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."

mpeg 4 - harddrive

[JamesSharman]

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.

Don't do it yourself

[ObviousGuy]

There are lots of companies that will do this (I did a quick google search and the results were good). Save yourself the hassle. Pay someone else to do this.

bttv + mencoder

[ddbsa]

cheap hardware, Free Software

lock in your quality with a high bitrate codec
or compress with divx and get about 2 hrs / gig

you can then burn to vcd, divxd (there are players emerging) or just feel good about having them all backed up til you decide you want change media

Re: All in Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I used an ATI 8500 AIW and a Sony DVD burner to convert my home movies (only about 60 hours of vhs-c). One important lesson I learned was to go through the whole process for a couple of tapes before capturing them all. What looked good on the computer screen looked like crap on a TV. Tweaking a few capture settings made all the difference (most notably the field order, AIW seems to use B first).

It did take a good bit of time to clean up the lead-in/lead-out of all my videos, but was well worth the effort. Now I have all my old home movies on DVD, with chapters and menus. The software I used (Ulead DVD factory) even puts slideshows of all my digital pics on the DVD.

archival encoding

[Herr_Nightingale]

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

[suwain_2]

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?

Try..

[Paladin84]

Try getting rid of it all. Do you really need every Star Trek and Quantum Leap episode on tape?

Re:Hard drives or DVD's

[Anonymous Coward]

Magnetic media are usually cited as having about a 10-year shelf life. It's a fairly common practice to refresh the data on such media every year or so, just to be sure. An operating hard drive lasts much less time, of course. But the bits will fade all on their own.

Optical media (CDs, DVDs, etc) are usually cited as lasting for 30-100 years.

There's also the factor of technological obsolescene. Will you still be able to find a, say, IDE interface to make the drive go in 10 years, or 30? (What if I told you I had an MFM or RLL or ESDI drive here with my data on it?) I think it's at least slightly more likely that a new device will exist to read obsolete media than will a controller for an obsolete device. But it's still a risk.

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

[jrl87]

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)

Re:ATI All In Wonder

[Skwirl]

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:Hard drives or DVD's

[ComputerSlicer23]

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

Re:DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

[ 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.

Re:What I'm doing with my 900 tapes ;)

[FredThompson]

wrt the comment somebody else made about capturing at 640x480:

video pixels are not square and 640x480 has no proper reationship to VHS resolutions. Capture at 720x480 and downsize. You're trying to fit a curve which means you want to sample at a multitude of the initial frequency then downsize to a proper video size.

640x480 would mean a distortion during the sample then a distortion when you change the size to be standards-compliant.

Then again, you could also get in a time machine and go beat some sense into the farmboy who invented TV so it would match computer resolutions and be progressive....But I digress ;)

Re:ATI All In Wonder

[MouseR]

The issue in this is the ink.

While ANCIENT paper laster long, current paper contains too much acid to be time-resistant like old paper (or better yet, vellum) are.

If you're rich enough to buy acid-free and chemical-free paper in large volume, then you have a chance. But then, the ink is also an issue.

Current ink-jet printer ink is way too fragile in daylight to be considered any useful for long time preservation.

Toner is better, but I've seen old toner-printed paper peeling some of their fused-in lines and characters. This might be because of the paper itself (acid again); I don't have evidence this is a generalized issue with toner-fused images, though, and until I saw that particular piece of paper, I hadn't imagined toner-printed work was subject to that.

Old paperwork, or vellum work, use animal ink, just as octopus ink, or special blends of coal and oils, or oils with coloring agents (usually mineral or vegetal based), such as those used in illuminated work done mostly by the church in the middle age.

So, I'm sorry to break your fun and totally ignore the amusement factor of your suggestion, but I think paper, as of today, isn't necessarily an option.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

[Johnno74]

Quite true, we probably won't be using x86 hardware in 20 years... but I bet whatever we are using will have more than enough horsepower to emulate it.

Look at the C64 emulator scene - I'd imagine that in 20 years Linux, WinNT and stuff will be regarded in the same way C64 is now.

Hell, with the likes of VMWare or VirtualPC we can emulate x86 with todays high-end hardware (yes I know, vmware isn't really emulation, its virtualisation. sue me)

frame drops

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Sooner or later you'll need to do another transfer

[ArcticCelt]

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.

Here's what I would do...

[Mr. Cancelled]

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 [bestbuy.com] ), and I run the output of this switcher through a signal enhancer (example: $50 [ebay.com]) 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 [showshifter.com] (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 [virtualdub.org]'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 [nero.com] . 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 [indigorose.com] so that your intended viewers can just pop it in a PC and go (another up and coming option here [sourceforge.net]). 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

What we need...

[Anonymous Squonk]

...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.

DV tapes / DVCAM bonus

[Rui del-Negro]

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
~~~

Re:MPEG, not divx

[zora]

Do you really believe that $TrendyCodecDuJour will be around in 5 years, let alone 20?

Probably, There are a whole lotta ambitious folks out there that have nothing better to do than to keep old shit alive e.g. Commodore 64 [google.com] or even a damn lisa [sunder.net]. A lisa for christs sakes!! Anyways I doubt that whatever format you choose to use someone, somewhere will have a player for it.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

[iocat]

Here's the brutal irony about the Apple IIe, C64, and TRS-80: Those old DD (double density, not high density) 5.25 inch floppy disks were so over engineered that as long as the data is refreshed once in a while, the media can last more than 90 years based on tests, versus a usual life of like 10 years for a CD and even less for a CD-R. I recently booted up some Apple II floppies that hadn't been accessed since 1985 with no problem.

To get back on topic, converting the videos to digital is the best bet. Then write some DVDs, keep them on your HD (moving and converting them as needed when you switch machines), put some on backup tape, etc. The real secret is redundancy.

DVD Conversion

[hsa]

"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 [dvddemystified.com]) 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.

Re:Related Question

[bill_mcgonigle]

There's more work done on extracting stills using this technique, but the technique could probably be applied to video, if you can get the synchronization right.

I've had good luck capuring the same frame several times and running it through an averaging filter on a binary combination basis. Some astronomy software packages have averaging filters. If you take 8 stills, average 1 and 2 to a, 3 and 4 to b, 5 and 6 to c, 7 and 8 to d, a and b to A, c and d to B, then A and B into the final image. Seems to give very nice results for me so far.

If you want to in for the big dollars high-quality solution, Salient Stills [salientstills.com] makes software that will do some image morphing and acheive a very nice result.

My favorite part of these techniques is that the PhD candidate who was leading my image processing class in school was condescending and indignant when I suggested doing similar things as a project back in the early 90's. "It's not mathematically possible to derive more information than is present in the source signal, so this cannot possibly work, pick a better topic." :) Dumbass.

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

[1u3hr]

Keep each cassette in its case, in a ZipLock baggie, with a fresh silica gel packet (like hard drives are shipped). Avoid temperature extremes and sudden temperature changes.

Too late for me... in Hong Kong for several months we have 95% humidity. All my "old" (more than 6 months) tapes have mould growing inside the cassettes. Same happens to hard disks if you aren't using them. Even my monitor gets freaky and turns itself off several times before it warms up and dries out. If you can't guarantee a controlled environment, go to an optical disk format -- if they get wet, you just carefully wipe them down and they're fine. Even when VCDs and DVDs are a legacy format, the drives are so much cheaper and numerous than tape machines you'll always be able to find a reader.

hdd and vhs

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:Better choice: DMR-HS2

[brucehoult]

Use the Hard drive to edit, pull out commercials, then burn to DVD.

Nice idea, but I actually *like* having a few 20 year old TV commercials in there. Talk about nostalgia!

Much of the stuff I've bothered to keep for 20 years is now starting to become availabel on pre-recorded DVDs, so I'm not sure it's worth copying myself. But I've got a 17" 1 GHz iMac with a DVD burner and I'm playing to see if it's worth-while (trying both iDVD and Toast Titanium).

Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years?

[hayse.in.oz]

Some years ago I had a problem with "stiction" (not my term...) on old R-to-R tapes, and I rang the local (Oz) office of the manufacturer (Ampex), who offered similar advice. They could (at a price) cook the tapes and return them to me. I would then have some time (not forever) to transfer them to other tapes or suitable media (CD burners were novel and expensive in those days).

He also advised me that the local Blind Society had had a similar problem with Talking Books, and that someone there (I had a name but never followed through, so I lost it) had had success using a microwave! (Obviously the tapes were not on metal reels - he he)

Sadly, I didn't follow through, and now have even more of a problem....but at least it was consistent advice.

It seems the "stiction" is caused by the plastisers or binders (one or the other) oozing, and sticking layers of tape together. I have had some where the coating falls right off as the tape is wound/unwound. Most critically at the end of the tape near the hub of the reel. Advice in other posts to regularly run tapes from reel to reel to even up pressures and generally loosen them up would seem good advice. I knew it all those years ago (more than 20) but always thought I'd be listening to them so frequently it wouldn't matter. Then along came CDs with all their convenience......

Hayse (down here in Oz)

Media longevity

[slim]

Well, it depends.

In 1990 I wrote a travelogue of a school exchange trip to Russia, and when I got home I typed it up on my BBC Micro, which I saved onto 5.25" floppy. I printed it on a dot matrix, and gave photocopies to anyone who was interested.

Last year, my Mum found the floppy and gave it to me. Admittedly it hadn't been carefully stored in ideal conditions. I started investigating ways of retrieving the data.

It turned out I had a couple of options.

The first option was to get hold of a 5.25" floppy drive for a PC, make sure it could be programmed at a low enough level, then get hold of some software that could drive it in the same way as a BBC, and read ADFS filesystems. Tricky.

The second way was to get hold of a real BBC Micro, and a 5.25" floppy drive for it. I would then have to build a serial cable for it (the BBC's RS232 port is a DIN), and type in a program to pump a file down the serial port (no other way to get the file on).

In the end, I found someone on the 'Net who offered to transfer BBC files to PC for a nominal fee of £5, so I sent him my disk (for no apparent reason, he then offered to do it for free! What a nice man). He found the disk to be blank. Even with a sector editor, he found nothing.

Lucky I didn't put all that effort in myself.

Even if I'd got the file off, I would have ended up with a WordWise file which no easily accessible software could read. Fortunately WordWise is ASCII combined with binary markup, so it should have been easy enough to hand-edit into shape, but other kinds of data would have been a real problem.

We're lucky enough today to have open standards, but you still need to think ahead. Will I be able to do anything with DivX;) in 20 years' time? Will I be able to read the filesystem I've stored it on? Will the media still be OK?

I'd suggest using MPEG2 because it's not going away, and there are freeware decoders out there in any case.

Whatever you choose as your storage medium for viewing, keep an archival copy on something reliable: backup tape for example.

Every 2 years or so, review the archive situation: maybe drives for that MO tape format you chose are becoming hard to find; best transfer the data to a different medium... this will get cheaper every time you do it, since storage will get cheaper while your archive stays the same size.

Stay analog

[Toshito]

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...