which reads the raw data off a variety of tape formats and converts it to video. Grew out of the domesday project for lasterdiscs
I had forgotten that Teletext existed until this post. And for those who know about BBSs, Teletext was the closest thing before modems.
I don’t remember seeing the wild Teletext Ascii art etc. as seen in the post though. UK seems to have had mad Teletext.
If you go to their web page that describes what they do and do not accept, don't go by that. It can be, and has been, wrong in the past including the recent past (this year).
Instead, try to get in touch with them by email. They might accept these as a donation.
You still have the problem of how to pay for the mailing. Just trying to get you one step closer to a solution.
There's no promise they will digitize it immediately, or even ever. But they might take it and then there will at least be a potential path to digitization.
As the Buddha said, all is impermanent.
I went with my girlfriend to deliver it and I reminded he used to tape and catalog F1 races and other stuff. I asked if he was watching one of these types and he proceeded to open a large cabinet and give us a tour of his meticulously catalogued and tagged 70's and 80's porn collection.
I suspect they might someday be valuable :-)
He talks about this collection with such pride, it’s hard for me to imagine not future proofing at least your favorite ones, but there’s no convincing some people.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
or get in touch with the enthusiast community, people like
https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/
You should ensure whoever you give them to can give you a binding commitment to use for legitimate archival purposes, and not just acquire them and sit on them for copyright reasons.
I thought about starting a streaming service to play some of the music I have from many of the local bands who've graced the Minneapolis music scene, many of whom no longer exist. There's also a ton of bands from the early aughts that are no longer around that I also have from when I worked in the local record store. Going to shows and being emersed the local music scene was all I cared about back then.
Then I start to think about the copyright issues of playing this stuff on a streaming service and instead of something nostalgic, I was caught up in the idea if its even legal to do.
At some point you just have to admit that they are useless and throw them away. Whatever it is, if it's been in the garage or basement for years and you don't use it and haven't dealt with it, get rid of it. Just knowing the stuff is there is a nagging mental irritant, and it won't go away until you get rid of the stuff.
Nobody wants old VHS tapes. Try to put them on eBay, it will just be another huge project you'll never finish and you'll maybe cover the shipping costs.
Throw them away.
https://www.foundfootagefest.com/
Interesting that you can get Teletext from the VHS, and sad that it is now lost after conversion to a youtube video.
Doing one tape a night, it'll take 6 years of calendar time. 3 years if you buy a dedicated computer to do it, at two tapes a day.
The good news is that's calendar time, not your time, which is pressing "record" on your computer and "play" on the VHS machine.
Currently planning to try out LegacyBox, but the reviews are mixed.
Run through AI and ask to transcribe, summarize, and catalog an index
Store in secure S3 bucket or NAS
Create a website/blog post with ask for access
sells decks for about $12 and Ebay prices aren't much more. Most TVs still have a composite in that will work great, and that place sells prerecorded tapes for about $2. Audio quality on VHS is surprisingly good and really pops with Dolby Pro Logic on my AV receiver.
Such a deck is likely to work just fine. Contrast that to a cassette deck which often has problems a lot worse than old belts. I have been looking for one of those because my son's 96 Buick came with a broken stereo and he eventually found a working OEM stereo that had a tape player but no CD player. (He really wants a copy of Deltron 3030)
After trying a few $20 decks I found locally I gave up and spent 10x that on Ebay. Blank tapes are more expensive than minidiscs in lots from Japan although prerecorded cassettes are cheap and abundant, he's already got more that he can keep in the car.
(If it were my car I'd get one of those minidisc players from Japan that looks like it came out of a Gundam...)
When my dad died, he had accumulated hundreds of tapes of movies from cable. What was I to do with them? I didn't want to watch them, and selling them would have violated copyright laws. I wasn't going to go erase them to try to sell blank tapes which had little value.
If they're empty or a random collection of this-and-that programs, then they might sell them at low prices to people who still have VHS machines and need the tape. (I'd imagine new tapes are scarce and expensive.)
On the one hand I do believe that there might be some bits which might be nice to have in 50 years, but we generate so incredibly much content and it only gets more. Shouldn't we just get rid of most of it someday? It was fun, it did it's purpose, but it's okay if we forget about it. Sure, now you could argue we did that for a long long time, just look at all the anchient libraries, but our content is exponentially growing. How much trash will we have archived in 50 years?
2000 oldThis is a joke, please don't do that.
Then, in the future, query the AI to find out if a specific piece of footage (that you need) is contained therein.
I met a bloke once in the 90's who made recordings on to C-90 tapes of anything interesting that was on BBC Radio 4 and 3, and he found most things interesting. He was surrounded by piles, thousands of tapes everywhere and he was desperately trying to catalog everything. As I spoke to him he was listening to the radio via an ear bud, whilst also recording the radio. He was supposed to be moving out of his house that day, having just exchanged contacts, but he was drowning in his precious tapes. His wife seemed pretty p**d off with him.
I was a bit compulsive myself. I used to buy records, then CDs, and I also made tapes of albums, and recordings of the John Peel show. It was a problem to shift 100s of records and CDs and boxes of tapes whenever I moved house. I lightened my load by giving everything away apart from the Peel tapes which were the most entertaining items in the whole collection, it actually felt good. I kept hold of the Peel tapes for some years, even though my tape deck had died. There were some great shows from the 90s! But then I had to downsize again so I took them to the rubbish tip, even that didn't make me sad.
Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.