> I was curious about the possibility of doing this myself, and I asked ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, it knew a lot of the various tapes, file formats, sizes, processing, storage, and after it asked some clarifying questions, it was quite optimistic about me being able to do this myself
Between this, it seems like it helped with so many different parts of the process:
1. Asking for how to do technical things, like transfer video from these old VHS to a newer computer.
2. Writing code for the web portal to host the videos.
3. Writing VLC plugins to help with data entry.
4. Transcribe audio into text.
Similarly, a coworker recently made a website that imitates what Alpha School does to incentivize his own kids to finish their homework all in the span of a weekend, and it's cool to think of the kinds of projects that less or minimally technical people can do with the help of ChatGPT to guide them.
Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.
I'm really coming around to the idea for the lucky of us (and I'm assuming a lot about the average HN poster) AI really is a force-multiplying tool
i've been digitizing old family photos recently and the part that surprised me most was how much context you lose if you don't capture it alongside the media. a photo of someone at a table means nothing in 30 years unless you know who, where, when. my parents can still tell those stories but that window is closing.
the AI angle is interesting here because transcription and basic organization are exactly the kind of tedious-but-important tasks that nobody does unless the friction is near zero. if you had to manually label 500 photos you'd never do it. if an AI can get you 80% of the way there, suddenly the project becomes feasible.
I dont think that's true? Even with moov atom at the end of the file, browsers just figure it out, as long as the server supports http range requests. And I suspect the size could be much smaller, given the low resolution of Video8 footage, but maybe author did the reasearch and compression would take too much time.
The only way I could save the file was to create a new movie with the exact same camera settings (luckily I hadn't changed anything on the camera) and graft the ending of the newly created mp4 onto the old one using some special utility a hero on the internet had created.
Immich has become a bit of this for me, my father digitized everything he has, he gave it to me and I dumped it in Immich and spend some time dating stuff. So now I can, with the slide of the finger, drop myself in 1983 and see my own first steps, no audio, video8 quality, still quite magical.
Perhaps normal for all you iCloud and Google Photos fans, but I never wanted that, for me everything was just in folders on harddrives, have been waiting for Immich my whole life I guess ;)
An upscale pipeline seems like the next job, by the way! you can pull a lot of quality out of those old videos with modern tools. Enjoy.
I'm not following here. Even if it was several terabytes of video (digitized at high resolution and minimal lossiness for archival purposes), that's plenty of time to download. Especially if you're a developer who can casually spin up a cloud or dedicated server to proxy through if need be? (And $2k sounds reasonable once you start going through "hundreds of hours" at a bare minimum, and again especially if you're a developer with real opportunity cost.)
Also, as far as the video analysis goes, Gemini might've been a better idea?
That's when you get the good stuff.
A couple of years ago when my son was a chatty, fast-moving toddler, his granny couldn't really follow what he was doing because she's a bit deaf and not as quick on her feet these days. Take him down to the park, mike him up, let him run around, stand well off with a long lens.
Also, because that's a Digital8 camera, it'll output analogue tapes over FireWire as described in the article. It's worth doing this even for Video8 because the output is so much cleaner than with capturing over composite.
I use FireWire as well. Spent a month connecting it, that was a devastating part. It turned out, only IEE1394 cards with TI chips works with Sony cameras. And only some cables. But to me, result is worth it.
However, everyone did have a DVD player! So I, similar to the author, wrote scripts to take videos, generate DVD isos, and then burn to DVDs.
I learned about message queues (rabbitmq) with that project and had connected a bunch of old laptops with Linux VMs installed.
I never finished the project and nowadays there are a hundred ways to share and stream digital video. I hadn’t anticipated, at the time, that casting videos wirelessly to our TVs would become the norm.
It would be a good idea to add a final step of burning the videos to M-disc. SSDs and spinning platter drives aren't reliable for long-term storage. You could use a tape drive if the file sizes are too large, but M-disc lasts longer and doesn't require pro hardware to read.
M-disc is readable by a standard DVD-ROM/Blu-Ray drive.
The industry has manufactured many, many more DVD-ROM/Blu-Ray drives than it ever made Digi8 camcorders, and they have fewer moving parts.
If you're concerned with finding an M-disc burner, I share the same concern.
If you're concerned with finding an M-disc reader, there's less reason to worry than with any other archival media formats.
You could look into one of those VHS to DVD systems. Sure, it's SD MPEG2, but the source was a VHS. At least you're not tying up your computer system to do this. It also means not needing a NAS.
I always assumed Fed has something to do with FBI or the Federal Bank. Please, can someone explain me what Fed means in this context?
Thank you in advance
From the founder of Costco, FedMart was a department store chain and the predecessor to Target
Federal Express Corporation was founded in the early 1970s and, of course, shortened up their name. Don't miss the arrow in their logo!
There were some consumer electronics stores named "Federated" and their commercials featured a mascot named "Fred Rated"
Institutions such as banks sometimes took names like "First Federal" which could give an impression of being a government agency, but probably referred to their organizational structure or nationwide presence. Different from the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Banks.
Unfortunately, the author spent so much time just ingesting and managing the video that he did not get to the fun stuff you can do in 2026: index, query, and restore it.
I shoot on full-size DVCAM as well as HDV occasionally. Yes, it's 576i or 1080i depending on which you use, but you'd be surprised how good that looks with a decent lens and a bit of care in shooting.
Similarly, I found a tape I'd shot in the mid-to-late 80s, probably Christmas 1988. On it was some footage of my dad, who died in 1993 when he was 47.
That's the first time I've seen that tape or indeed heard his voice since he died. He must have been about ten years younger than I am now.
So, the first time I've heard my dad's voice in over 30 years, and the first time his grandson has ever heard him (he recognised his grandad straight away).
Quite a moment, that.
A Linux user who’d never installed VLC was weird enough, but the part where they recreate youtube from first principles really strains credulity.
They achieved their goal of digitising their family videos and allowing their siblings to view them in a coherent way, which they very likely would not have been able to accomplish without the help of AI. Not without like triple the time investment.
They aren't releasing a product here, it's bespoke software which serves the exact purpose they need it to. This is exactly what AI is good for.