Quick survey: Is there anyone else with boxes of old VHS tapes that they have totally ignored, haven’t thought about digitizing, and not really sure how to - or is it just me ?
I’ve got 11 years of the Tour de France on about 130 VHS tapes, and the thought of transferring that to digital terrifies me. I’m just curious if anybody else has this problem, and what solutions they have found
Thank you! That’s a great idea. I just have so many bicycle races recorded off the television going back 25 years, and I worry about losing them. Way out of depth on this.
My parents did of their home movies, holidays etc I then transferred them to a NAS.
It's not that terrifying, time consuming granted. But it's a simple process of grabbing an TV tuner card off eBay, connect the VCR via aerial coax and then encode the stream.
Most DVR applications have the option to encode, so it's normally a few clicks of a button.
I bought an "old" Panasonic DVD/HDD/VCR combo. They are old as in out of market since ~2010
https://www.whathifi.com/panasonic/dmr-ex99v/review And it was still 400€ but almost in pristine condition. Anyways it makes perfect VHS rips. It has a HDMI out so you can play directly on pretty much all TVs. Unfortunately there is no access to the files directly (DRM I guess) so copying to PC is a bit slow cause you have to burn it to DVD first (but it's not reencoding the rip so there is no quality loss after the first recording). That's the smallest problem. I wish there was a jailbreak or something cause there is a USB port on the device but afaik that's only for some kind of software based troubleshooting by the Panasonic service.
Also one of the reason I bought that it has a time base correction chip so no desync issue with old VHS tapes. Perfect sound and don't have to reedit them.
You might be able to find some advice/inspiration on the r/DataHoarder subreddit [0]. They also have an IRC channel (#DataHoarder on freenode [1]). The IRC channel is a little more informal, but the subreddit has tons of great info and discussions on not just storing data, but also digitization and organizing/cataloguing data.
It won't seem so bad if you can do this on an ultra low priority basis. Meaning that you could do a tape every time you are near your digitizer. Perhaps that is 5 times per week. 5 tapes per week would get the job done in 26 weeks.
There are also professional vhs digitizing services that might offer a bulk rate. I'm only assuming that because of the large numbers of companies specializing in 8mm film transfer to digital video.
Yes. I learned that it is best to store those tapes with as little packing and coding as possible. MP4 might look good at a glance, but at some shaky action scenes vital information is forever lost. Raw DV for example takes 1 Gigabyte / 4 minute, but multi-Terabyte disks are quite cheap.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] threadI’ve got 11 years of the Tour de France on about 130 VHS tapes, and the thought of transferring that to digital terrifies me. I’m just curious if anybody else has this problem, and what solutions they have found
It's not that terrifying, time consuming granted. But it's a simple process of grabbing an TV tuner card off eBay, connect the VCR via aerial coax and then encode the stream.
Most DVR applications have the option to encode, so it's normally a few clicks of a button.
https://www.whathifi.com/panasonic/dmr-ex99v/review And it was still 400€ but almost in pristine condition. Anyways it makes perfect VHS rips. It has a HDMI out so you can play directly on pretty much all TVs. Unfortunately there is no access to the files directly (DRM I guess) so copying to PC is a bit slow cause you have to burn it to DVD first (but it's not reencoding the rip so there is no quality loss after the first recording). That's the smallest problem. I wish there was a jailbreak or something cause there is a USB port on the device but afaik that's only for some kind of software based troubleshooting by the Panasonic service.
Also one of the reason I bought that it has a time base correction chip so no desync issue with old VHS tapes. Perfect sound and don't have to reedit them.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder
[1] https://freenode.net/kb/answer/chat (in case you aren't familiar with IRC but would still like to check it out that should get you started)
- ancient family movies taken on super-8 film by my parents
- merely old VHS tapes recorded from the tv of weird things like an old superbowl where something was in red/blue 3D (+ paper/cellophane glasses)
- semi-old 8mm (minidv?) recording of hours of the news on 9/11/2001
some things I just pitched, like 9-track tapes, vinyl records, and windows 3.1 and XP era games on cd and floppy disks.. Maybe should have kept them.
There are also professional vhs digitizing services that might offer a bulk rate. I'm only assuming that because of the large numbers of companies specializing in 8mm film transfer to digital video.
tl;dr is to find some professionals to digitize your VHS tapes for you.