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Preserving VHS Recordings For Another 20 Years?
efedora asks: "I have about 650 hours of VHS tape going back about 20 years (no, not my porn collection) and the tape is starting to deteriorate. What are the best options for preserving the contents? Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
"Some of the ideas I've had so far are:
- VHS to VHS tape with an analog 'clean up' box between the VHS machines. This would give me the same number of tapes but should last another 20 years. Quality will degrade.
- Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation.
- Burn VCD's. I don't know of any simple direct-to-VCD software that will do this so there would be a large labor overhead. Good quality with some degradation. Cheap.
- VHS direct to cheap IDE drives. Good quality with no degradation. Relatively cheap. Probably could use the same technique as burn-to-dvd."
I've really found that getting a Pinacle Video-editting compatible card and software is helpful. I've converted the majority of my VHS collection to DVD for a relatively low price... WHich comes out to be less than I spent on all the VHS.
Buy an all-in-wonder card, hook up your VCR to the video in, and you're on your way.
You can pick up an 80 gig drive for very little money these days, so just divx the video up.
Should cost less than 200 bucks, maybe more if you really want to preserve every pixel of visual integrity.
You say quality is not critical. I would recommend using an mpeg4 codec (proberbly divx or xvid), if you capture at full vhs resolution (352x240) then you can store image quality that far surprises vcd (and your slightly degraded vhs) quality at about 300meg per hour. 650 hours of tape will bring you upto 195gig. How you store your data is really up to you, but I would recommend getting a couple of 200gig hard drives and keeping two copies for safety reasons.
You might want to read this article on capturing from vhs.
How about the recently made Ars Technica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video? It was made with exactly what you want to do in mind.
Plenty of compaines will put them on DVD for you and go thru the process of cleanup..
Sure its not cheap.. but your time is worth something and 650 hours of stuff would take forever...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
No. There is no way that you can copy 650 hours of VHS video simply, inexpensively, and with little labor. It's going to be time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive.
That said, making more VHS copies seems like a poor idea as they, too, will degrade and machines to play them will cease to be available long before 20 years is up (remember Beta, 8-track, U-matic, and Elcassette?)
You need to get them into the digital domain and, once there, moving them from format to format is relatively easy.
As the subject says. The card just doesn't work for more than 10 minutes. Value edition, feh.
Otherwise this is a really good idea, I thought about doing it myself. I was trying to record the simpsons but my whole system just froze up. Tried all the drivers, different video cards, not worth it.
My boss purchased a unit which has VHS and a DVD burner on it for around $600. Very high quality recordings too. He found it in an electronics catalog or something, he talks a lot though so I don't remember the specifics.
Nothing I'm sure Google can't help you with.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
DV capture device (sony dvmc-da2) and a couple 160-200gb hard drives. Should do the trick. (Does for me)
Store what you can that will fit onto DVD-RW now, and save the rest for later when larger capacity DVDs come out.
You can also get a used 35gb DLT drive off ebay and store DV onto that. Tapes are pretty cheap and DLT is pretty rugged.
Stick with well known formats that have a future.
DIVX, XVID etc.. could easily be forgotten in 20 years time, DVD and MPEG2 probably won't be.
But seriously, nothing digital lasts long. Your (seriously now) best option is to engrave all your data into granite. I hear you can buy the stuff in bulk now.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I don't know how great the quality of this device is, but you can get a Terapin VCD recorder. Has Audio/Video inputs as well as RF/coax input. Link to webstite:
http://www.terapintech.com/
Panasonic DVD Recorder .. I bought one of these bad boys at their original retail of $700... still well worth it. At $400, only a few months later, it's practically a steal. Media's still fairly expensive, about $3-$12 per disc, in singles.. though I haven't looked around too much for multi-packs.. I mostly have just been using 1 or 2 different DVD-RW discs with it...
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
if you capture 240 lines you are effectively throwing away half your vertical resolution.
Between the VCR and the capture card, second deck, etc, make sure you use a time base corrector. Don't trust the TBC supposedly built in to the VCR or capture card, get an external unit. Otherwise, audio sync problems will haunt you forever.
The broadcast video processor (also from b&h) is also useful for this application. I like to put it before the TBC.
Regards,
Mark
markrages@mlug.missouri.edu
capture it to disk encoded with something lossless (huffyuv springs to mind) then archive using DivX 5 Pro CBR encoding. Set DivX to 1-pass, quality-based encoding; set the quantizer to 2 or 3. You should definitely be able to fit a video on a DVD this way.
I've found VirtualDub to be nice for DivX compression, but VegasVideo has a vastly better interface for 95% of users.. also, the standard compression profiles in VV are OK for non-space-critical applications (eg. burning to DVD) and should replicate your VHS source with no noticeable degradation.
If you want to take a bit more time and care with your tapes, you might want to create some SVCD sets by running the huffyuv-encoded source through TMPGenc.
Oooh... Giant Flip-book!
Michael Loves Me!
I've had this long-standing theory that you could play a video multiple times, and merge them to get a higher-quality signal. Obviously, VHS has it limits, but in theory, with the right magic, you could filter out some noise and stuff?
One time I saw something on a TV show where detectives took a video from a store CCTV system that was almost COMPLETELY unusable. They took it to some experts (at NASA, actually, IIRC), who were able to work out a formula for the horrible noise almost completely obscuring the video, and get pretty good quality video from it.
Now I realize the original post here wanted a *quick* way to to do, so taking his home cassettes to NASA isn't quite what he wants. But what I'd like to know is... Is there stuff out there that can do what I've described (play a video multiple times and take the best parts from each), or is this just some insane, impossible idea I dreamed up?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Try getting rid of it all. Do you really need every Star Trek and Quantum Leap episode on tape?
I agree with the DVD idea. get one of these http://www.dvdrecorder.philips.com/
hook it up to your VCR. Most people are suggesting stupid solutions with Video cards and Video editing software which end up costing around the 600$ mark anyway so for this extra ease of use you cant go wrong. Hey and its Phillips a cool electronics company.
There is no god
If you picked low labour and time, try a ReplayTV. Hook up your vcr to your replay, click record on the replay, start vcr playback, come back 2 hours later. Then get DvArchive and stream the recorded show off the Replay onto your pc. The stream is an MPG2 format. Use VideoLan Client to view the stream. Archive as desired.
Have fun!
The fastest and easiest way would be to use a DVD recording deck. I have a Samsung (Panasonic) unit that works just like a VCR. Decent quality too, much better than your VHS tape and it's very fast and easy!
I've consulted for video applications for a while now, and I found the best solution is:
* Relatively fast PC - Athlon XP1800+ or faster roughly.
* Decent video in card - ATI All-In-Wonder Card (even the non-Radeon AIWs are good for this).
* Good DVD Burner - Pioneer DVR-105 or DVR-A05 that burns DVD-R. Don't worry about the +/- debate, -R media is cheaper and has virtually the same compatibility as +R.
* Easy software - Sonic MyDVD is great software that you can capture from and burn to DVD in one app. Plus, if you buy the A05 above it usually comes with this software in a bundle.
* (the trick) Solid long-lasting archival media - Mitsui Gold Archive DVD-R for longevity.
I cannot stress the last one enough. It's so easy to get a great system only to flounder on the choice of media because the goal is to keep the videos. The best DVD-R media generally are Mitsui, Verbatim, and TDK. I wouldn't trust anything else. Just capture in 640x480, and you can burn up to two hours at a time. If you want to get really fancy, you can delve into more advanced software, cut bitrates to get additional time, and do ultra slick menus.
Blue laser DVD burners will be readilly available and probably cost about the same amount as the current DVD burners. This gives you two options:
1) You could buy the standard DVD Burner for around a $100(??) and use something such as the All-in-Wonder (~4.7 gigs per disc)
or
2)You could buy the blue laser burner for around $350(??) and use the same capture device (~24 gigs per disc)
You CAN store more than 2 hours of video on a DVD, just create the videos
in VCD format (MPEG-1 video), and store them on a DVD disk. This will give
you around 7 and a half hours of video per DVD.
As you are converting from VHS, the quality has probably already degraded to
the point where using a codec that captures the full PAL or NTSC signal is not
really warranted.
One of the new VIVO capable ATI or NVidia graphics cards will suffice for
capturing the video files (they usuaully come with simple video capture software).
Then I'd recommend using TMPG Enc http://www.tmpgenc.net/ to encode the files.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
seriously, no matter what you do, it will eventually turn to dust...
the only way to keep data safe would be to constantly keep massive RAID-4+ disk drives constantly checking and correcting mistakes as the disks degrade over time. only through active monitoring of the integrity of the data could you correct errors before they appear. and then spread redundant copies of this all over the known universe so that no planetary activity interferes.
what am i smoking...
oh... right...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
miniDV is a horrible option. Anyone who suggests that hasn't really worked with the format much. It's great for camcorders but not archival of this volume.
You DO need a good deck. I use an upper-end JVC S-VHS deck with integrated comb, genlock, and digital buffer to stabilize. The importance of a clean incoming signal CANNOT be overstated. Garbage in, garbage out and bandwidth wasted. S-Video is important because it delivers a far higher quality image. Composite video mushes parts of the signal together.
For the bulk of my straight archival I use an Athlon-based system with USB2 connected to an ADS USB Instant DVD MPEG-2 encoder and an iMic USB sounde device.
USB2 is important because you need lots of available bandwidth. The iMic uses the same AD/DA chip as some of teh pro Roland devices. Doing the sound grab outside the computer's case helps cut down on noise. (Yes, I use a USB extension and the iMic is "housed" near the VCR.
Some people prefer the Snazzi USB encoders. I found the ADS, factory refurbished, at TigerDirect for $150. hard to find a hardware capture at that price.
I've also got a Canon DV camcorder with passthrough and an ATi All-in-Wonder. Neither is a good solution. DV is HUGE compared to the quality of the source and any cheap capture card has poor performance. If you want to spend $1K for a Canopus, well, that's a different story...
For plain-vanilla VHS and S-VHS you're going to be just fine if you use CVD which is half DVD resolution and is compatible with the DVD spec.
Which leads to storage medium. You can burn CVDs to CDR if you want. It's cheap because, at least in the U.S., you can find CDRs for full rebate a lot and the drives also. Right now, if you're lucky, you'll find both at OfficeMax.com. Alternately, got to DVD.
Now, a word about bitrates: Your comment that a DVD can't hold 2 hours is incorrect. Sounds like you tried and captured at too high a data rate for your source.
If you're willing to re-compress, you can easily use various clean-up filters and get at least as good an image as you have on tape, putting 3.5-4 hours per disc in CVD format on a DVDR. That's not a typo. If you properly use filters the result of cleanup on onld VHS source can be better than the raw version. There are filters specifically to deal with the various colorswim and dropouts of magnetic tape.
For a list of links and info on hacking the ADS capture device:
utils@mindspring.com
A/V Utils for the Masses!!!
Curator of links at
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/
For info on the iMic:
http://griffintechnology.com
First you can easily fit 2 hours of video on a DVD-R. Remember, it's 4.7GB. You were considering VCD yet you could fit 6 hours of SVCD quality video on a single DVD-R!
Second, blank 1X DVD-R discs are 58cents in quantity 100. I picked up 200 Princo DVD-R blanks last month, they work fine in several DVD players I've tried.
[ I've really found that getting a Pinacle Video-editting compatible card and software is helpful. ]
Stay the hell away from Pinacle. Those with the ugly details can post them. In short, the drivers suck, and are not forward ported to newer Windows versions.
- Comes out looking better due to Time code correction
- DVD will hold 2:20 at the next-to-best setting. I can't tell the difference, and some DVDs can't even deal with a higher bitrate.
- Record up to 6 hours at a time, then cut it into multiple files. Stick in the tape and walk away.
- Use the Hard drive to edit, pull out commercials, then burn to DVD.
Panasonic DMR-HS2. $800 online, $1000 retail. Only downsides are that you really can't do chapters, and that it'll drop in price."Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
"The Philips DVDR-985 will copy DVDs, VHS tapes, TV shows, VCDs, audio music CDs, and more onto DVD+R and DVD+RW discs. Then, it can be played back on DVD players and on your DVD-ROM [computer] drive.
With this DVD recorder, you can record using video-in (RCA), s-video, or firewire (lEEE1394) connections. It also has a built-in TV tuner for your convenience.
The most compatible of all recorders, the recorded discs (DVD+R and DVD+RW) can be played on more than 90% of all DVD players and on DVD-ROM computer drives. Also, with DVD+RW, you can erase the recorded disc and re-record onto it again for thousands of times.
There are four recording modes: DV quality (1hr ), DVD (2hr), S-Video (3hr), and VHS (4hr).
As an added feature, the DVDR-985 will also play play CD-R, CD-RW, SVCD, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD, and VCDs.
And like most stand-alone DVD recorders, the Philips DVDR-985 is as easy to use as a VCR."
Easy , just not as cheap as you would like to go, bout 700 bucks but i'm sure you can find a better deal as i spent only 4 seconds looking.
Whats better than clubbin' baby seals?... Absolutely nothin!!! -Zero Wing
As a library science student I have learned that there is not yet a reliable archival medium materials like this. About the only thing I can think of is film, but that's clearly not an option here. Continually changing formats and technology have made being a librarian very complicated. This stuff is fragile to boot, and its shelf life is dubious. An instructor said that he only expected his DVD to last five years.
If your content is non-personal, you may consider outsourcing. Companies like Vidipax (link withheld to avoid spam accusations) offer such services which would save you some time.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Capture it to MPEG and then change the name to "N_Portman.MPG". It'll never disappear off of Kazaa.
"Derp de derp."
-Any Dazzle products. Especially the DVC-80. The price is right but this piece of trash is so terrible that it does not even belong in the trash. The FireWire DV Bridge is decent, but it has severe problems with slightly unregulated power source. And the only thing worse than dazzle products is dazzle tech support.
-Pinnacle Products. Sometimes they work with excellent results. But they are very unpredictable, with often buggy software and whacked out compatibility problems. If you are starting out and don't have an existing video conversion infrastructure, avoid these things!
-Adaptec VideOh. It looks good in the surface but I have heard reports of these things acting in a very whacked out fashion.
So what do you get? Check out the card list at www.vcdhelp.com which has a huge list of products with many user ratings which tend to be quite reliable. The best products for converting your VHS to digital format in the lower price range that actually work tend to be the Matrox devices as well as the Canopus ADVC-100. From personal experience, I can say that the canopus (~US$300) kicks serious ass, and I have converted several VHS tapes to VCD with its help. The output from these into the computer can be sent to VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc.
Also check out rec.video.desktop which is a low-spam, well populated newsgroup with people who deal with this kind of stuff a lot. I read it regularly.
1. watch all of your porn... er, vhs collection
2. create an oral narrative that captures the heroic and essential nature of your vhs collection
3. create a religion based upon this oral narrative that centers upon wise men who have committed your narrative to memory from father to son for generations
4. enjoy your porn collection in the afterlife as a demigod
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I recall seeing a TV news item on this as well.
As I recall the processing technique did contrast and edge definition enhancement based upon movement within the frame. Items that moved frame to frame became clearer and sharper. Stationary objects did not improve, making this ideal for surveillance cameras.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
The problem with "converting it to DVD" is that what you probably REALLY mean is "converting it to DVD-R" ... and, say what you want, but I haven't actually seen much evidence that says a piece of DVD-R media is going to last any longer than a VHS tape. Those in the know say you want to be really careful about scratching it, and especially about exposing it to light.
... even the DVD-ROM drive on my old PowerBook G3 won't read it.
There's plenty of DVD players on the market that don't support it, besides
DVD-R is a nice development, but it's yet to prove itself as a viable archival format, IMHO.
Breakfast served all day!
biggest issue i see going from analog to digital(in any form) is dropped frames. I have recorded several VHS tapes to VCD, have gone through the TiVO before going to VCD. My Likko VDR2100 is very sensitive to signal quality, if there is a bunch of problems it will just puke(never had it puke since I process everything through tivo first). Tried doing some VHS videos to computer using a TV capture card with mixed results, some tapes went pretty well, others dropped significant amounts of frames(upwards of 90%). Tivo is much better at dealing with those situations but even tivo I tried 2 or 3 different tapes(one of which was about 8 years old) and got about 80-90% dropped frames.
I'd be shocked if you can recover 20 year old VHS tapes, if my 8-9 year old ones were useless(they hadn't been played in probably at least 6 years). if anything perhaps going from VHS->VHS then going to a digital medium if thats your thing would give better results since the newer VHS tape should be more stable.
So I have mostly given up on transferring old stuff from VHS to VCD and instead opted to re-record as much of it as I could. Nearly 1,000 VCDs burned in a bit over a year since I got the recorder. only 1 coaster sofar. I can then use transcode to encode the VCDs down to a low resolution/low bitrate in MPEG-4 which I can then watch on my Zaurus(@30fps).
Many good ideas here but I think we all act with suggestions like if the world is going to end tomorrow and this is the last chance you have to preserve your video collection. Let's see some facts.
*You want to be able to see your video in 20 years.
*You want a cheap, painless and effective strategy.
*The technology wont be the same in 20 years.
What I recommend is to put it on a digital media that will allow to preserve good quality and that is easy to access. DIVX on DVD or Hard disk are good choices. I don't recommend CD's because in my opinion to many CD's is a pain in the ass and in a couple of years you will deeply regret that choice. (Like it was for me when I did a clean up in my hundreds of 1.4 Floppy Disks of data.)
Then in the next 5 to 10 years you will see if DIVX or DVD technology will be in the way to be extinct. At that moment you will be able to easily decide how to transfer your videos to a new format and then maybe you will have better solutions that will last for very long or maybe you will simply transfer your data on another media for another 10 years. The most important is to keep a good quality (DIVX 200 meg/hour will be OK and take around 150 gig) and keep it on a media where it will be easy to access when you want to watch your stuff and will be easy to do the transfer when YOU WILL NEED to do the transfer.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Breakfast served all day!
To follow up on what someone earlier said, make SURE you run the output from your VCR through a good professional (or at least semi-pro) external time base corrector.
If you have a high end consumer video deck, it may have a built-in TBC -- disable it. These consumer TBCs work great on good-quality tapes but can actually mess up your image pretty badly on degraded tapes. Use a real, adjustable professional TBC.
Not only will it give you a stable signal for capture (preferably with a pro capture card rather than a consumer one), but it will actually make your videos look better when you view them!
I've built a PC for use as a VCR which uses a ATI Radeon 8500DV video card. This card is nice for a varitey of reasons, but one of the main strenghts (for me) is that it comes with a connector supporting a variety of inputs and outputs.
By the way, you could basically do this with any decent/modern/1Ghz+ system & the aforementioned video card -Or one similar to it (The ATI 7500's a reputable alternative). But anyway...
In my case I've got a variety of peripherals tied into my 8500 via a Video Switcher (example: $50 ), and I run the output of this switcher through a signal enhancer (example: $50) before it's ran into the 8500's S-Video input.
One of the things connected via the switcher is a nice 4-head stereo VCR. By running the VCR through the enhancer, I can get quite good copies of video tapes.
Similarly, by running Showshifter (or another PVR / recording package -But Showshifter has some really nice DivX capabilities built in), I'm able to automatically encode the VCR's output as a stereo, high-quality DivX file in real time.
Or you could use any other video codec really. If it was something you wanted to edit, or preserve at high quality, you could record in a non-lossy codec, edit as needed in a video editor (Virtual Dub's a good place to start), and then encode down to a DivX (or again... Any codec. AVI, Mpeg, DivX, or even... Windows Media Format).
A side bonus of running the video switch through the enhancer is that a DVD player's output can be piped through and recorded as the enhancer removes the copy-protection. Not that I'd ever hook a DVD player up to my video switch to find this out (or to record a few rented DVD's for that matter), but one could do so if one wanted too.
Either way, the resulting video files can either be converted to VCD or SVCD (These both are burned onto regular CD's, with the former fitting slightly more, lower-resolution video on the CD than the latter. Both are also playable in the majority of modern DVD players), or DVD (self-explanatory) formats via programs such as Nero . I'm not an expert on the lifetime degredation of either CD or DVD media, but both are arguably going to be around and in good shape longer than some old VHS tapes.
Another option is to burn them as data files onto any of the aforementioned media, and set them up with an autorun software package so that your intended viewers can just pop it in a PC and go (another up and coming option here). Doing it this way offers the capability to save higher resolution video, but it also requires that your viewers view it either on a PC, or on a TV connected to a PC. There's some other pros and cons as well, but that's the basics from my point of view.
For archiving old VHS footage, I would reccomend recording the video via a method similar to what I've described above, and then outputting the footage as a regular old DVD. DVD's can support... what is it? 704x480 or something like that, and that's way higher than the 320x200 or whatever that standard TV broadcasts at (and this is likely the resolution you'd have on VHS tapes, I'm guessin'). This would ensure you wouldn't have to lose much if any quality, and the resulting footage will be viewable either on a consumer DVD player, or on a PC via a DVD drive, which are more or less standard these days.
Similarly, with 4x DVD burners hitting the "below $300" market, it's a good investment as you can back up your other data and videos when you're done archiving tapes. If that's not enough, you'll also be able to sample the
...is a regenerating medium. Something that you can "refresh" as many times as necessary. Then every ten years or so you just stick your Refreshable DVD's (for lack of a better name) into the Refreshacycle, which copies the contents, cleans the Refreshable DVD, and rewrites it again, good as new.
If you buy a DV-CAM 184-minute tape and use it in a "plain" DV recorder, it will magically become 4 and a half hours long. This is because one of the differences (in fact, the main difference) between DV and DV-CAM is the tape speed (this is to make DV-CAM more durable; the actual data is the same, you can copy between the two with no loss).
Not only is DV durable and (reasonably) affordable, it's also extremely easy to capture and manipulate (a DV capture card is very cheap compared to a decent analog capture card). The only expensive part is the recorder itself.
There is another option that might be cheaper, but I don't know how big the tapes are: Digital-8. The data is in the same format as DV; the main difference is usually in the quality of the equipment (ie, Digital-8 cameras usually have worse CCDs than DV cameras, etc.), but here that probably wouldn't matter much (the AD converter is probably worse than the ones on good DV decks, but I doubt it'll be noticeable with VHS).
RMN
~~~
Hammurabi's law has been around for 7,000 years. This is a backup solution that will survive fire, flood, even a nuclear war.
But could not survive to Bush Diplomacy.
I won't compromise on media any more. If I'm just casually copying something for someone, I might have a spindle of cheapies, but you need archival-rated media if you want it to last any length of time.
The DVD may not last longer than the VHS, but it won't degrade form generation to generation. A 5th generation VHS tape is almost unwatchable, but a 50th generation DVD is just as good as a 1st generation one. As for the problems with reading it, I think that most new hardware won't have a problem, and certainly the burner he uses to make them shouldn't have a problem reading them.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Etch them into gold platters. They'll last really long that way.
_nfotxn
Set the whole lot on fire and forget about it.
This is the solution I use. I bought a Leadtek WinFast TV2000 PCI Video Capture card for $29.95. Then made a trip to Radio Shack for the necessary RCA cables. You'll need one male RCA to male RCA for the video and another dual male RCA to headphone jack for your sound card. The cables were about $15.00 for both. So, for less than $50 bucks, you have a solution in place for transferring VHS to a digital format. The cool thing about the Leadtek card is that it includes software that lets you choose the format you want to use. The options are MPEG-1, MPEG-2, NTSC VCD, PAL VCD, DVD, or AVI. It also syncs the audio for you, so you avoid that very time-consuming task of ripping video and audio separately and then having to synch them up again.
The main thing is getting the VHS tapes converted in some fashion to your hard drive. Then, you really have many choices on how to proceed. I bought a Plextor DVD+R/W drive because I wanted the maximum compatibility with home DVD players. DVD-R is OK, but not quite as reliable as DVD+R, in my experience.
But a DVD burner is not an absolute requirement if you decide to burn SVCD or VCDs. You can use regular CD-R's which play in most home DVD players. I choose DVD+R just to cut down on the number of discs necessary to transfer a standard VHS tape.
"Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation."
You are so wrong. Most people tend to think DVD is like 720x480 MPEG-2 with high bit-rate. They are wrong, too.
If you degrade the resolution to 352x480 (as is possible with DVD Standard) and lower the bitrate you can easily get one VHS tape for one DVD disc. Your software and your DVD player should support this, because it is in the standard.
Considering, that your VHS has no more resolution anyway, this is IMHO the optimal situation. I will not go to lifetime of DVD-R discs, etc. because you can easily make identical copies (no D/A or A/D conversion) after you have one copy. Discs will probably be cheaper in the future, too.
Most people are suggesting stupid solutions with Video cards and Video editing software
I agree.
Okay. I used to work in a TV station.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all. Now, TV stations buy good tape and use good video formats (ie. no crap like VHS with its ridiculous tape wear). The average VTR in a TV station is in the range of $10,000.
The video is saved in a tape format which will be around in 20 years. You can still find an Ampex Quad machine to play nearly 50 year old tape; almost every large city will have at least one in a video production house or tape archive.
Local stations tend to run Betacam SP or Digital Betacam. The investment in video formats is huge, most TV stations will stick with whatever format they chose for years after it became obsolete.
As recently as 1993, I was carrying around an Ikegami camera and a 40 pound Sony BVU-110 3/4" VTR handing off my shoulder. The battery belt for the VTR and the sun gun was another 20 pounds. Meanwhile, the bigger stations in my area were all running around with single-piece Sony Betacam ENG setups.
Interestingly, there's one video format that you can take anywhere in the world, and any TV station or production house can use it: 3/4". Razor sharp analog pictures, very little generational loss, good and fast tape speed. It's Beta's big brother, but it's old now, so the tape and the machines can be found used all over the place.
Why not pick up a 3/4" deck? You don't need anything fancy, just make sure it will take the full-size (not just portable) 3/4" cassettes. The tape is cheap enough, the machine will last forever, and you won't be able to visibly see any image degredation from VHS. Hell, if the stuff was recorded 20 years ago, the VTRs at the TV station you were recording were probably 3/4". Look for a 25-year-old "U-Matic" machine, preferably from Sony (popular enough to be easy to service), top-loading is fine. Record a couple of DVDs to it - if it's working properly, most people could never tell the difference. Newer U-Matic SP machines are even better. Watch out for the machines which are player-only, and for the ENG machines which only take the small cassettes. (3/4" cassettes come in two physical sizes, but the full-size machines will play both sizes.)
Tape storage - this applies for all formats, including the lowly VHS:
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I wonder how this entire conversation would be different if the VHS tapes had copyright enforcement like everyone's making now under DMCA. Most of the preservation techniques discussed here sound like they're "fair use", but in the future will they even be possible?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Most of the suggestions I saw are to put the video on to some sort of rotational media. Disk drives, or DVD are the two most common offerings.
There's one thing I think that history has show us is that rotational media go obsolete quite quickly, and when they do the technologies to play them quickly disappear from the marketplace. If you go this route, you will also need to archive the entire playing system, not just the media. In that vein, the TiVo idea is perhaps your best bet. Ex: if you performed this project 15 years ago, you would likely have used MFM or RLL drives, now you can't buy them, their controllers or cables, and I don't think modern hardware or OSes would even know what to do with them.
Tape has a much longer life-span in the consumer marketplace. Without too much difficulty, one can still purchase an open reel tape deck, an 8 track or cassette player. Try finding a phonograph that plays 78rpm records though. It's damned near impossible.
I fear CDs and DVDs will get the same treatment. Once the next thing replaces them, their players will disappear from the market. and locating one in 15 years may prove difficult. For instance, once we get enough bandwidth, video on demand may get us to all toss out our DVD players and disks.
I think the best compromise you can make is to use MiniDV. Especially if you have a compatible camcorder or deck already.
The benefits are:
1. No problems dealing with time-code transcoding or creep
2. No audio sync problems
3. Digital storage on tape. Later generations will not suffer degradation
4. Easily imported to computer for duplication or storage on other media (back to VHS for example)
5. If similar to other tape formats, will endure longer than most rotational media of its generation
6. You can fit two hours of VHS tape on to an 80 minute MiniDV if you use EP; which on MOST devices yields no degradation of video or audio. I personally have not encountered any more dropouts from EP than from SP on any of four devices I've used.
I might even import the video from MiniDV to computer, perform some enhancements (sharpness, color, contrast) then write it back out to MiniDV. Then write back out to VHS so you can watch the video on a regular basis. You don't want to use your digital master tape for regular viewing.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I'd suggest that you copy your vhs originals to a harddrive and then make copies back to vhs for day to day use. That way you have the convience of what you're used to but can continue to produce copies without further degradation.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I seriously doubt VHS recorded on a 20 year old VCR is going to output a picture sharper than DVD quality.
Yes, 720x540 will perfectly reproduce a perfect, noise free NTSC signal. But NOT VHS. Even today's VHS recorders probably only output a usable resolution of 500x400 give or take. I say usable, meaning, that you would extract more pixels than that from it, but it would not increase the clarity of sample.
I am seeing all these messages saying, use MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 because DivX won't be around in 5 years, but MPEG-1 and 2 are standards, blah blah blah.
.avi's, instead of putting them inside a proper .mp4 container (which is based on QuickTime, and FULLY documented)
...And in the end, isn't this the point of having open standards in the first place?
I put this to you: DivX 5.03, 3ivx D4 and above, XviD, Apple MPEG-4 and most of the other MPEG-4 variants are actually fully MPEG-4 compliant, and MPEG-4 is as much of a standard as MPEG-1 or 2 is. MS-MPEG is another thing all together, as is DivX 3.11. Avoid these.
The worst part of this MPEG-4 hodge podge is that everybody stuffs them into
Basically if it's MPEG-4 compliant, there will be some way to play it in the future, as surely as you can play MPEG-1 or 2.
I think we all know that there will be better formats in the future. No question about it and the wait won't be long.
The question of format type for software (MPEG 2/4, DiVX, whatever), is a good point, but starting with the most lossless format possible will help maintain maximum quality with any needed conversions later.
Besides, your average MPEG2, even at a medium bitrate, is overkill for old VHS material. We're not talking about anything more than 240 lines of resolution (on a good day), after all.
Ah, but what about the media itself? Well... So what if that DVD-R doesn't store beyond 5-10 years? If the digital transfer process has been done at a point where the VHS is still viable, this won't matter much. A few years after the transfer, go ahead and copy your DVD-R
s to your new Blu-Ray discs. You should be able to fit about 10 DVD-Rs each, if I remember correctly.
Then 10 years later transfer ALL of it to Holocube or whatever.
I do video archiving for the school I work for, and this is my stated plan. We use DVD-R because it's cheap, and when properly stored should last until the 'Next Big Thing'.
I would be more worried about VHS analog degradation than digital format obsolesence for one reason: time of transfer. How long will it take to transfer a two hour VHS tape? Yup. 2 hours. How many tapes does this guy have? How long will this take? How long should he wait - this material is DYING in front of him!
How long will it take to copy a DVD? Hmmm. Depends on what year you're talking about doesn't it? 10 years from now, you'll probably be able to copy your entire library of material in mere minutes! You can have copies of the copies; no loss in quality, plenty of redundancy.
That's a very real advantage. With analog there is continual loss (more if the tapes are actually played). the longer you wait to convert the material, the more video will be distorted. With digital, it's already converted and then it's just a factor of time for file copying.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Just some precisions from the resident astrophysicist :-)
1.) Yes, true, UV damages dies.
2.) The solar spectrum is a blackbody curve that peaks in the green, visible; incandesceng light will typically peak in the red, visible--so yes the sun will send more UV.
3.) Most hard UV is absorbed by the atmosphere, we only get UV-A, UV-B, UV-C on earth, which are closest to visible light;this is why UV telescopes are in space.
4.) Some windows are specifically designed to stop UV, but most windows will let UV through (most of it anyways).
yours ever, fz.
From a physics point of view, I'd be very wary about baking tapes. Certainly don't do it at home.
Let's not forget that tapes are a magnetic medium. All magnetic media have a temperature (the Curie point) at which they will suddenly demagnetize. Now I don't know what that temperature is for tapes, but it's often not that high.
Additionally information on magnetic media degrades faster at a higher temperature. This is because the way information is stored is basically as an alternating sequence of magnetic domains (areas of the same polarity). With time, large domains grow at the expense of small domains, basically smoothing out the information. Turning up the heat just makes this happen faster.
You can't beat entropy.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Yes it IS available, here is only 1 news article out of many google results:
v d. reut/
;)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/03/04/blue.d
ask your local retailer for the model
Probably too late for someone actually reading this comment but...
I read not long ago that the Library of Congress chose to stay analog for the archival of sound recording, because they haven't found ANY digital format and media that they think will still be usable in a distant future.
Analog reel-to-reel recordings from 50 years ago are still usable (think Elvis 30 #1), compared to DAT recordings from 10 years ago that are completely lost due to poor media. Hey, 78rpm disks and wax recordings from 70-80 years ago are still good!
So, I say copy your VHS tapes to 3/4" video, pretty cheap and it'll last for 20-30 years...
Try it! Library of Babel