Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > February > 07 > Entry
The VHS purge and digitization project
Photo by Sung Park / AMERICAN-STATESMAN
On Friday night, when I probably should have been playing video games or watching TV, I instead got on one of my strange late-night productivity kicks. I started getting rid of our huge, unnecessary library of useless VHS tapes.
It began a month ago when my wife and I decided to buy a new desk (or two; we’re still looking) for our home office. We’re looking to clear up clutter and get rid of old computer desks that we bought when cheap particle-board furniture was all we could afford. We decided to get rid of all of the home office stacks of old CD-ROMs, printer paper and other unsightly messes. We have lots of shelves and drawers in our home office (we had them custom built after we bought our house to hold all our DVDs, CDs and books), but a big chunk of those shelves is also taken up by perhaps 100 VHS tapes.
Mixed in there are store-bought movies like “The Piano” and “Saturday Night Fever” (hey, don’t judge) along with stacks of VHS tapes containing episodes of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (remember when we were circulating the tapes?), recordings of old Must-See TV circa 1997, along with a few important bits of content we’d want to keep (the first ultrasound when we met Lilly; my wife’s college graduation recording).
I don’t know what kind of mental block I had, but for years, I’ve resisted the thought of going through these tapes and getting rid of what we don’t need. It’s taken the transition to DVD, then Blu-ray and now on-demand streaming video to make me realize how little we need the tapes. A week ago, my daughter watched “Wallace and Gromit” via Netflix (we own it on VHS) and I was taken aback. We haven’t even had the VCR hooked up to our home theater in three or four years. When I showed her the boxed set of VHS tapes containing the shorts, splashed with wonderful illustrations of the characters, she showed no interest. “Do you want to play with the box, at least?” I asked. She did not.
Purge and capture
My home PC doesn’t currently have a video card that can capture video, so I hopped online and bought a PC/Mac-compatible device called the iGrabber.
It’s a small, white device that has inputs on one end (RCA and S-Video) and a USB connection on the other end. You can connect it to a VCR, DVD player or even a Roku box, I learned, to capture practically any video to your Windows or Mac computer.
It arrived a few days after I ordered it online for under $40 and though it was tricky to install (the disc it came with didn’t install correct; I had to install fresh drivers off the manufacturer’s website), everything was soon working and I was soon ready to start digitizing tapes.
But first, I purged. In one night, I went through about 35 VHS tapes, inserting them into the VCR that has until recently been stuffed in our office closet. I fast forwarded past old episodes of “Seinfeld,” past recordings of “Mr. Show” and “Prime Suspect,” past documentaries I never bothered to watch from PBS, just to make sure there wasn’t something important I was throwing away.
I was surprised by how much stuff I had held on to that can now easily, often instantly, be accessed online. Even the stuff that’s not on DVD can be tracked down elsewhere without too much trouble. Almost none of the tapes were worth holding onto.
Like the business-card scanning project that I started a year and a half ago (and only recently completed), going through these VHS tapes has taken me back to what I watched 10-15 years ago and has also made me regret not doing this sooner.
I separated the commercial VHS tapes into a pile to donate and put the blank tapes into a separate box. My current plan is to send a box of tapes to Greendisk for proper recycling.
Then I’ll go through the process of digitizing video, either to keep on a hard drive (with a backup of course), or to burn to DVD. Maybe I’ll do both just to be safe; the software that comes with the iGrabber offers an option to convert straight to DVD disc.
By the time I went to bed around 1 a.m. on Friday, I had cleared an entire shelf (out of three) containing our depressing VHS library.
Things I’ve learned:
- VHS tapes are heavy. I didn’t remember a stack of tapes weighing so much.
- A VCR without a remote is a sad, sad creature.
- Even for tapes that haven’t been touched in about 10 years, the video quality was surprisingly good. I was expecting much more deterioration, but most of tapes I have are still very watchable.
- Capturing video can take up a lot of hard drive space, but since VHS video maxes out as a resolution of about 240 x 480, you really don’t need to save it in a huge, high-def format. I’m experimenting with this to see what looks best.
- Those cheap cardboard VHS sleeves and the label stickers are still annoying.
Have you gone through a similar VHS purge? Did you do it years ago? Let me know in the comments. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.
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By Randolph Miller
February 8, 2011 12:44 AM | Link to this
I did my purge years ago. I had bought a new computer so I specifically got one that had a good video capture card built in. I used that to record all my tapes. I only had a CD burner, not a DVD burner, at the time so each tape had to fit in less than 700MB. The quality is about what I'd expect from VHS. I didn't have the heart to trash the tapes though. I still have them all!