[HN Gopher] Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tape...
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Archivists are uploading hundreds of random VHS tapes to the
internet
Author : happy-go-lucky
Score : 114 points
Date : 2020-02-28 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| josteink wrote:
| The amount of RedLetterMedia comments in this thread is seriously
| telling about the correlation between hackers and b-movie fans.
|
| And oh yeah. Guilty myself.
| ggffryuuj wrote:
| My step mom was recently going through a bunch of old vhs tapes
| looking for wedding footage of her mother's wedding. 99% of the
| tapes are television from the early 2000s. She was going to just
| throw them away! So now I've got 30 tapes of early 2000s gold.
| I'm going to digitize them and upload them to YouTube.
| Zenst wrote:
| With the number of people chastised in later life for old tweets,
| this could be interesting.
|
| However, it's such recordings that have saved many an old TV show
| as the studios reused tapes as well. Kinda how few Doctor Who
| episodes got saved.
| subdane wrote:
| There's a great doc that came out last year on Marion Stokes, who
| recorded decades of television. Her footage is being added to The
| Internet Archive https://blog.archive.org/tag/marion-stokes/
| WalterBright wrote:
| My father left me several hundred 6 hour VHS tapes. I had no idea
| what was on them because he'd kept an index, but it was mostly
| missing.
|
| There was a lot of interesting random stuff on them, mostly from
| the 80's. The bits of stuff he recorded is like a peek inside his
| brain :-)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| There would be all sorts of weird stuff on them.
|
| Young people probably would not know that watching VHS tapes
| anything could happen because they got reused.
|
| So you'd be watching a movie and halfway through it would
| suddenly switch over to a shuttle launch or a music video or a
| documentary or something cause someone decided to record
| something else at that point.
|
| I once recorded a three hour British detective show. I watched it
| for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit
| and the tape ran out.
|
| It's great that they are archiving the old content but I don't
| miss VHS in the least.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to
| reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out.
|
| I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago.
| The reaction in the comments was something less than amused.
|
| (Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly
| non-important video in order to record...what was it, the first
| X-files episode? A _Wings_ episode about a favorite jet?
| Something like that. But man, she was not happy.)
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| I prefer RedLetterMedia's use of VHS tapes. They use them to play
| a terrible version of Jenga, where they watch all the random VHS
| tapes collected by the "winner".
|
| Also for some reason, Macaulay Culkin seems to be hanging out
| with them a lot. Maybe Milwaukie is just that much fun?
|
| "Junka" -> https://youtu.be/9M39zY9OXFA
| cabaalis wrote:
| The best part about RLM's Best of the Worst is that they all
| seem to hate doing it. There was one episode where they got
| terribly drunk and had to stop filming and come back a few days
| later.
| jcomis wrote:
| I love stuff like this. Here's one of my favorites:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject
| themodelplumber wrote:
| You reminded me of this spy film, which starts with a shot of a
| VHS recorder!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFYFT1nqp8
| ris wrote:
| Related: rescuing historic teletext pages from VHS recordings of
| broadcast TV: https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext
| allovernow wrote:
| How does one archive data for long term storage in 2020? From
| what little I've read, all of the media accessable to the layman
| has an archive lifetime of less than 30 years before physical
| degradation- NAND, tape, disc, whatever. That makes for a brittle
| civilization when the vast majority of our knowledge is stored on
| media and would be unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global
| calamity.
| aglavine wrote:
| I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time, as
| well as older vinyl discs.
|
| I'm sure I own 20 year old DVDs in same condition.
| iamphilrae wrote:
| Audio CDs can survive a bit of degradation to the odd data
| bits here or there; the music will just skip the millisecond
| of missing data and your ears won't notice. Likewise with
| vinyl. Data discs on the other hand have the issue that if a
| single data bit is lost, a whole file could be corrupted,
| especially if it's a zipped file.
|
| In addition, printed audio CDs are of a different build than
| CD-Rs which have been found to not be as resistant to
| moisture and light.
| jandrese wrote:
| It takes more than a single bit--there are Huffman codes
| built into the spec, but it is certainly possible for the
| bits to degrade enough to render a sector or even the whole
| disc unreadable.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| If you're serious about using optical media as archival
| storage, you can mitigate this by incorporating your own
| error correcting codes into the data storage format.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| same, but I've also seen some cheaper makes of CDRs break
| down after 20 years and the storage layer crack etc.
| sigstoat wrote:
| quite. the writable discs don't last nearly as long. i had
| a pile of writable DVDs that were unreadable 8 years later
| when i went back to fetch the data from them.
| Seenso wrote:
| > I have 30 year old CDs that play as good as the first time,
| as well as older vinyl discs.
|
| Mass produced CDs are produced using a different process than
| the one consumer CDR writers use, and they are thus a much
| more stable storage medium. The data-containing layer is
| literally formed out of metal using a kind of mold: https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_manufacturing#Ele...
|
| CDRs are written by altering a layer of dye with a laser, and
| that dye is very vulnerable to chemical breakdown:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#Physical_characteristics
| allovernow wrote:
| Yep...not to mention all discs are ultimately made of
| plastic which is subject to environmental degradation -
| primarily oxidation from atmosphere and UV damage, both
| which can lead to yellowing/clouding of the transparent
| medium, and eventually brittleness and fracture.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| You can extend the lives of writable and rewritable optical
| media by proper storage. The key is to avoid light and heat
| as much as possible, to keep the dyes stable. I'm not sure
| about 30 years, but you can probably get 10 out of properly
| stored optical media. See the following advice:
|
| >A disc should always be handled by grasping its outer
| edges, center hole or center hub clamping area. Avoid
| flexing the disc, exposing it to direct sunlight, excessive
| heat and/or humidity, handle it only when being used and do
| not eat, drink and smoke near it. Discs should be stored in
| jewel cases rather than sleeves as cases do not contact the
| discs' surfaces and generally provide better protection
| again scratches, dust, light and rapid humidity changes.
| Once placed in their cases discs can be further protected
| by keeping them in a closed box, drawer or cabinet. For
| long-term storage and archival situations it is advisable
| to follow manufacturer instructions. For further
| information consult the international standards for
| preserving optical media (ISO 18925:2002, Imaging materials
| -- optical disc media -- storage practices). [0]
|
| ---
|
| [0] : http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa12.htm
| Seenso wrote:
| > You can extend the lives of writable and rewritable
| optical media by proper storage. The key is to avoid
| light and heat as much as possible, to keep the dyes
| stable. I'm not sure about 30 years, but you can probably
| get 10 out of properly stored optical media.
|
| Though, if you care about longevity, it might be better
| to use a technology like M-DISC. It uses a different
| recording technology to "[burn or etch] a permanent hole
| in the material, rather than changing the color of a
| dye."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC#Materials_technology
| allovernow wrote:
| Honestly, paper lasts thousands of years. Maybe the solution is
| microprint and OCR? How long does microfiche last?
| quag wrote:
| After going down this rabbit hole, I concluded that M-Disc is
| the right trade off at the moment. They're not too expensive,
| the writers are available, they'll last, and they could be
| reverse engineered if discovered in the future.
|
| The second choice is using hard drives (easily available) and
| every so often power them up and copy data to new drives.
|
| If you have a small quantity of data, then encode and laser
| print onto paper, with a font designed for optical scanning or
| QR code's.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
| eitland wrote:
| Seems hard to get hold of M-DISCs now.
|
| Are they still produced?
| zoonosis wrote:
| I see many listings for them on US Amazon.
| Seenso wrote:
| > They're not too expensive, the writers are available,
| they'll last, and they could be reverse engineered if
| discovered in the future.
|
| IIRC, the _writers_ for M-DISCs are special, but the _reader_
| can be any DVD or Blu-ray drive.
|
| Honestly, I think the biggest consideration for digital
| archival media isn't so much the longevity of the media, but
| the future availability of equipment to read it.
|
| That's one of the biggest benefits of paper, IMHO. Besides
| being very well-understood material, nearly everyone is born
| with the necessary reading equipment and the decoding
| software is very common.
| reificator wrote:
| > _the decoding software is very common._
|
| [Citation needed]
| pmiller2 wrote:
| You want a citation for the claim that many people are
| literate and/or can visually process images?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| It's a joke.
|
| Because some people can't read. Har har har :)
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > [Citation needed]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy
|
| There you go.
| allovernow wrote:
| I also came across M-Disc but iirc there is no real
| verification of the longevity claims outside of marketing
| from the manufacturer.
|
| >The second choice is using hard drives (easily available)
| and every so often power them up and copy data to new drives.
|
| I suppose the question is whether doing so could remain under
| the error correction threshold indefinitely, since there will
| be errors accumulating both during copying and over time in
| cold storage. If manufacture of new drives stops, it also
| isn't clear to me if only the data stored on them has a 30
| year life or if the medium itself decays regardless of
| whether it is in use or not.
|
| In theory I imaging keeping an unused NAND or even magnetic
| drive in cool dry storage should preserve it's physical
| integrity indefinitely...
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I came across this, which describes a "torture test" more
| rigorous than most accelerated life tests:
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/torture-testing-
| the-1000-year-....
|
| TL;DR: The CD-R's didn't survive the process, but the
| M-discs did, with their data intact.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do what I do - copy it forward every couple years onto new
| media.
|
| My oldest files are from 1977 - proof:
|
| https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10
|
| My files have gone from magtape to 8" floppy to various 5.25"
| floppy to 3.5 floppy to zip drives to cdroms to dvdroms, then
| to hard disks of ever-increasing size.
|
| (My old hard drives are completely unreadable now.)
|
| I'm sorry I never kept my punch card decks. I'm sure there was
| nothing but crap on them, but it would be fun to see what kind
| of crap it was.
| tialaramex wrote:
| If you want data to survive you've always needed to copy it.
| Digital storage just makes that easier to do in bulk. Copying
| Bibles was a full time task for huge teams of monks but you can
| (and should) make backups routinely on a daily or weekly basis
| with barely a thought.
| crmrc114 wrote:
| This is a huge problem for any data- https://www.theatlantic.
| com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
|
| Even communication of a simple warning message for yucca
| mountain and WIPP proved how hard it was going to be to
| communicate danger over 10000 years from now.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
| time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| The LOCKSS project is an approach used in university networks
| around the world to preserve research data for the long term.
|
| https://www.lockss.org/
|
| The big issue isn't the technology, it's the vast amounts of
| data that are being created at this point. Storage is cheap,
| but the labor that goes into managing the longevity of
| datasets isn't: it's essentially continually keeping your
| infrastructure up-to-date whilst also ensuring the integrity
| and readability of the datasets as was intended when they
| were first created. It implies regular checks of bit
| integrity, readability of your data, checking that you can
| restore your data, ensuring that you can access the data,
| making sure that you can find the data and everything is
| catalogued, ensuring that you have the rights and license to
| use the data,...
|
| When it comes to physical archives of the past, you have to
| be aware of your own survivorship bias. We only have an idea
| of what is preserved to the extent that documents are
| archived, recorded and thus discoverable.
|
| What we do not know is how much knowledge and information was
| lost to the past. When you look at documents, you're always
| limited to what's there. And when you hit the boundaries of
| what's there, then you may have indications that there was
| far more in the past, but you have to conclude: sadly that's
| lost. Either because it is physically lost, or because it
| might be somewhere in the archive but it's not registered yet
| in a catalogue and therefor not accessible.
|
| That's why I think that making backups with "barely a
| thought" is only as effective as to the extent to which you
| have organized your data, used accessible / readable data
| formats and filesystems.
|
| For instance, most people these days generate endless streams
| of photos with their digital devices, which then get
| automagically uploaded to cloud services. And that's great.
| The downside of that is that your ability to find a specific
| picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to the extent
| that you were able to organize and add specific metadata to
| that picture. Let alone, if you did take the opportunity to
| do so.
|
| That's why I advise people to sit down, and take time to go
| through their digital albums to pick the nicest or most
| important pictures they have, print them out on quality photo
| paper in several copies and store them with labels in albums
| at different physical locations.
|
| When it comes to longevity, your physical albums will still
| be accessible to your descendants some 70 or 100 years down
| the line. Something that isn't remotely guaranteed by cloud
| solutions.
|
| And that's just photos. Consider e-mail or the countless of
| closed messaging apps you have been using these past years.
| And then scale the problem beyond the personal but to
| entirety of large organizations, many of which are required
| by law to keep an archive of their documents, correspondence
| and so on, not just for decades but sometimes also for
| perpetuity.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > The downside of that is that your ability to find a
| specific picture from 5 years ago is entirely restricted to
| the extent that you were able to organize and add specific
| metadata to that picture.
|
| I disagree with the premise that we should spend time
| manually organizing and tagging our pictures all that much.
|
| The metadata that the phone adds to pictures - time stamp
| and GPS coordinates - is already sufficient in a lot of
| cases for finding pictures that I look for.
|
| And where that metadata is insufficient, improved search
| powered by machine learning will come to the rescue. And
| not just tomorrow but even today.
|
| Just the other day, a few weeks back, I was standing in the
| kitchen that I share with two other people and I wondered
| to myself whether the kitchen knife in the dishwasher was
| mine (I'd bought a new one a few days prior but couldn't
| remember what it looked like). I take _a lot_ of picture of
| random stuff and mundane things, most of which I never
| bother to organize or tag or anything. I pull up my phone,
| search my photo library for "knife" and lo and behold, I
| did take a picture of it when I bought it and my phone has
| recognized the object in the photo to be a knife so it was
| able to find it for me.
|
| Important files and photos I do organize. Specifically for
| three reasons:
|
| 1. Ease of access.
|
| 2. Grouping related data together.
|
| 3. Tying photos and other data to abstract concepts like
| ideas for possible games or products.
|
| So I am not advocating no organization or tagging at all.
|
| But I think a lot of people are unaware or at least haven't
| really incorporated the distinction between information
| that is already present in the data, and information that
| must be manually added. So they spend a lot of time
| manually creating folder structures that encode information
| which could already be automatically derived from the data
| itself.
|
| As for messages in closed apps, I just screenshot them. And
| I am relying on OCR technology to be or become good enough
| to refind those messages in the future that way if the
| platform itself is gone by then or the messages are not on
| the platform itself or hard to find on the platform itself
| for whatever reason.
|
| I do wish though, that iOS would automatically tag
| screenshots with the name of the app that the screenshot
| was taken in. And I think it would be cool if the
| screenshots were stored as SVG with pure text and vector
| shapes plus embedded bitmaps, so that the whole OCR thing
| could be side-stepped.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Digital storage depends on a long and complicated chain of
| formats, standards, technologies, businesses, software,
| services etc which come and go every decade or two, or even
| more often. Any of it is lost, and your archive isn't an
| archive anymore. So to store something long-term, you have to
| eliminate single points of failure, such as encodings, formats,
| and even human languages. It can be completely non-obvious, and
| the physical media isn't the most important one.
|
| Naturally, "civilizational scale archival" is only feasible for
| a proper archival organization such as a museum, a library or
| an archive. As a person, you can't have this. You can use the
| archival-grade media like M-Disc, but don't expect to put
| something on it and recover it 50 years later easily. You have
| to design the process to validate and migrate the data every
| once in a while. Digital storage can't offer something
| comparable to a simple printed photo.
|
| _> when the vast majority of our knowledge ... would be
| unrecoverable just 3 decades after a global calamity._
|
| The vast majority of our knowledge is encoded in the societal
| and economic context. There's simply no way to translate it to
| any media, and any disruption would be the end of it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Do what archivists do - copy.
|
| The challenge is keeping things accessible. Only copying does
| that for electronic media. That includes getting things like
| photos printed.
| allovernow wrote:
| How many times can you copy digital media before it degrades
| beyond error correction? I don't know the error rate per
| copied bit.
|
| I think this is an excellent place for neural networks. They
| can preserve vast amounts of data compactly for many data
| types because they statistically compress high level abstract
| data which can then be used to fill in regions with high
| error rate, although if you did that at a large scale you'd
| probably end up with some constant error rate fluctuating
| around the average true value.
|
| All indications point to the fact that we seem to be working
| against the unstoppable Force of entropy - indefinite error
| free preservation of data is ultimately impossible.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Considering we can read parchments thousands of years old,
| and stone tablets going back even further, perhaps we
| should focus efforts on copying what we can to the time-
| tested preserved data formats.
| xvector wrote:
| > How many times can you copy digital media before it
| degrades beyond error correction? I don't know the error
| rate per copied bit.
|
| I am not sure I understand. Isn't the error rate zero? And
| wouldn't you be using checksums to verify perfect copies?
| [deleted]
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Is there an easy way to download results from that vault in mass
| (not having to click into each item)? Or is that not available?
|
| EDIT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-
| downloader... - It looks like that's a solid option to use a
| Chrome extension for it.
| humaniania wrote:
| For random Chrome extensions, I use a sandbox session (windows
| 10 feature), just in case.
| smhenderson wrote:
| I'm almost afraid to write this as I fear it will be removed soon
| and am surprised it hasn't been already but this was the first
| thing I looked for...
|
| https://archive.org/details/star-wars-ONTV-Early-80s/Star+Wa...
| sproketboy wrote:
| Cool. But I was looking for the Christmas Special. ;)
| themodelplumber wrote:
| If you haven't already, search for "vhsrip" on the same site...
| pkroll wrote:
| To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a torrent
| of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you can get the
| originals, these days.
| smhenderson wrote:
| Oh, I agree, but it's still a nice blast from the past
| watching it this way. I was 10 when this came on TV and I
| still remember the thrill of watching it. I was five when it
| came out in theaters. I had an older brother who got to go
| see it there and he kept telling me how awesome it was but I
| had to wait five years to see it!
|
| So this is more of a "oh yeah, that's what TV used to look
| like" moment than an actual "I want to watch the original
| Star Wars" again...
|
| I have a friend at work who actually scored a pristine, never
| opened VHS copy and of course we ripped that sucker open and
| watched the day he got it. And we go back once in a while and
| watch it again, sometimes running it along side the new ones
| so we can spot and discuss the differences. Fun stuff on a
| Saturday night!
| Seenso wrote:
| > To hell with that ugliness, go all-out and look for a
| torrent of Star Wars Despecialized Editions. As good as you
| can get the originals, these days.
|
| The true original is the one my parents taped off of TV when
| I was a kid, commercials and all.
| karatestomp wrote:
| Team Negative 1's scan & restorations of 35mm prints are my
| favorites. Empire's not done yet, but the other two are.
| csours wrote:
| Red Letter Media fans rejoice!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igaLv7ro8o
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(page generated 2020-02-28 23:00 UTC)