
Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the internet - happy-go-lucky
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzeg4/archivists-are-uploading-hundreds-of-random-vhs-tapes-to-the-internet
======
andrewstuart
There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them.

Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes anything could
happen because they got reused.

So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would suddenly switch over
to a shuttle launch or a music video or a documentary or something cause
someone decided to record something else at that point.

I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I watched it for three
hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out.

It's great that they are archiving the old content but I don't miss VHS in the
least.

~~~
themodelplumber
> I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal
> whodunnit and the tape ran out.

I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago. The reaction in
the comments was something less than amused.

(Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly non-important
video in order to record...what was it, the first X-files episode? A _Wings_
episode about a favorite jet? Something like that. But man, she was not
happy.)

~~~
GuardianCaveman
You’re the first person in any forum online I’ve seen reference Wings. My dads
friend used to call my dad to tell him it was on and he’d switch from whatever
ninja turtles / golden girls / simpsons episode we were watching. We despised
wings! But actually it’s a great show.

~~~
themodelplumber
Funny. I hadn't searched for it online much but I can understand its lack of
traction. It was like a lot of commercial promotional clips spliced together,
in some ways. It left a lot of questions unanswered, too! But it was great for
an overview and the theme music will be forever engraved in my memory, right
next to the _Strike Commander_ theme. :-)

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subdane
There's a great doc that came out last year on Marion Stokes, who recorded
decades of television. Her footage is being added to The Internet Archive
[https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-
stokes/](https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/)

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allovernow
How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From what little I've
read, all of the media accessable to the layman has an archive lifetime of
less than 30 years before physical degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever.
That makes for a brittle civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge
is stored on media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global
calamity.

~~~
WalterBright
Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new media.

My oldest files are from 1977 - proof:

[https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-
PDP-10](https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10)

My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25" floppy to 3.5
floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then to hard disks of ever-
increasing size.

(My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.)

I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sure there was nothing but
crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind of crap it was.

~~~
einpoklum
But - and sorry for the morbid question - what about when you grow older, and
may not be able to take care of that? Or when you pass away?

~~~
lm28469
You have to come to term with the fact that 99.99% of (your/all) medias are
useless in the grand scheme of things.

Imagine having to take care of the backup of your ancestors data on 10
generations, that'd be ridiculous.

~~~
WalterBright
Well, sure. But I have ancestors who go back in the US before the American
Revolution, but all I know about them is a name and a date or two. I'm curious
about more.

You also don't really know what future people might find interesting.
Archaeologists like to sift through ancient trash dumps :-)

------
smhenderson
I'm almost afraid to write this as I fear it will be removed soon and am
surprised it hasn't been already but this was the first thing I looked for...

[https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-
Early-80s/Star+Wa...](https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-
Early-80s/Star+Wars+ONTV+Early+80s/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB)

~~~
pkroll
To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent of Star Wars
Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the originals, these days.

~~~
karatestomp
Team Negative 1's scan & restorations of 35mm prints are my favorites.
Empire's not done yet, but the other two are.

~~~
gsich
There is some Despecial version for Empire. But in comparison Empire is also
the least modified.

------
ris
Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of broadcast TV:
[https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext](https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-
teletext)

~~~
jamiek88
WOW!

What a brilliant idea! So obvious now, the teletext data must have been
embedded into the tv picture thus captured by VHS recording.

This got me very excited, I'd love to rebuild the old Ceefax 101 pages.

~~~
kaetemi
I remember trying out teletext from a VHS whe I was a kid. Was interesting
that it worked. Lots of glitches in the data, though.

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bluetidepro
Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass (not having
to click into each item)? Or is that not available?

EDIT: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-
downloader...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-
downloader/elhoagejfapekjaefenmngphliikoace) \- It looks like that's a solid
option to use a Chrome extension for it.

~~~
rsync
"Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass ..."

This is neither a rebuke nor pedantry - I genuinely hope this will be useful
to you:

It's "en masse".

------
ggffryuuj
My step mom was recently going through a bunch of old vhs tapes looking for
wedding footage of her mother’s wedding. 99% of the tapes are television from
the early 2000s. She was going to just throw them away! So now I’ve got 30
tapes of early 2000s gold. I’m going to digitize them and upload them to
YouTube.

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jcomis
I love stuff like this. Here's one of my favorites:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject](https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject)

~~~
themodelplumber
You reminded me of this spy film, which starts with a shot of a VHS recorder!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8)

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AcerbicZero
I prefer RedLetterMedia's use of VHS tapes. They use them to play a terrible
version of Jenga, where they watch all the random VHS tapes collected by the
"winner".

Also for some reason, Macaulay Culkin seems to be hanging out with them a lot.
Maybe Milwaukie is just that much fun?

"Junka" -> [https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA](https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA)

~~~
cabaalis
The best part about RLM's Best of the Worst is that they all seem to hate
doing it. There was one episode where they got terribly drunk and had to stop
filming and come back a few days later.

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josteink
The amount of RedLetterMedia comments in this thread is seriously telling
about the correlation between hackers and b-movie fans.

And oh yeah. Guilty myself.

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WalterBright
My father left me several hundred 6 hour VHS tapes. I had no idea what was on
them because he'd kept an index, but it was mostly missing.

There was a lot of interesting random stuff on them, mostly from the 80's. The
bits of stuff he recorded is like a peek inside his brain :-)

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mml
The "removed a rib" thing was started by Gabriele D’Annunzio, father of
Italian fascism. Most likely untrue, but a rumor also most likely to be spread
by its subject.

Check out [https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-
bastards/e/66732...](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/behind-the-
bastards/e/66732817?autoplay=true) for the details behind this truly unlikely
person.

------
csours
Red Letter Media fans rejoice!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o)

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olivermarks
What is the copyright situation with these tapes? I get the value of archiving
and preserving digitally but if I'd invested time and money creating a vhs
catalog of titles I'd be unhappy to see them suddenly all over youtube
(assuming they had some appeal of course) with no ability to profit from them.

~~~
epanchin
Don't you think 20 years is enough time to profit from a creation? Copywrite
law lasts so long, it makes little sense.

~~~
olivermarks
It's a tricky one. If I flew around the world with expensive camera gear and
edited up some kind of big budget travel video I'd be a lot more upset about
seeing it free than if I had made a 'origami how to' video in 1989 that was
very low budget...

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Zenst
With the number of people chastised in later life for old tweets, this could
be interesting.

However, it's such recordings that have saved many an old TV show as the
studios reused tapes as well. Kinda how few Doctor Who episodes got saved.

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cabaalis
Three (edit:Two) full seasons of Salute Your Shorts makes this very much worth
it.

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WalterBright
Oh darn. Still no "Dance Fever" episodes from the early 80's. There are a
handful on youtube, but not the interesting ones.

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LocalH
I hope they’re capturing this at full resolution and preserving the full 60i
signal. Too many times, people think VHS is 320x240 and capture accordingly,
dropping half the temporal resolution from the get go. Even though there’s not
a ton of horizontal evolution, a full D1 resolution capture will represent the
tape much better than a half-resolution capture (but half-D1 would still be
better than 320 or 352 by 240).

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dmix
This would be great audio/visual sampling content for musicians and the like.

