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.
I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.
We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.
In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.
Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.
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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.
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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There’s a lot of movies that are only on VHS (they never made it to DVD or streaming) and they can be worth some money. Might want to check them on eBay and see the values.
I have a small collection, would love to have a mini video rental store setup with VHS and DVDs to pick movies to watch and have a popcorn machine and neon lights.
I think in a while they will turn into collector’s items
Donate if possible.
As long as you have the player and place to store them (that isn’t the garage or attic) , I don’t see why not.
We had those, too, until the last tape recorder in the family died. We tried to get rid of them, but not even the thrift store took them anymore. And that was many years ago.
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.This is the way.
If I had VHS tapes, it’s what I would do. I even know a single place in my city that could do it, but they would probably reject the job for copyrighted stuff, sadly but understandably.
Beware, in this way lies madness.
Ask me how i know.
As long as you have a VHS player it is fairly trivial to buy cheap composite or S-video capture devices on eBay and archive them yourself. Its gonna be slow with 300 tapes but it is doable.
Could give you a reason to rewatch every VHS :)
Fair enough.
File storage, please.
Those DVDs will not last as long as you think.
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.
Plus if you’re worried about ownership, just remember there arr always other acquisition methods.
Yeah, a backup that gradually destroys itself on such a short timescale isn’t much of a backup.
No.
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.
