This is so neat! I really think AI turbocharges this kind of personal project way more than it speeds up programming for work:
> 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.
completely agree on the personal project angle. for family media specifically, the barrier was never really technical, it was the combination of effort + organization + knowing what to do with the output.
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.
> 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
@SamPatt Good post, including the clip of grandma's anecdote.
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.
> I searched for services which offered to digitize Video8 tapes. Most services cost about $20 per tape. Even with discounts for bulk amounts, it would likely have cost about $2k! I considered paying it (how exactly do you value a few hundred hours of childhood video?) but then I noticed how they delivered the videos - a private media hosting solution for 60 days. I knew this would be a huge amount of data, and only giving me and my siblings two months wasn’t sufficient.
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?
The post is impressive but anyone else feel a bit icky about the comments here? Numbering out the advantages in lists? The phrasing, the exciting exclamation mark(!). This comment section feels like some kind of marketing exercise.
Neat! I briefly tried digitizing some old VHS tapes for my family. I was just planning on giving them the files, maybe putting it on iCloud, it's a much smaller collection (and I don't have a NAS already!). I did a few, the time investment was the biggest issue, as well as figuring out the right encoding so as to not take up a ton of space, but still be compatible with everyone's (Windows + Mac) native video players while preserving video quality.
I'm in the process of doing something similar but just planning on throwing them on my Immich instance once they're ready (and that lets me share them with other people as well with the Immich account management).
This is so neat! I really think AI turbocharges this kind of personal project way more than it speeds up programming for work:
> 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.
completely agree on the personal project angle. for family media specifically, the barrier was never really technical, it was the combination of effort + organization + knowing what to do with the output.
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.
> 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
@SamPatt Good post, including the clip of grandma's anecdote.
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.
> I searched for services which offered to digitize Video8 tapes. Most services cost about $20 per tape. Even with discounts for bulk amounts, it would likely have cost about $2k! I considered paying it (how exactly do you value a few hundred hours of childhood video?) but then I noticed how they delivered the videos - a private media hosting solution for 60 days. I knew this would be a huge amount of data, and only giving me and my siblings two months wasn’t sufficient.
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?
The post is impressive but anyone else feel a bit icky about the comments here? Numbering out the advantages in lists? The phrasing, the exciting exclamation mark(!). This comment section feels like some kind of marketing exercise.
The post has 8 comments at the time of your comment and they look pretty organic for established accounts.
There are now organic looking comments. Maybe it's just the way some people sound.
I asked ChatGPT and it told me it was marketing.
Neat! I briefly tried digitizing some old VHS tapes for my family. I was just planning on giving them the files, maybe putting it on iCloud, it's a much smaller collection (and I don't have a NAS already!). I did a few, the time investment was the biggest issue, as well as figuring out the right encoding so as to not take up a ton of space, but still be compatible with everyone's (Windows + Mac) native video players while preserving video quality.
I'm in the process of doing something similar but just planning on throwing them on my Immich instance once they're ready (and that lets me share them with other people as well with the Immich account management).
That was an amazing read, thanks for sharing!
Way too much work :( At least my video collection is mostly miniDV.
You are so amazing, and you are so lucky to have found this. I read it and cry because I will never have such an experience...
This is SUCH a great story. Thanks for writing up both the human and technology parts with equal love and depth.
The AI folks are really getting desperate to be churning out this slop.
A Linux user who’d never installed VLC was weird enough, but the part where they recreate youtube from first principles really strains credulity.