> 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'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?
A random non-techie human without particular urgency will not download a hundred old family videos in 60 days. They will watch some of the first one, try to fast forward, stop when it gets boring, and think about downloading them sometime in the future and then forget about it until six months later.
(Except your uncle who is the family historian, who tries to download all of them but runs out of room on day three.)
My siblings are very much not developers. That's a lot of data for them to download, store, and figure out a way to view.
I was worried they'd just see a list of filenames and not put in the effort. By creating a streaming experience, I thought they'd actually watch them.
You might be correct that Gemini could have helped, I didn't test it, but much of the knowledge of who was in a scene, where it was, and why it would matter is inside my head. I doubt any model could effectively label locations and people over 20 years of video.
As to the opportunity cost - I'm currently looking for work, so mine is undoubtedly lower than yours!
I wasn't suggesting anything about your siblings, but you, who are a developer. I was just talking about the actual download step, not what you did after that. (Obviously you were going to host them somewhere else in some other form. Probably not DVDs but a little quickie website or maybe just a Flash drive with a HTML file index, say, I don't know, lots of options here to make it user-friendly for your siblings on Christmas Day. The hard drive or Flash drive idea has the benefit of LOCKSS, especially if you use up the spare space providing PAR2 FEC.)
> I doubt any model could effectively label locations and people over 20 years of video.
Actually, Gemini is highly promptable with a large context window and a single still image only takes up ~300 tokens IIRC, so I think that you could probably do so! Just include, say, 3 photos of each person over time with a natural language description, and 1 photo of each location, and that might be enough to get back useful labels. Gemini can even do bounding boxes. (Google is quite proud of its vision and video analysis capabilities.) And you can run multiple passes or split up videos etc.
Every single digitization service I have ever known is a small business of one guy who sends you back DVDs full of files. It's not even a consideration by anyone that they could possibly hold your videos hostage like that.
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.
There are tools which can fix that too (was it mconvert from mplayer or ffmpeg, not sure).
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 ;)
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.
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.
But I could have probably auto split the entire file at the start then just do that metadata per file. Although I found being able watch the entire video was quite nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We often refer to government agents as "feds." I wasn't considering an international audience with my title, apologies!
I posted this 5 days ago, and it didn't seem like anyone saw it then, so I'm happy folks are enjoying it now.
I'm working on loose documents and photos now with a great Epson flatbed scanner that I've had for years. It's something of an obsession for me now: to finish the job and tie their lives and a good chunk of ours off neatly. When I'm done I'll pack it all onto thumb drives and send copies to my siblings and they will look at a few of them and then put the drives in a drawer and that will likely be the end of it. But I will have done my duty to the old folks, even though it took long enough that I became one. It has all reminded me of how I mourned when I lost a hard drive years ago, and then came to the realization that I hadn't looked at any of its contents in years and that if I lived to be 100 probably none of it would ever have been important again anyway. You can't really keep anything, so do your kids a favor and dispose of your stuff while you can :).
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.
Yes, I've used VLC. But I'm using a fairly new machine and hadn't installed it yet.
Why does it strain credulity to make this myself? I explain it step by step. I enjoy using AI to build stuff myself.
But I am looking for work, so hey, if anyone is hiring and they enjoyed the post, then email me.
