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Rip my VHS tapes, or download? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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So I own over 500 vhs tapes. And dvds, but those are easy to rip. I am trying to archive all my tapes before they go bad. However, that takes a lot of time. Should I just try to find all the movies I can for tapes I own?

I've been out of the game for a few years now. How vast are the resources for 90s movies and such ?

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[–] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I would only rip the ones that you can't download. To get a decent quality transfer from tape, you will need to connect a time base corrector between the VCR and capture card. Unfortunately, they are rather hard to find now and expensive.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And even with a perfect capture of a tape that somehow hasn't aged, VHS quality is still crap compared to even DVD, let alone HD formats.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    And it will probably take 40 years to accomplish versus a few days of downloading. This isn't even a question worth considering for me but I understand that some people have reservations about piracy, though there's an argument that this isn't it since they're just digitizing what they already own.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    a TBC unit might be absurdly expensive these days BUT a VHS>DVD-RW unit is cheap and needs a form of time base correction to record to digital and that corrected signal is sent to the video out ports, this also strips VHS copy protection that messes up the VHS>DVD internal copy so you have a clean signal to capture out the back.

    I used a Panasonic DMR-ES35V and a Black Magic intensity shuttle capture device to rip ads from our collection. and the shuttle has zero tolerance for dirty signals, recording stops when it drops a frame so you know it's doing the TBC right.

    Honestly you should only be archiving television or videos that didn't get a DVD release.

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