
For Sale: A Massive, Obsessive and Probably Obsolete VHS Boxing Archive - typographer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/nyregion/boxing-vhs-archive.html
======
userbinator
As someone who frequently researches obscure and obsolete topics (but in a
different subject area), I very much appreciate the efforts of people like
her. Especially for older topics, Google is often silent, archive.org has
little, but going to a physical library will yield much better results.

I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested... but then again, it
usually takes donations and doesn't purchase material.

 _Just about every fight was available online_

...but is it really? That's the good thing with specialist collections like
this: they're very thorough.

~~~
intopieces
>... but is it really?

It might be, and it probably won’t be in 5 years whenever some copyright troll
purchases the license and locks it away. Then 25 years from now someone will
come across this article and wish, in vain, that someone had saved this
collection.

I don’t have any interest in boxing, but there’s a special place in my heart
for amateur archivists. It makes me sad to think this work will eventually be
lost to history because of shortsightedness.

Would love for the Internet Archive to digitize and hold on to them.

~~~
rectang
To me the article evokes the existential futility of trying to achieve
anything everlasting. Living humans cannot carry the past history of all those
gone before -- at best, there is a continuing process of loss and compression.

From the article:

> _" Before he died, he told me: 'The collection is going on forever. It has
> to go on,'"_

How cruel.

~~~
wozniacki
Then ought not we ask, are we contented with a selective reading and
understanding of all those that have preceded us, especially those of small
repute and those that had insignificant impact on that history?

And following from that, the factors that contributed to that insignificance
in the first place - things like scant media exposure, lack of coverage by
mainstream outlets being just two of a whole slew of other factors we may
never fully capture or fully grasp.

I guess in the end we are posed with the question, are we okay with that
"process of loss and compression."

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11thEarlOfMar
Seems like exactly the type of trove that the Smithsonian Institution would be
interested in: "Termed 'the nation's attic' for its eclectic holdings of 154
million items, the Institution's nineteen museums, nine research centers, and
zoo include historical and architectural landmarks,"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution)

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dmitryminkovsky
I’ve had this vision of being able to watch 90s cable as it aired (channel
flipping). This would entail a project wherein people en masse would send in
all their VHS and in return for free digitization we would be able to keep the
archived video to recreate cable airtime. I know it’s impossible, for
copyright/privacy issues, but stories like this make me think it’s technically
feasible. The material is out there.

~~~
therealx
There's a website like this. You can only flip through a few channels, and
there's no guide, but it was long format recordings including commurcials. Ah!
Why can't I think of the name. Maybe keep looking? Sorry this isn't more
helpful, but maybe just knowing it's there will help.

~~~
ctoth
I reckon you're looking for [https://my90stv.com/](https://my90stv.com/) :)

~~~
tritium_
Wow that was an interesting 5 minutes of my life. Does U.S. TV still have so
many pharmaceutical ads?

~~~
acomjean
Yes, probably more. Glossy and strangely happy visuals as a list of side
effects is being read. I don’t watch a lot but still have over the air tv, and
it seems to be bankrolled by drug ads.

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reaperducer
This brings back memories from my childhood when my father would spend his
weekends drinking Michelob, gnawing on a massive stick of pepperoni, and
watching sports on television.

Boxing, bowling, and several other sports that were mainstream then and
available all the time on free, normal, mainstream TV that are only niche
online or pay cable things now.

~~~
sitkack
I loved watching golf, curling and bowling on the weekends as a kid. I’d read
math and physics books with those programs running in the background. The
announcing for curling was like holding the event in the reference section of
the library.

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aurizon
As someone suggested, the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress can accept a
donation for a tax deduction, so a person of wealth can buy it from her for $$
she can live on and they get the 40% or so deduction on the donation. Needs
some appraisals by third parties to make it work, but it is doable and can be
staged over a few years.

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freakz
I can relate. I have every cable broadcast of WWE (WWF back then) from around
1996 to 2001 on VHS.

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skookumchuck
"any individual or organization would need to embark on a lengthy and
expensive digitization project for them to be usable in the longer term."

Lengthy, yes, expensive, no. All you need is one of those video capture USB
devices from Amazon, a computer, and a VCR.

8000 2 hr tapes will fit on a couple of 10T drives, and storage will no longer
be a problem.

~~~
wl
I did this kind of thing in college. It's more involved than you think. If you
want good results, you're going to need at minimum a professional VCR (We used
the Panasonic AG-7350), a timebase corrector, and a professional grade
digitizer. Luckily, the equipment is much cheaper than it used to be. You'll
probably need a food dehydrator to bake sticky tapes for one last playback.
And since tape that old is probably falling apart, you'll need to get good at
cleaning heads with cotton tech wipes and ethanol.

~~~
skookumchuck
I've done it for a hundred or so old tapes. It is not so involved. I used
thrift store VCRs and an Amazon USB video capture device. Almost all the old
tapes play just fine. If the tape has gone bad, it's gone bad. Just toss it
and move to the next one.

Yes, you have to clean the heads now and then with a qtip and ethanol. No
skill required. Usually just running one of those head cleaner special tapes
does the trick just fine. I never had a sticky tape. I have had broken
cassettes, but the fix was just taking it apart and moving the reels to an
unbroken cassette. Once I had the tape itself break, and a bit of scotch tape
got that working again :-)

The results are plenty good enough. My relatives were quite happy to be able
to see their old home movies again by clicking a button on their Roku rather
than wrestling with their long lost VCR or 8mm camera.

Seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's much easier than recording LPs onto
cassettes.

The result will be converting 8000 tapes and their storage problems to two 10T
drives, which aren't a burden to store. Though you should copy them to new
drives every year or so.

Saying one doesn't have $100,000 to do a 2% better studio job, so throw all
the tapes in the trash, is a choice I don't understand.

~~~
LocalH
Most of the cheap ways of capturing analog video will end up dropping half the
image data before the process even starts.

At a _minimum_ , full SD-resolution capture is necessary. 480 lines and
whatever seems reasonable (for VHS, doubt there's much of a difference between
640 and 704/720).

Capture such material at 240 lines and you might as well not be capturing it
at all.

It's somewhat involved to make archival-quality digitizations.

~~~
skookumchuck
Elgato video capture captures 640*480 and is $90. I have it, use it, and it
produces very satisfactory results.

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bredren
In Portland, the Hollywood Theatre recently bought out Movie Madness, a
classic SE video store boasting a wide collection of film media.

The purchase was made using a very successful kickstarter campaign. There was
some talk at the time of the actual value of the physical collection, though.

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mywrathacademia
I've always wondered if in future an archive like this can be used to train a
machine learning powered cyborg boxer or even a robot boxer. This could be one
of the incentives for preserving this archive. Surely with AI set to replace a
lot of workers, boxers will also be affected

~~~
0815test
Youtube has lots of unboxing videos. Maybe one could just play these
backwards, and then the robot/cyborg will learn how to properly box stuff
instead of unboxing it. Google's ML division could do it very easily since
they basically own the video archive already.

~~~
labster
If only Google could solve the issues with natural language parsing in humans.

But interesting point nonetheless.

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Animats
Try the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.[1]

[1]
[https://museum.tv/donate%20an%20artifact.htm](https://museum.tv/donate%20an%20artifact.htm)

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ilovecaching
Sometimes I try to think back on what my last watched VHS or heard CD was. I'm
sure it was something exceedingly dumb from blockbuster.

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acd
She is doing conservation as an archivist.

The content should probably be put on the Internet archive

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sbr464
What are they asking for it? (I was paywalled) (and didn’t have time to
incognito)

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420codebro
Makes me wonder if there is some value in converting these to digital, then
running each scenario through some kind of Machine Learning setup. Learn what
makes for successful v. unsuccessful from a tactics perspective.

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klyrs
If you want to move your product, try "For Sale: Training Dataset For Killer
Robots."

Or... maybe that's just my paranoia acting up again.

