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.
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.This is the way.
If I had VHS tapes, it’s what I would do. I even know a single place in my city that could do it, but they would probably reject the job for copyrighted stuff, sadly but understandably.
As long as you have a VHS player it is fairly trivial to buy cheap composite or S-video capture devices on eBay and archive them yourself. Its gonna be slow with 300 tapes but it is doable.
Fair enough.
Beware, in this way lies madness.
Ask me how i know.
File storage, please.
Those DVDs will not last as long as you think.
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.
No.
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.
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.
This is what I did with all my physical media.
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.
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.
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.
We donated ours to a local nonprofit org that rents them out. Such a cool group of film nerds running this operation. https://www.weluvvideo.org/
My response is likely to be unpopular but it’s how I feel. I had ungodly gobs of physical media years ago - VHS, DVDs, BlueRay, CDs, etc. It got to where it was more of a hassle to dig through and find the item then slub it over to the equipment just to enjoy my media.
I digitized everything and stuck it on a home media server. Now it’s as simple as grabbing the remote and pick what I want and it’s done. I’m much happier now.
Same. Physical media will degrade and fail. If you want reliable access to the VHS collection then you need to digitize and create backups. About 10% of my collection wasn’t able to be digitized due to degradation
Keep only the good or rare ones.
Contrary to to what you think, not everything is available digitally.
I’d say keep them, but if space is an issue you could sell or give them away. Please don’t discard them!
Oh I dont throw anything!
If you don’t have another copy of a film I’d keep it. If you have DVD or more advanced versions consider purging the VHS, but it’s always worth checking to see if the more modern copies that exist have been changed in some way (eg Star Wars).
Of course. VHS is unwatchable on a modern TV. It wasn’t great back in the day on old CRT televisions to begin with. VHS is half the resolution of SDTV. Add to that the quality loss due to age and you basically have a pile of worthless plastic.
What do you mean? Back in the day it felt like watching 4K on an OLED :P
Im not a quality snob for video. I regularly play my atari through rf on my crt.
I don’t even watch 1080p content if I can help it. 4k dolby vision and atmos please.
Note that watching that kind of content on a tiny analog CRT is a much better experience than watching it on a modern display with discrete pixels.
No. If they are meaningful to you, keep them. If you’re worried about the data failure of them, just watch them once every 10 years and it should renew the magnetic stuff on them.
I work in a place with a lot of old technology and the general consensus is that magnetic media needs to go through the motions every 10 years to stay healthy.
but we have had success accessing 25+ year old media. so there’s no scientific line about how long that stuff should survive.
I do subscribe to the 10 year access rule because not all media was created equal.
just watch them once every 10 years and it should renew the magnetic stuff on them.
VHS doesn’t work like that. It’s not digital. It doesn’t rewrite on a read. Magnetic hard drives and tapes don’t rewrite on a read either.
You need to copy them to renew and VHS is analog so every copy is worse.
the head of the vhs is using magnetic resonates to read the tape, that magnetic interaction is the same thing that tape has always used. it is the same
edit: the real problem with VHS is the moving tape and how fragile the process is. the tape head can stick to the tape or the tape sticks to the wheels or the vhs cassette rollers sticking
Reading does not refresh the data! The head passes over the magnetic domains and that induces a current in the wires in the head.
That process does not in any way refresh the magnetic domains.
Yes it is the same for digital tape but at least with digital tape you can read the data and re write it perfectly onto a new tape because of ECC. Simply reading a digital tape doesn’t refresh the data either.
VHS is analog. The signal read will be slightly weaker than original. That signal will be written onto a new tape as weaker because it is analog. Nothing in the VHS recorder knows what the original was supposed to be.
Maybe the internet archive would be interested (but shippibg may be expensive)
The USPS media rate is inexpensive. It’s less than $1 each.
Oh thats cool:)
If I had to send these from greece I think it’d be very expensive (I think they accept stuff from two points in the world, somewhere in the usa and somewhere in uk, both outside eu which makes it very expensive).
