I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc).

I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to document the history of a community, too.

I would jump at the chance to do work in this space full-time. What little I have done, helping friends and with my own family, was fun and rewarding. I've never been able to figure out how to finance it.

The lab described in the article and others like it handle the digitization part, but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too. The digitizing is the easier problem. Once the material is digitized I feel like it's in a lot more peril for catastrophic loss.

I think something like "digital cemeteries / memory gardens", financed by endowments that allow them to continue to operate in perpetuity, should be "a thing". I haven't thought deeply about how to make it work, but the "shallow" thinking I've done says it's financially unsustainable.

I lean toward not-for-profit because I'd like to provide the services for as close to free to the clients as possible. I think preserving family memories and records should be accessible to everyone-- not just those with significant financial means.

While I think what libraries do with these labs is laudable, I worry that the self-service aspect raises the bar too high for some people. I think having a service component, at a reasonable price, to do the digitizing and to work to preserve the material in perpetuity would be a great thing.

I've started working through a backlog of a few hundred home movie tapes, mostly MiniDV, but a few dozen 8mm and Hi8. Fortunately I have a Digital8 camcorder I've been able to use for the analog 8mm tapes to interface with dvcam over ieee1394.

A quick python script around dvcam lets me drop a tape in and type in the label on the tape, and it rewinds, captures the raw tape, transcodes it with ffmpeg, and adds it to a jellyfin library for family to view.

I also have a Sony DHR-1000 DVCAM/MiniDV deck I've been using for all the minidv tapes, but suddenly it started ejecting tapes with an error whenever I insert one. Does anyone know any good communities online that might be able to help me get the deck working again? I'm hoping it's just something that needs adjusting or cleaning, since it worked fine until now (though it is probably close to 30 years old now).

VHS VCRs have been out of production for a decade. It's worth keeping any you still have, and any that you find being thrown out, even if only for parts. Notably, while the electronics (especially with advances in DSP) and other components are probably still easy to replicate or produce replacements for, the video heads themselves are extremely specialised, and they do have a finite life.

I'd love to walk around with a Hi8 camera and 4K camera with a rig to record identical frames, and get a few hundred hours if footage and train a model to do intelligent upscaling and cleanup of old footage.

Possibly a 3D printed rig with a semi-transparent mirror + some crowdsourcing and this could really work.

It's in my backlog.

Many libraries or library systems actually have something like this. In the Bay Area, the large Santa Clara Library does and at least had regular drop-in hours.

I love the idea! So many people have old home movies, slides, and VHS tapes just sitting around collecting dust.Feel bad to throw it away but doest know what to do with them. The self-service approach is smart too—you actually learn how to preserve your own memories instead of just handing them off. Libraries are really making the practical and meaningful things. I love Boston Public Library a lot. Had to check if they have one.

I've had reasonably good results digitizing VHSC home video with a composite to HDMI converter/scaler followed by an HDMI capture card. The converter does TBC and deinterlacing and I find the resulting footage to be much more clear and stable than what you get out of a regular composite to USB dongle.

If you have an AVR with composite or s-video in and HDMI out that could also work in place of the converter. In either case you'll downscale the footage back to 640x480 before encoding.

You have to monitor the process start to finish if the tapes are bad, there's nothing around that.

For MiniDV and Digital8 you should straight up get a lossless copy using a cheap Firewire card.

This is AWESOME and I see from the comments that "Memory Lab" is a more or less standard thing. Ties in really neatly with the recent personal encyclopedia post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522173

At the end of last year I took the old VCR and VHS home movies from the 90s out of my mom's basement and digitized them using this cheap converter[0]. I also had to get some rubbing alcohol and foam swabs to clean the VCR heads, which only took a few minutes[1] (some of the older tapes would play normally for a moment before the quality degraded into poor tracking and static). My family enjoyed watching them.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB6BW6X4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ClXrffkN3M

Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general.

SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior.

Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be updated regularly without much hassle.