Im torn. On one hand yes everything is available digitally. On the other I like having hard copies and not thinking about backing up 3 hard drives and random hard drive failure and managing an even larger library on a computer…its nice just to have the media exist. And what happens when our ability to own media disappears (which looks to be a very real possibility).

They do take up space. I may keep the ones I really like and get rid of others.

I easily have over 300. Along with dvds, but im keeping those.

  • YeahIgotskills2@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.

    We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.

    In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.

    Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.

    :::

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I think you should keep physical media. I once bought a digital copy of a pretty obscure record from Google Play Music when you could still buy records from them, and eventually it changed to YouTube Music, and the record just vanished from my collection despite me having bought and paid for it. I’ve heard of other stories like this too. The companies just decide not to offer it anymore and it’s gone.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    Of course not. The bigger problem is that VHS, like most magnetic analog media, decays. Most of those tapes have likely lost a ton of fidelity compared to when they were new and they’ll only get worse.
    I wouldn’t scrap them but I’d also consider archiving tapes without current digital copies to DVD’s or video files.

  • Just because VHS goes bad, I’d suggest ripping to dvd or blu-ray (too keep the physical feel) which should get you another 15+ years of storage in a compact fashion, more If kept properly (my ps2 games still work after 23 years, is my source on that).

    My uncompressed rips (via OBS) from VHS are around 35 GB, perfect use case for a BD-R.

    I know I’ll probably get shit for this comment because “optical media bad” but I don’t care.

      • There is absolutely better ways to do it, but I have an HDMI VCR and a capture card from goodwill that was $10 total.

        For now its fine, I’m not burning physicals, its just bytes on a platter, I do need a VHS digitizer though.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          yeah but the blue ray disks must be expensive. can’t OBS use the capture cards source directly? v4l2 or anything?

          how do you make the image visible on your screen, to begin with?

          • My VHS player is HDMI, I feed that into an HDMI splitter (to bypass HDCP) then into a USB capture card.

            OBS displays the capture card as though it were a camera input. I record this while it is playing, and export to MKV so I can add web sourced SRTs in after the fact.

            I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but this works for me.

  • Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    So they’re slowly rotting (I mean, not rotting but you know what I mean). It’d be wise to back them up digitally if better digital copies are hard to come by.

    But a couple additional thoughts:

    1. Whenever you actually watch one of them, put it back on the shelf backwards/upside-down. Wait up to six months. Anything on the shelf that isn’t backwards/upside-down gets put in the ‘don’t keep’ pile.

    2. If you’re looking for a hobby, don’t want to keep them but don’t want to toss them right away, you could play around with … idk exactly you call it, but video mixing? A couple VCRs, some sketchy looking hobbyist tech from Etsy, and a capture card, and you can play around with multiple analogue video sources and noise introduction to make some cool as fuck visuals. Actually looks hella fun, it’s high on my post-divorce distraction list. Use 'em till they’re dust for this purpose or you get bored. If you want to squeeze more life out of them afterwards, there’s lots of crafts you can do with old VHS bodies and tape.

    Caveat: At minimum, if you have old VCR recordings, back that shit up ASAP. Old commercials and TV shows (particularly super local stuff) are of massive interest to a certain type of person, who would appreciate your efforts. This goes double for cam footage/recordings of live events.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    VHS is low resolution and degrades over time, no reason to keep it unless you have tapes of things that don’t exist on better formats.

    • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Yeah, a backup that gradually destroys itself on such a short timescale isn’t much of a backup.

    • iegod@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Plus if you’re worried about ownership, just remember there arr always other acquisition methods.

  • Libb@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    Allow me to share a personal experience with digital.

    I’m well into my 50s and for many years I have been an avid books collector (much into rare editions). In the early 00s, I started reading… ebooks almost exclusively. Because I wanted to make my life much simpler and less focused on materialism. So, save very few books I truly wanted to keep with me I donated my personal library to a charity. And started reading (and purchasing) ebooks.

    FF some twenty years later, approx in 2023. I have been reading ebooks almost exclusively.

    I kinda like my various Kindles readers, and my iPads too. I’m not ‘happy’ to own a digital library (I have always loved the book object) but it’s so practical there is no discussing it. My entire library used to fill almost all rooms in our home, it can now fit in the palm of my hand. Great. But then, one day I suddenly realize I don’t really own the ebooks I purchase on Amazon (Amazon can and is legally allowed to delete them from our devices). WTF? Another day, I realize my ebooks can be remotely updated. So far, I had no issue with books being edited in order to remove typos and stuff like that but that day I realized a book could also be remotely edited to change its content, say to remove a word that would now be considered offensive… Without me having any legal ability to prevent that. So, in order to protect my property, I learn about removing drm. But then I realize all I’m reading habits are also being monitored and tracked by ‘my’ devices and send back to Amazon or Apple for marketing and data analysis. WTF?

    I looked at my digital library and realized it never was mine. Most of those ebooks I had purchased for years on big retail platforms like Amazon and Apple they never were mine. I was merely renting a right to read them (that’s not always like that with ebooks purchased on some smaller/independent and DRM-free platforms but the bulk of my purchases were made on Amazon, and then on Apple). Looking at ‘my’ devices and knowing they were spying on me, I decided this was not the world I wanted to live in. It is something I discuss in more details on my blog, but simply put: upon realizing that I decided to quit reading ebooks almost entirely and move back to print (even for magazines and newspapers). Books I can fully own (no one can remotely delete or edit them from my bookshelves) and that don’t spy on me.

    And, at last getting back to your point, I did the same with with movies, series and music. I cancelled all my streaming subscriptions, all of them, dusted my old DVDs and CDS, and started purchasing new (or used) discs again to complete it. I’m not a collector anymore, as I strictly limit the size of my personal library, but I have not looked back and do not miss streaming or digital access.

    Physical medias are great as they give us full ownership (we can even resell or gave them away), they don’t track us, don’t spy on us, can’t be remotely edited or deleted. They don’t require Internet access, nor a monthly subscription.

    If you have room to store your tapes somewhere, why not keep them? If you don’t, well then it’s a question of deciding what is more important to keep in that limited space and tapes can very easily not be that important ;)

    edit: clarifications.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      Went back to buying CDs to rip them.
      But I’m usually only buying what I really like.

      Collecting physical, listening digital.

    • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      You’re honestly a far more forgiving man than me. My bitterness towards the same realization you had is what drove me to piracy. To me, I was playing by the rules and losing to the corporations that kept getting away with cheating and of no one well enforce the rule then it isn’t one. I don’t pirate to make a grand stand, I do it because I’m petty and powerless and that’s all I can do to enjoy the media I love.

      If you still have all those ebooks and readers, there are ways around all the muck that can give them to you for real. Though honestly I think you have the healthier view.

      • Libb@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        I dare say we shared the same bitterness (and anger) in realizing that absurd situation they created. But it also happens I’m getting old, well into my 50s, and have quite a few severe health issues making it an almost certain fact that I won’t last indefinitely . Knowing that, I’d rather not waste whatever time I have left dealing with such nonsense. So pirating is not the best option for me but it’s certainly not something I would frown upon or discourage anyone from doing if they wanted to.

        If you still have all those ebooks and readers, there are ways around all the muck that can give them to you for real.

        I do. But I also realized I would never be able to read those ebooks as comfortably without using a device whose behavior (aka what it tracks and reports back to its maker) I can’t, or not easily, control. The only way I now read my ebooks is on my Linux computer using the Foliate epub reader (or Calibre, for all other file formats) because I know Linux and Free/libre software/apps are much more trustworthy than anything else. Alas, reading on a computer is often a lot less comfortable than reading a good old printed book that I can easily carry with me and that I can read whenever I’m not working at my desk.

  • Krudler@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Before you do that, I would like to point out I donated the entire TNG collection, and later found out it could have been sold for over a thousand.

  • FUCKING_CUNO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    When was the last time you watched one? For whatever reason tape media is making a comeback, so you could probably get a decent price for them if you wanted. Maybe just keep the rare ones and pirate the rest? I donno. I personally just dont see the reason to keep them with free digital access to movies being so readily available.

    • BurntWits@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Tangentially related, and mostly for others reading this, but if you have 4K blu-rays I’d definitely consider keeping them. Disc looks far better than compressed digital, and uncompressed 4K movies take up way too much space, unless you’ve got dozens of TB of storage or only have a few movies. I have a few 4K AV1 (and HEVC too) files where I also have the 4K disc for, and the disc looks so much better it’s not really close.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    if you have a VHS player buy a cheap digital VHS to USB converter. You can get them for like 15-20$ and they plug one end into composite cable and the other end into the USB port of a laptop, then you can digitize the tape.

    You should probally do that sooner rather than later though, those tapes don’t last forever and eventually they will degrade.

  • ameancow@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Plastic is an organic molecule. Think of it like a complex set of legos, and the individual lego bricks have a tendency to want to stick to other things if they get shaken. At an atomic level, everything is always shaking, all the time. So this shaking energy, over time, will increase the probability that some of those lego bricks are going to fall off and stick to other things or just fly free. There are simply more ways these lego bricks can be arranged in ways that are not plastic than ways they can.

    Or another way of looking at it, there are nearly infinite ways you can break or damage a porcelain teacup, but only one configuration where it works as a cup that people can drink out of. IE: The chances of it not being a teacup anymore are greater than the chances of it remaining a teacup over long stretches of time.

    What does all this mean? Your tapes are literally falling apart. Even if they’re kept in boxes or on shelves away from other energy sources like light or heat, they are still vibrating, they are still shaking. A few molecules here and there, pop off every few minutes or more, never to return. While it might be centuries before they turn to dust, these changes over time will in fact start to smear or degrade the subtle magnetic alignment in that plastic tape which is what the actual audio and video is encoded as. This may take only a few more years to be unreadable depending on the age and quality of the tape.

    If you want to save your collection, invest in something to record them onto a digital medium, and even then the best you can hope for is a few more decades. Currently we don’t have many commercially available methods for long-term data storage.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
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    4 days ago

    When I got rid of mine, I made a list of all the media I still wanted a copy of and then, over time, found second-hand or new old stock DVD versions online. That was ten years ago and I’ve still not broken the cling wrap on some of the replacements I bought. Just goes to show how much I really needed them!

    That said, my collection was far less than 100, so your collection might be an expensive endeavour to replace.

    Tapes with crud recorded from TV and computers went to landfill. All the commercial ones went in a consignment I had a charity organisation collect along with a lot of other things I was clearing out at the same time. In 2025, I’m not sure charities will accept them any more.

    I did manage to digitise some of the stuff from the TV / computer ones with an old VCR and a TV card in the computer, but that must be coming up on 20 years ago now. That’s all on a DVD around here somewhere. In one of those multi-disc wallets. Remember those?

    They can still be had online if you feel like paring down the space your DVDs take up. People used to use them for burned DVDs, of course, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting legit DVDs in one. Make a separate binder for the DVD covers if you really want to, and send the cases to landfill or recycling.

    If you want to go really nuts, do the same with Blu-rays.

    I do regret getting rid of a few things during that clear-out, but maybe only one tape had some sentimental value. And yet, if I’d kept it, I’m think I’d be equally disturbed that I didn’t get rid of it with the rest of them.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      4 days ago

      Yup, get better copies first, and then see what’s left over. Most will have much better versions available, and for the few that don’t pick up a conversion kit, and bring them into the digital age.