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."

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.

Re:DVD

I agree with the DVD idea. get one of these http://www.dvdrecorder.philips.com/ [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.

Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

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:

• Note that tape != cassette; tape is the stuff inside the cassette.
• Wind the tape from one reel to the other every year. Don't rewind it back if you come to the end of the tape, just leave it like that until next year's winding. You want to ensure the tape is evenly packed and doesn't stick together, but don't wear it unnecessarily. If it's VHS, use an old machine which doesn't thread the tape around the heads for fast-forward or rewind (ie. less wear). When you're done watching something from your archive, wind it *all the way* forward, then rewind it *all the way* with no interruptions for a smooth packing.
• Store the cassettes on their edge, not flat! If you store it flat, the edges of the tape will rest on the reel; if you store it on edge, the tape will hang on the reel. Flat-stored tape will often develop rippled edges, leading to problems reading linear audio, control and timecode tracks.
• Keep your machines well maint

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

Umm... 8-Track never caught on.

You're kidding, right?

For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.

Smaller, more dubious record companies (K-Tel, Time-Life Records, etc) would advertise in TV commercials as recently as the mid-80s, "Available on LP, cassette or 8-track! Order now!". (In the mid-80s, there were still lots of 8-track equipped cars driving around.)

I can't give you exact statistics, but I can tell you that the machines and cartridges were everywhere. Now? Well, 8-track tapes were endless loop, and they tended to split at the splice. Not to mention the lubricated tape shedding due to poor binding, and the integal pinch rollers jamming or failing... the cartridges almost all got pitched, but the machines can still be found in many thrift shops and old cars.

The format was bad, too... in the middle of a song it would fade out, the machine would click (and knock its heads right out of alignment) and the song would fade back in. Signal to noise ratio, print-through, wow and flutter and frequency response were all atrocious.

This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.

Uhhh... Well, you can't expect *no* degredation. But a well-stored tape running on a properly aligned Quad or 3/4" machine will perform pretty close to the picture quality limits of NTSC. These things were built for TV stations, not for Joe Sixpack.

I think you might be confusing a few things.

1. Kinescope. This was before the popularization of videotape. A film was exposed from a video feed on a picture tube. A similar technique ("flying spot kinescope") was used to scan film for showing on television. This is the way that I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were done, for example.

2. Image Orthicon camera tubes. These produced the black halos around performers. They were low-light cameras in their day, making them preferable to the absolutely punitive surface-of-the-sun lighting used to make a good image from an early plumbicon or vidicon camera tube.

3. Poor film. In the early days, there were no re-runs and most stuff was live; the only reason to film or videotape a TV show was for the producers to do a "debriefing" after the performance.

4. Poor TV. Are you remembering stuff you saw on a 1950s TV set and wondering why it looks so crappy on your new TV set? We look back with rose-colored glasses, you know. With my collection of restored 1950s TV sets, I can assure you that even with all new capacitors, good tubes and properly aligned, TV sets were cutting edge technology in the 1950s, and they were pretty bad compared to the picture quality from even a cheap modern TV.

5. Are you comparing video to still photos? Keep in mind that those still photos probably aren't frame grabs; the technology to do that in video certainly didn't exist, and with film mostly being for analysis rather than archive, they were probably using studio photographers for publicity stills.

6. Re-runs of more recent stuff. The original air of a sitcom, for example, will leave the network head-end by satellite and be run from that feed by all affiliates in the time zone. The tape playing will be some uber-quality format; as recently as 10 years ago it was some offshoot of Quad. When stations later syndicate that same episode, it's often provided in the format of the station's choice. Any station with syndication rights can order a broadcast quality copy of Seinfeld on 3/4", Betacam, Quad, hell - even Betamax and SVHS are still covered by some syndicates. Of course, all of these copies are several generations old.

Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.

This is true, but

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

Say, this is slightly OT, but:

My father recently re-discovered some musical recordings on reel-to-reel mag. He brought it to a technician who specializes in doing transfers to DAT. What amazes me about this process is that he bakes the tape in a specialized oven he built.

I have heard of baking tape before, but I've never heard a good explaination of why this is done. I think it is an attempt to get moisture out of the binder to prevent the tape from sticking, but I don't understand how this does not rapidly degrade the quality of the recording...

Just thought I would ask if you knew...

Thanks for your excellent write-ups,

-AP

baking tapes? don't try this at home

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.

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

I worked in a television production studio for the last five years as well. I learned that my professional requirements and the requirements of your average home user are two different things.

What works for a studio does not work for everybody else (not to mention that the way television studios currently work, with all of the details mentioned above, is incredibly antiquated.) This is a situation perpetuated by seasoned producers who can still edit a mean tape-to-tape session but have no clue what to do with a non-linear editor. I respect their ability, and the necessity for something that works reliably every time five minutes ago, but that's when your job depends on it. In the home user arena, there are already far better options that are just as reliable, they just require an investment of time to get everything set up.

Once you know what you're doing, you can just zip on through faster than the conventional methods will allow. Just as reliable, way faster, and with access to your video catalog using search functions built right into your operating system. It also requires a fraction of the physical storage space and is far more attractive to look at.

To summarize: DVD sky-rocketed because it filled a void. You're far more likely to find a DVD player with backwards compatibility than you are a VCR. Also, a lot more can go wrong with a video tape stored properly than a DVD stored properly.

I'd suggest making the software investment (with the exception of the hardware needed to import the movies, most of this can be done with freeware, shareware, or open source software if you're using something like OSX.)

VHS is going to be poorer quality already compared with a lossy format such as, say, a MPEG-2 compressed movie, or even a high-quality Divx. You could also use the DV format for good compression, and it's already compatible with modern DV video cameras. I had a lot of success with it when working on a spot for ESPN last fall, and had no trouble passing it on to my producer for use in an Avid editing system.

MPEG-2 is the same format as used on commercial DVDs. It gives you the option of burning a DVD that can be dropped straight into a standard DVD player.

If you use some other format that gives better compression but requires a computer for playback, consider video mirroring to a TV and playing back on your computer (again, on the Mac, this is ridiculously easy, and there are video cards for the PC that offer similar capabilities.)

If you want to dedicate a hard drive to storing these movies, go for it, but consider a tape backup (not the VHS kind ;-) to make sure the data remains secure. I'd even suggest storing it on an external drive - perhaps one using Firewire (IEEE 1394) so that you can easily move it around and get incredibly fast transfer rates.

If the tapes are worth it to keep around for another twenty years, I'd go with the hardware investment and go the DVD or hard drive route myself.

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

If it's VHS, use an old machine which doesn't thread the tape around the heads for fast-forward or rewind (ie. less wear)

I can't agree about the old machine. Most older/cheaper models of v.c.r. run the tape at high speed until the optics detect the clear header tape at each end, then slam on the brakes (with that painful sounding thump). Modern, (higher cost) recorders user the relative spool rotation speed to identify position and slow the tape down as it reaches the end of a wind/rewind. Hell, our latest unit rewinds at 750x play speed! It can completely rewind a E180 in under a minute, you hear it decelerate from a high speed whine to a crawl before a gentle click.

The result is that older units tend to stretch the start/end of tapes far worse than modern ones and may also tighten the outer winds of tape due to the braking action, potentially rucking/rippling the inner winds slightly. You should also avoid tapes longer than E180 (3 hr.) as the tape thickness is reduced significantly beyond this length to fit them on the spool, which can lead to more stretching.

Try to keep the tapes in a dry and cool (but not cold) constant environment. If there is enough moisture around and the temp. varies enough you'll get condensation which can lead to mould between the tape layers.

Finally, obvious though it may sound, check the walls and floors with one of those wire/pipe/stud detectors the electricians use to ensure there are no live mains cables within about 0.5m of the storage area. I lost a heap of audio tapes some years ago when I didn't know there was a lightswitch on the far side of a wall behind the storage case.

Re:DVD

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.

There's plenty of DVD players on the market that don't support it, besides ... even the DVD-ROM drive on my old PowerBook G3 won't read it.

DVD-R is a nice development, but it's yet to prove itself as a viable archival format, IMHO.

Re:DVD

Doesn't that make it hard to use? Since you cannot expose it to light, and the reader MUST use LASER light?

I'll assume you're not just being a wise guy and point out that the real problem is ultraviolet light, which tends to damage all forms of dyes (think of the movie posters turning blue in the window of the video store), and is present in much greater quantity in sunlight than in incandescent light.

Re:DVD

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.

Transfer this stuff NOW!

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.

Re:DVD

I'd look-into a standalone set-top DVD recorder. Expensive initial investment, but about as simple as you can get. Easier than running through the PC - just throw a blank in and let it burn.

Depending on the manufacturer and model, you can set the bitrate so that 2 hours should fit with fairly reasonable quality (in the 5Mbps range off the top of my head, which should be plenty for a VHS source).

Newer units should have no problem with generic DVD-R blanks that run in the $1-2 range.

If you want to spend a little more money, Pioneer has a new "industrial" dual-burner model coming out with a built-in 120gb HD for storing video until it's ready to burn. Also has simple editing features I think. Cost is estimated at around $3,500 according to the magazine I read.

Even still, 650 hours is a LOT of work. I don't envy that task.

Fortunately 80% of my own VHS collection is just movies I've taped off of movie channels and the like - no great loss as I'll replace most of them on DVD eventually anyway.

So you admit it...

You do have a porn collection then, just not on 20 year old VHS? Presumably you had the good sense to write that to something durable, like microfiche, or laminated paper.

Re:So you admit it...

That would be really unique, though - pr0n on microfiche. Wow.

You must remember these are /.'ers we're talking about.

And microfiche is very small.

Some of these geeks will go to great, uh, lengths, to make themselves appear larger.

Even if it's just in comparision to their porn.

Re:So you admit it...

alright, this is OT but I have to reply ...

I used to work in the Microforms dept. of my university library. We had a whole bunch of newspaper and journal collections on microfilm and fiche, including the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and ... Playboy on microfilm.

Somewhere before my time, apparently, some of the Playboy films kept on being stolen from the shelves. I don't know what kind of person it takes to actually steal *MICROfilm* of porn ... and I don't think I want to know. I did have to wonder, though, if they had a microfilm reader at home. I hope they have it in acid-free boxes, at least.

Re:So you admit it...

If you are going to archive your pornography - you'd better make sure you archive a pornograph or you'll have nothing to play them on.

Old axiom

If it ain't porn, it ain't worth it.

ATI All In Wonder

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.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

true, but neither will most storage media.
they can store the player software and codecs on the same hard drives, and when the next leap is required at least they'll be ready.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

But, what *will* last 20 years?

Re:ATI All In Wonder

This is crazy but it'd work. Print every frame out one by one. This comes out to something like 70,200,000 pieces of paper, which as long as kept away from open flame, sunlight, moisture, wind, etc will essentially last forever. Plus the bragging rights for having a huge pile of paper is cool. (23,400 feet high to be exact given that paper is 0.004 inches thick, of course quality of paper will affect this.;-)

Flip Book!

Oooh... Giant Flip-book!

Re:ATI All In Wonder

Modern paper is too acidic, it will just eat itself up given enough time. I'd opt for inscribing it in tablets of lead, myself. That would sacrifice color, but you could make three tablets for every frame...

Re:ATI All In Wonder

You joke, but back when film was first invented, filmmakers weren't allowed to copyright it, so they sent a picture of every frame to the copyright office instead. Film restorationists have been able to go back to these archives and reconstruct the films from the individual photographs.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

This is why true geeks store their porn collections by inducing resonances in quantum folds... guaranteed to survive the coming big crunch.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

OTOH, my phono record collection dates back to 1949.

[lame humour attempt]
If you bought everything in your phono collection new maybe you should start worrying about preserving yourself for another 20 years instead of your music...
[/lame humour attempt]

Re:ATI All In Wonder

It sounds like a wonderful idea, but....

Think back 20 years.. In 1983 you may have had an Apple IIe, TRS-80 Model III, or C64.. If you did save video then for that platform on a media that would oxidize over time (DVD's have a shelf life too), what are the chances of having working hardware to view it with? The last of any of the above that I've seen were headed for a trash can about a year ago when I cleaned my garage.

In 20 years, more than likely FreeBSD and Linux will both be dinosaurs that no one will have a clue how to work, except for a few of us geeks with perfect memories that say "Ya, I used that 20 years ago!". I wouldn't place bets on a continued existance of Microsoft either. There'll be some bigger, better, faster that comes along and everyone will switch to. (I have inside information that says BeOS and OS/2 are making a comeback, hehe)

Definately, I'd see problems trying to get your movie from the DivX format to a new format intact. You may not have any similiar connections to use. Serial and Parallel may already be dead (they're close to it), and USB version 2020 may not be compatable with what we're using now.

I don't have a good solution for him either. In 20 years you may not be able to get a working VHS player, or the TV's may not support them. Do regular VCR's work with HDTV? Isn't the US Gov't doing some manditory change over?

Maybe he can keep copying between formats, for as long as he remembers to.. Are those family memories worth it? That's a question he'd have to ask..

Maybe he's already taken it from an old film movie camera to Beta to VHS, so the trend can continue.. At least with digital formats (as long as they survive), you shouldn't have too much degregation between generations. But, compressing and recompressing video will make it look worse over time too..

Re:ATI All In Wonder

Chances are DivX won't last 20 years.

I can run binaries for the PDP-11 and play old Atari and Commodore 64 games, and old Amiga tunes on XMMS. But all the geeks who have hours and hours of anime and TV shows and porn in DivX are going to be unable to port the DivX codec to whatever system were running in 20 years, and not even be able to run xine under a x86 emulator? I regard that as very unlikely.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

Better question is "why 20 years ?" ...

VHS has been great in the absence of options that are easier to move forward.

Now that you're thinking digital, why not think about 2-5 years and, since it's digital you can batch-convert everything to the next best thing.

Cheers

Things not to get

Here's a short list of some other things to avoid:

-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.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

No matter what you do, DO NOT USE DIVX. I do massive amounts of video editing and this will result in massive amounts of data loss. Also, I'd also suggest against using the ATI AIW. If you must capture, grab a Pinnacle DV500 for best quality, or for lesser quality, grab a Matrox. The ATI card depends on your processor, which cannot hope to compete with the onboard hardware on professional capture cards. Using the ATI card will almost always result in dropped frames and other bad stuff. Also, once captured, DivX and MPEG-1 are bad. They used to be great standards, but now, newer and better codecs have come out. If you use MPEG-4, use XviD instead of DivX. It's more customizable and has beat DivX out in almost every area. Instead of using MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (what .vob files use) would be a far better choice. Personally, if you have the space, I'd go with HuffYUV. Lossless data compression at a price (LOTS of space).

Kinda simple eh?

Grab a capture card that can capture to divx format. Since it is vhs, I don't think you would notice much of a problem.

It doesn't take a studeo genious to use that technology and all that is really required is to choose which medium you want to store it on. Divx solves the basic problem of getting it managable.

You can toss it on cdr, dvdr, or create a HD storage solution with protections and capacities for your needs.

Re:Hard drives or DVD's

Depends... I know old mac drives had a "sticktion" problem. Basically the drive's coating would harden, and cause the head to stick. Presummable, there is some form of lubricant in the drive that would break down. There could problems depending on where you store it. If a big enough magnetic field happens near it, your drive might have issues. There's also the problem of finding an interface card that will plug into the bus type you want. I know some guys who have "MLM" (pre-IDE) drives. Can't find anything to plug them into. Then there is the problem, of once you get it plugged in, where you gonna find something that can read the filesystem type? Once you read the filesystem type, will you be able to read the file format that's on there? Will the filesystem stand up to random bit failures? Will the compression go to hell due to errors? There is a lot that can go wrong between now and then. About your best bet is to make 3 copies every 2-5 years to the latest greatest cutting edge technology. Keep all of the copies, so keep the VCR tapes, the CDs, the DVD's, the flash cards, the Holo-cube storage, and all the other types, just in case you can find the old readers. Kirby

Transfering

Well, DVDs are said to have a shelf life of 50 years, VCDs I would not recomend, VHS tapes and Beta also become brittle. Multi-media backups wouldnt hurt, but if you're on a budget DVD and IDE HDs would probably be best. Remember, DVDs can be scratched so they must be preserved in pristine condition...well, thats my take (no pun intended)...

good luck

DV

I would consider DV as a good format for this purpose. Sony makes a series of combo DV/VHS decks (WV-DR5, WV-DR7, and WV-DR9). These have "one touch" dubbing from VHS to DV. You just insert both tapes and press "dub."

mpeg 4 - harddrive

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 [divx-digest.com] on capturing from vhs.

352 x 240, not a good idea

if you capture 240 lines you are effectively throwing away half your vertical resolution.

Re:352 x 240, not a good idea

Actually he did that when he put it on VHS.

"Typically VHS and 8 mm tape are rated at a vertical resolution of 240 lines, 3/4 inch SP at 325 lines, S-VHS and Hi8 at approximately 400 lines, Betacam SP and MII at close to 400 lines, and DVC at 500 lines (although some tests point to effective resolutions of around 400 lines)."

Re:mpeg 4 - harddrive

You know, this whole 352x240 == VHS resolution is such a farse. First, NTSC signals are analog, which means there is virtually infinite horizontal resolution. It's well known that NTSC has 525 lines, which is 262.5 lines per field. Most VCRs are specced at 260lines of resolution, but because they don't have any concept of pixels, it's largely based on the quality of the unit. There are many factors that influence the quality of the recording. Honestly, 720x540 is the minimum acceptable digital analogue of the NTSC spec.

The biggest problem with the analog to digital conversion is that most units do not convert the interlaced input into a progressive format before recording. Because of this the effective resolution of the digital copy is much degraded. If you want a semi-reasonable dub, you need to perform progressive conversion before downsampling the resolution. You will notice that many PVRs do this, I know that my Replay does.

The other problem with encoding to digital is the loss of the interframe data. There are 21 lines of information that contains things like captions and program data. These are not preserved by the traditional conversion process. This is where the PVRs get it right again. They will store the data in the interframe area.

The bottom line is that 1GB per hour of video is the bare minimum quality. 3GB per hour is better, realtime is closer to 4.5GB per hour. You need about 5-6Mbps encoding rate in MPEG to get decent video. 9Mbps is what Superbit is IIRC.

I'll step off my soapbox now...

Re:mpeg 4 - harddrive

First, NTSC signals are analog, which means there is virtually infinite horizontal resolution.

Oh for fucks sake would you freaking idiots stop it with this "infinite analog" bullshit. The NTSC standard allocates 4.2Mhz of bandwidth for the colour signal which works out to 450 "pixels" of horizontal resolution.

Read this [maxim-ic.com].

Ars Technica has a guide on this

How about the recently made Ars Technica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video [arstechnica.com]? It was made with exactly what you want to do in mind.

Re:Ars Technica has a guide on this

I would have to say the Ars dropped the ball with this article.. I would have suggested using a DV bridge, then compressing the DV stream into something like ISO MPEG2 or ISO MPEG4.

Dazzle has a $99 Bridge that works great. Composite in, DV out or DV in, Composite!

http://www.dazzle.com/products/hw_bridge.html [dazzle.com]

And, no I do not work for Dazzle.

For that much, send it out.

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...

It can't be done simply, cheaply, & with low l

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.

DV to HD or DLT

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.

Tricky decision..

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.

dvd recorder

Panasonic DVD Recorder [radioshack.com] .. 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...

Long term solution

Encode them to DiVX / Quicktime / etc and give them the name "Last Flight of The Osirisxxxx.divx" Where xxxx relates to your program contents.

Leave them on a P2P file sharing network and watch them fly - they will still be around in 20 or so years doing the rounds- whenever you need them again just download them using any P2P client...

MPEG, not divx

One of the biggest problems that you'll face a few years down the road is finding a player that'll read the format that you choose today. Do you really believe that $TrendyCodecDuJour will be around in 5 years, let alone 20?

MPEG-2 is used in current DVD players. For that alone, if you go digital, you should store the data as MPEG-2. It's also supported by pretty much anything that's capable of playing video.

If it were me, I'd use the copying sessions to decide what video really mattered to me. It's a chance to weed out some junk. Anything that I'd keep, I'd burn to DVD-R.

Tradeoff

I think you're going to have to make a tradeoff between something like this [ebay.com] (easy, but expensive) or something that requires a bit of work (like All-in-Wonder or Pinnacle capture). I have yet to see a solution that is easy AND cheap...

What I did.

I went out and got me a Dazzle 2 board and plugged my best VCR into it and ripped my VHS tapes to DVD. Thr prcess was painfully easy. The only thing I didn't like about it was the DVD authoring software. It was crap. I ended up using A program from ULead. It's not feature rich, but it's reasonably quick and it actually works.

This is not the BEST solution, but it is a very cost-effective solution, especially if you have an aversion to ATI produtcs like I do.

I did try using my Hauppauge Tuner card for recording, but results were less than what I liked and you had to convert to MPEG2 on your own.

DVD

I got a Phillips DVD-R for Christmas and I can honestly say that tape sucks. I've been able to transfer my old tapes to disc quite easily and it's not expensive. DVD-R's are like $.20 a piece, a small price to pay for long preservation and the ability to set up index points etc.

Time Base Corrector

I do this for a living [homemoviedepot.com].

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 [elitevideo.com] (also from b&h) [bhphotovideo.com] is also useful for this application. I like to put it before the TBC.

Regards,
Mark
[e-mail]

archival encoding

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.

Related Question

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?

You are not insane.

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.

ReplayTV

Low labour, cost, time: pick any two :)

If you picked low labour and time, try a ReplayTV [sonicblue.com]. Hook up your vcr to your replay, click record on the replay, start vcr playback, come back 2 hours later. Then get DvArchive [sourceforge.net] 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!

DVD Recoding Deck

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!

VHS to DVD and Sonic MyDVD

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.

If your willing to wait another 15-18 months ...

Blue laser DVD burners [com.com] 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...

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.

your data is doomed!

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...

What I'm doing with my 900 tapes ;)

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:

[e-mail]
A/V Utils for the Masses!!!
Curator of links at
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/

For info on the iMic:

http://griffintechnology.com

DVD-R is NOT expensive, it's now cheaper than VHS

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.

Don't count on your Princo discs lasting...

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.

4 Seconds of Googling results

"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.

Archival Mediums

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.

Outsource?

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.

Really wanna preserve it?

Capture it to MPEG and then change the name to "N_Portman.MPG". It'll never disappear off of Kazaa.

easy

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

Sooner or later you'll need to do another transfer

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.

Make sure you use a good Time Base Corrector!

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!

DV tapes / DVCAM bonus

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
~~~

Best burning option

Set the whole lot on fire and forget about it.

Leadtek WinFast Video Capture

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.

Degrading media vs the DMCA

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?

Not much talk about tape

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.

hdd and vhs

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.