The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Betamax Tapes (2014)

Re:The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Bet... by WalterBright on Monday August 03, 2015 @08:25PM (#10000882)

Why does it cost $12 per tape to digitize it? I recently digitized a giant pile of old home movies, and all it took was an $80 usb video capture device, $20 thrift store VCR, and a few minutes each. About every dozen tapes I had to take the cover off and clean the heads, but that was no big deal.

Some older tapes will need a time base corrector to rebuild the sync signals, but they aren't that expensive.

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Re:The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Bet... by deftnerd on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:00PM (#10000989)

If I remember correctly, the IA also likes to encode the video several times in different qualities and formats and that results in large archives. A 1 hour TV show might end up taking 100 gigs of space. With RAID and replication, an enterprise 4tb drive that costs $200 might end only holding 2tb of data, or 20 TV shows. That ends up being $10 in equipment just by itself for storage. Then add on the costs of power and equipment to encode it and the labor, I can see things costing $13 per tape.

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Re:The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Bet... by sp332 on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:00PM (#10000991)

Pay someone $15/hr to babysit the player, type in the episode and guest names.

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Re:The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Bet... by ytdht on Monday August 03, 2015 @10:43PM (#10001349)

$12 per tape is cheap to make it available to everyone...

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Re:The Internet Archive Wants to Digitize 40,000 VHS and Bet... by WalterBright on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @04:17PM (#10012529)

Despite my message, I am very happy that these tapes are being made available.

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