables were bulkier and heavier than the competition).
VHS was released in 1976. VHS-C was released in 1982. The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.
So? The first commercial camcorder came out in 1983 (Betamax). VHS-C predates the camcorder of any format (the first VHS-C VCR JVC HR-C3 coming out the same time).
> The first VHS camcorder was not VHS-C.
I told you a specific make and model. Do you actually have a reference to any make and model of VHS camcorder commercially available prior to 1984? The NiCd 10kg “portable” JVC HR-4100 shoulder strap VTR came out in 1978, tis not a camcorder.
To be clear I’m (consistently) using “camcorder” with the commonly accepted definition of a camera and video recorder in a self-contained unit. With that definition the earliest commercially available VHS format camcorder was the JVC VHS-C mentioned, with Matsushita coming out with the full size M1 a few months later.
Prior to the GR-C1 there was a neat accessory to shoulder carry the aforementioned VHS-C portable, but not a camcorder (regardless the first VHS on your shoulder was VHS-C). This was sort of a poor man's Betacam setup.
https://www.totalrewind.org/cameras/C_SFP3.htm
Prior to that your options for portable VHS were the heavy carrying strap separate VTR like the JVC HR-2200 and the HR-4100 (sometimes referred to as “Portapaks” which was a genericization of Sonys open reel systems from the 60s). They were heavy and inferior to the contemporary Betamax and U-Matic S options, pros didn’t really use them and few enthusiasts were up for lugging 20 kilos of shit around. Hitachi made a few units as well.
Prior to 1985 there were just a handful of VHS licensees. JVC/Victor, Matsushita, Hitachi and Sharp with the other names like RCA as rebadges. No camcorders I’m aware of. I think you’re mistaken, but would be very interested in being corrected with specifics (as would the Rewind Museum).
https://www.rewindmuseum.com/vintagecamcorder.htm
The thing about hardware/electronic technology history in general is that the difference between 1976 and 1983 is not subtle. While VHS came out in 1976, and video tape in the 1960s, the technology to mass produce the level of integration for a camcorder did not exist (or at least was not cost effective) (not to mention the power efficiency leaps necessary as we were stuck with NiCds). Anyone that regularly dismantles any kind of electronic equipment from the 1970s to 1980s is aware of the extreme shift in integration that occurred during that time period, LSI ASICs, surface mount, things that were nearly unheard of in a commercial device in 1976, took hold in the 80s. It took a great deal of further engineering to make a camcorder possible, the tape format being around wasn't the issue. VHS-C like Betacam was developed in anticipation of this, not the other way around.
VHS was already totally obsolete when 1+GB HDD came to consumer market...
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.
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.
Unfortunately most of them are terrible. I've played with it on and off for years and even gotten individual tools for $100+ but still have issues. It's a bit of a mess with PAL/NTSC, different recommended settings, and at the end of the day you still need a high quality VCR to extract all the data. Those tend to go for hundreds of dollars here. You also need a time base corrector (some VHS have them built in I believe) to avoid dropping frames and causing desync.
A common suggestion is to just get a VHS->DVD recorder and then rip the DVD. You lose out on quality but it usually works and will save you a ton of time.
The suggestion by OP is probably if you truly want to maximize the quality.
The whole point of VHS-Decode is to bypass as much of the VCR's output circuitry as possible; capture from the read heads and apply modern digital reconstruction from there.
There are some high end vcrs that can do a better job (according to those who have them.) but they are getting old and even broken ones can go for a couple hundred on ebay.
For home movies it isn't worth it since the starting quality probably isn't that great. I've messed around with it for a couple movies that were only released on VHS.
I had forgotten that Teletext existed until this post. And for those who know about BBSs, Teletext was the closest thing before modems.
I don’t remember seeing the wild Teletext Ascii art etc. as seen in the post though. UK seems to have had mad Teletext.
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 closed captioning) became much more common, but by then the ship had sailed. The service was NLA by the time we had a TV with these capabilities in our own home.
I thought, though I might be wrong, back in the UK we broadcast on 650 lines, and the top or bottom 25 lines were reserved for teletext and also IIRC timing signals, that could start/stop VCRs automatically but was never used in the UK. The teletext signal was tiny in modern terms, it was extremely similar to the BBC Micro 'Mode 7' in size.
The article mentions that VHS 'compressed' the signal. I don't think that was the case, I think it filtered the analogue signal and chopped off the teletext info, but some of it used to leak through, hence the opportunity to recover it.
Then there was Macrovision that fiddled with those not-quite filtered lines to add bursts of colour that would leak through to stop tape-to-tape piracy.
Fun fact: a magazine published a circuit that would remove Macrovision that was then widely photocopied and distributed in the UK. You could order the parts from Tandy or RadioShack, and we took it to school and had (a lot) of help from the teacher putting them together as part of our CDT/tech classes. The rest, is as they say, history.
In fact, at the end of 2023 our public broadcaster rewrote the Teletext backend system using modern programming practices to keep it running into the future. [2] Before that it was running on software from the 80's.
[1] https://over.nos.nl/nieuws/teletekst-kan-weer-jaren-vooruit-... [2] https://tweakers.net/reviews/11700/hoe-werkt-het-vernieuwde-...
I have a few hundred VHS tapes from the eighties, mostly Saturday Morning Open University lectures, and whilst I'm intrigued to run these through, I'd need a VCR too.
If you go to their web page that describes what they do and do not accept, don't go by that. It can be, and has been, wrong in the past including the recent past (this year).
Instead, try to get in touch with them by email. They might accept these as a donation.
You still have the problem of how to pay for the mailing. Just trying to get you one step closer to a solution.
There's no promise they will digitize it immediately, or even ever. But they might take it and then there will at least be a potential path to digitization.
As the Buddha said, all is impermanent.
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 don't end up holding on to...)
In just the last little while I've been getting to see that peculiarly ingenuous sort of joy again, as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs.
That's a show that makes a habit of trying to tell the audience things they'll hope never to forget. It does so wonderfully. It's a story I cherish, and if someone half my age will perforce love it at least somewhat differently from how I do - so what? That the story remain loved is enough.
I dunno if any of that's any use to you, but share it in the hope it'll do you the same small good it did me, thinking on this of a quiet evening.
What show are you referring to? Consider my curiosity piqued!
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.
Can you explain what causes you to say that we will be the last generation to say this? Not rhetorical, although this caused me to question it because I think that this is probably a constant wrt generations passing onto the next and unlikely to change.
We now face a kind of reverse problem though where we're drowning in so much content that some interesting things can be missed or lost.
It's bittersweet but probably a good thing.
— Conan O'Brien
https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hid...
Eventually, most graveyards will simply erode away. The average erosion rate is 0.2 mm/year, so 2 meters down will be exposed in about 10,000 years. YMMV
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.
Maybe Gilgamesh, who may well have been a historical king of Uruk sometime between 2900 – 2350 BCE.
Enmebaragesi[1] probably existed around 2600 BCE but not much is known about him other than he was a King of Kish.
Figures in the old testament Bible are hard to track but the stories of Nimrod (grandson of Noah) seems to have been placed around 2000 BCE
They're just dates, but each one made me pause for thought of the joy, and the despair of each of the family groups.
https://www.bridgelawllp.com/they-say-we-die-twice/#:~:text=....
But a cool program nonetheless!
I went with my girlfriend to deliver it and I reminded he used to tape and catalog F1 races and other stuff. I asked if he was watching one of these types and he proceeded to open a large cabinet and give us a tour of his meticulously catalogued and tagged 70's and 80's porn collection.
I suspect they might someday be valuable :-)
He talks about this collection with such pride, it’s hard for me to imagine not future proofing at least your favorite ones, but there’s no convincing some people.
Of course there's also the question of how much digital storage that would take, which is probably in the hundreds of terabytes range.
wrt to storage, I hope one is running a reasonably low res for this with some moderate compression. This is vhs after all…
At some point you just have to admit that they are useless and throw them away. Whatever it is, if it's been in the garage or basement for years and you don't use it and haven't dealt with it, get rid of it. Just knowing the stuff is there is a nagging mental irritant, and it won't go away until you get rid of the stuff.
Nobody wants old VHS tapes. Try to put them on eBay, it will just be another huge project you'll never finish and you'll maybe cover the shipping costs.
Throw them away.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
or get in touch with the enthusiast community, people like
https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/
You should ensure whoever you give them to can give you a binding commitment to use for legitimate archival purposes, and not just acquire them and sit on them for copyright reasons.
They collect all VHS tapes.
https://www.foundfootagefest.com/
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.
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.
For damaged cassettes, you can move the tape from one cassette to another. If the tape is broken, packing tape will get it spliced well enough. If the leader or trailer is bad, you can cut it off and reattach the end to the spool. If the recording is lousy, cleaning the VCR heads with alcohol usually will fix it.
Would be interested to have a more quantified idea of the sizes involved.
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.
Currently planning to try out LegacyBox, but the reviews are mixed.
Perfect? A linux PC with 400 dollars RF capture card plus vhsdecode software.
VHS-C can be played in a normal VCR, with an adapter cassette, but the process will otherwise be the same. Excellent VCRs in good condition had gotten expensive last time I checked, though.
When I did it, vhsdecode didn't exist and I know nothing about that, but I'm completely satisfied with the results I achieved.
if they're digital 8, then of course ideally you would get a digital capture.
Interesting that you can get Teletext from the VHS, and sad that it is now lost after conversion to a youtube video.
Lot of stuff from 90s-2010s in there.
Run through AI and ask to transcribe, summarize, and catalog an index
Store in secure S3 bucket or NAS
Create a website/blog post with ask for access
If they're empty or a random collection of this-and-that programs, then they might sell them at low prices to people who still have VHS machines and need the tape. (I'd imagine new tapes are scarce and expensive.)
sells decks for about $12 and Ebay prices aren't much more. Most TVs still have a composite in that will work great, and that place sells prerecorded tapes for about $2. Audio quality on VHS is surprisingly good and really pops with Dolby Pro Logic on my AV receiver.
Such a deck is likely to work just fine. Contrast that to a cassette deck which often has problems a lot worse than old belts. I have been looking for one of those because my son's 96 Buick came with a broken stereo and he eventually found a working OEM stereo that had a tape player but no CD player. (He really wants a copy of Deltron 3030)
After trying a few $20 decks I found locally I gave up and spent 10x that on Ebay. Blank tapes are more expensive than minidiscs in lots from Japan although prerecorded cassettes are cheap and abundant, he's already got more that he can keep in the car.
(If it were my car I'd get one of those minidisc players from Japan that looks like it came out of a Gundam...)
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.
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.
On the one hand I do believe that there might be some bits which might be nice to have in 50 years, but we generate so incredibly much content and it only gets more. Shouldn't we just get rid of most of it someday? It was fun, it did it's purpose, but it's okay if we forget about it. Sure, now you could argue we did that for a long long time, just look at all the anchient libraries, but our content is exponentially growing. How much trash will we have archived in 50 years?
Yes, I often find all the retro stuff really cool and it's nice what was done with such little hardware, back in the days, but do we really need that? I doubt it. Yes, save the fundamentals, save part of the history, but not everything
2000 oldThey’re often able to convert these potential landfills into comedy gold.
Digitizing and blanking them out and selling the tapes aren't mutually exclusive, OP may have an opportunity to recuperate the digitization costs that way.
This is a joke, please don't do that.
Then, in the future, query the AI to find out if a specific piece of footage (that you need) is contained therein.
Have you considered storing it on the blockchain instead, so this way it is immutable and permanent? /s
That way the content can be monetized using Bitcoin as the payment backbone.
You laugh, but all TV will work this way in the future. Micropayments. Think Grameen, but for Video Clips.