75 to 100 VHS tapes each with 2 to 3 movies

April 24, 2014 9:57 AM

I have an entire month's of Turner Classic Movies "31 Days of Oscar" from 1994/95 or so on VHS tape. What should I do?

There are about 75 to 100 VHS tapes each with 2 to 3 movies recorded in SLP mode (6 hours/tape). The movies are all classics, including many foreign (a bunch of Kurosawa). It's not a 24x7 recording, only the Oscar series movies plus the intros by (a younger) Robert Osborne, and the 30-second animation that precedes each film series (Foreign, etc..). I tried converting one movie to digital, it's very watchable but clearly from another analog era - our tolerance for low-quality video was high back then. Maybe the Robert Osborne intros have some value?

I'd prefer to recycle, the true cost of VHS tapes is reflected by Green Disk, for $70 for 70lbs of VHS tapes they will recycle the plastic. Thought I'd check here first in case anyone thought there might be some value in the content (which I doubt given the SLP VHS quality, most movies these days have been recorded in digital).

posted by stbalbach to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

If you a) would take the time to digitize them in exchange for literally nothing and b) are sympathetic to the sort of people who would share things like these for their value as time capsules (and not pirated films), MeMail me. There's a place that may appreciate these.
posted by griphus at 10:20 AM on April 24, 2014

Maybe archive.org
posted by bottlebrushtree at 10:23 AM on April 24, 2014

I would probably digitize just the intros if the movies themselves can be found in better form. That wouldn’t take near as long.
posted by bongo_x at 10:55 AM on April 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

There is no value in the content if there are other copies of these films around in better than VHS quality. If you can buy them on DVD, there's absolutely no reason anyone will need your VHS rips. Even if you can't, there are probably people out there with better quality copies than yours.

Just recycle the plastic. The world won't have lost anything by losing your specific copy of these films.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 11:35 AM on April 24, 2014

Best answer: Don't assume that they are available on DVD, though. Lots of those old movies aren't. Maybe a good first step would be a check to see which ones you have that aren't available in any newer, digital formats? That might whittle down the number of tapes in your collection you or someone else might want to digitize considerably.
posted by backwards compatible at 12:59 PM on April 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Wow, I have a bunch of VHS of the same thing, albeit from a later time in the 90s. I'd digitize.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:34 PM on April 24, 2014

(sigh) You could do what I did with my dozens of VHS rips of movies of all ages (not at all worth digitizing): stack them all in a closet and close the door. Once or twice a year when I need something in that closet and I see them there, I remind myself that this is still on my ToDo list and then I close the door for another 6 months.
posted by CathyG at 9:35 AM on April 27, 2014