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Should I get rid of my VHS collection (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 60 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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