Im torn. On one hand yes everything is available digitally. On the other I like having hard copies and not thinking about backing up 3 hard drives and random hard drive failure and managing an even larger library on a computer…its nice just to have the media exist. And what happens when our ability to own media disappears (which looks to be a very real possibility).
They do take up space. I may keep the ones I really like and get rid of others.
I easily have over 300. Along with dvds, but im keeping those.
Of course not. The bigger problem is that VHS, like most magnetic analog media, decays. Most of those tapes have likely lost a ton of fidelity compared to when they were new and they’ll only get worse.
I wouldn’t scrap them but I’d also consider archiving tapes without current digital copies to DVD’s or video files.When was the last time you watched one? For whatever reason tape media is making a comeback, so you could probably get a decent price for them if you wanted. Maybe just keep the rare ones and pirate the rest? I donno. I personally just dont see the reason to keep them with free digital access to movies being so readily available.
Tangentially related, and mostly for others reading this, but if you have 4K blu-rays I’d definitely consider keeping them. Disc looks far better than compressed digital, and uncompressed 4K movies take up way too much space, unless you’ve got dozens of TB of storage or only have a few movies. I have a few 4K AV1 (and HEVC too) files where I also have the 4K disc for, and the disc looks so much better it’s not really close.
Before you do that, I would like to point out I donated the entire TNG collection, and later found out it could have been sold for over a thousand.
VHS is low resolution and degrades over time, no reason to keep it unless you have tapes of things that don’t exist on better formats.
Yeah, a backup that gradually destroys itself on such a short timescale isn’t much of a backup.
No.
Just because VHS goes bad, I’d suggest ripping to dvd or blu-ray (too keep the physical feel) which should get you another 15+ years of storage in a compact fashion, more If kept properly (my ps2 games still work after 23 years, is my source on that).
My uncompressed rips (via OBS) from VHS are around 35 GB, perfect use case for a BD-R.
I know I’ll probably get shit for this comment because “optical media bad” but I don’t care.
there must be a better way than screen recording. I think you are using way too much bitrate that way
There is absolutely better ways to do it, but I have an HDMI VCR and a capture card from goodwill that was $10 total.
For now its fine, I’m not burning physicals, its just bytes on a platter, I do need a VHS digitizer though.
yeah but the blue ray disks must be expensive. can’t OBS use the capture cards source directly? v4l2 or anything?
how do you make the image visible on your screen, to begin with?
My VHS player is HDMI, I feed that into an HDMI splitter (to bypass HDCP) then into a USB capture card.
OBS displays the capture card as though it were a camera input. I record this while it is playing, and export to MKV so I can add web sourced SRTs in after the fact.
I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but this works for me.
oh that’s not bad as I though first
So they’re slowly rotting (I mean, not rotting but you know what I mean). It’d be wise to back them up digitally if better digital copies are hard to come by.
But a couple additional thoughts:
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Whenever you actually watch one of them, put it back on the shelf backwards/upside-down. Wait up to six months. Anything on the shelf that isn’t backwards/upside-down gets put in the ‘don’t keep’ pile.
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If you’re looking for a hobby, don’t want to keep them but don’t want to toss them right away, you could play around with … idk exactly you call it, but video mixing? A couple VCRs, some sketchy looking hobbyist tech from Etsy, and a capture card, and you can play around with multiple analogue video sources and noise introduction to make some cool as fuck visuals. Actually looks hella fun, it’s high on my post-divorce distraction list. Use 'em till they’re dust for this purpose or you get bored. If you want to squeeze more life out of them afterwards, there’s lots of crafts you can do with old VHS bodies and tape.
Caveat: At minimum, if you have old VCR recordings, back that shit up ASAP. Old commercials and TV shows (particularly super local stuff) are of massive interest to a certain type of person, who would appreciate your efforts. This goes double for cam footage/recordings of live events.
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Plastic is an organic molecule. Think of it like a complex set of legos, and the individual lego bricks have a tendency to want to stick to other things if they get shaken. At an atomic level, everything is always shaking, all the time. So this shaking energy, over time, will increase the probability that some of those lego bricks are going to fall off and stick to other things or just fly free. There are simply more ways these lego bricks can be arranged in ways that are not plastic than ways they can.
Or another way of looking at it, there are nearly infinite ways you can break or damage a porcelain teacup, but only one configuration where it works as a cup that people can drink out of. IE: The chances of it not being a teacup anymore are greater than the chances of it remaining a teacup over long stretches of time.
What does all this mean? Your tapes are literally falling apart. Even if they’re kept in boxes or on shelves away from other energy sources like light or heat, they are still vibrating, they are still shaking. A few molecules here and there, pop off every few minutes or more, never to return. While it might be centuries before they turn to dust, these changes over time will in fact start to smear or degrade the subtle magnetic alignment in that plastic tape which is what the actual audio and video is encoded as. This may take only a few more years to be unreadable depending on the age and quality of the tape.
If you want to save your collection, invest in something to record them onto a digital medium, and even then the best you can hope for is a few more decades. Currently we don’t have many commercially available methods for long-term data storage.
if you have a VHS player buy a cheap digital VHS to USB converter. You can get them for like 15-20$ and they plug one end into composite cable and the other end into the USB port of a laptop, then you can digitize the tape.
You should probally do that sooner rather than later though, those tapes don’t last forever and eventually they will degrade.
This is what I did with all my physical media.
My response is likely to be unpopular but it’s how I feel. I had ungodly gobs of physical media years ago - VHS, DVDs, BlueRay, CDs, etc. It got to where it was more of a hassle to dig through and find the item then slub it over to the equipment just to enjoy my media.
I digitized everything and stuck it on a home media server. Now it’s as simple as grabbing the remote and pick what I want and it’s done. I’m much happier now.
Same. Physical media will degrade and fail. If you want reliable access to the VHS collection then you need to digitize and create backups. About 10% of my collection wasn’t able to be digitized due to degradation
Keep only the good or rare ones.
Contrary to to what you think, not everything is available digitally.
I think you should keep physical media. I once bought a digital copy of a pretty obscure record from Google Play Music when you could still buy records from them, and eventually it changed to YouTube Music, and the record just vanished from my collection despite me having bought and paid for it. I’ve heard of other stories like this too. The companies just decide not to offer it anymore and it’s gone.
We donated ours to a local nonprofit org that rents them out. Such a cool group of film nerds running this operation. https://www.weluvvideo.org/
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I think in a while they will turn into collector’s items
