VHS to thumb drives

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have tips on the best and most affordable options to transfers several VHS tapes onto something like a thumb drive? If there's a store front, I would love something in upper NW or Bethesda area. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Costco does this.

https://www.costcodvd.com/services-and-pricing/videotape-transfer

[Anonymous]

If you have a VCR you can buy the gadget that does this on Amazon.

[Anonymous]

https://legacybox.com/products/vhs-conversion

[Anonymous]

Is this for archival quality conversion of historically significant or otherwise one-of-a-kind footage (including precious home movie footage)? If so, you want to go to place like DC Video or some other specialized video conversion outfit with actual engineers who can do the best possible conversion of your tapes (and, no, flash drives are not self-stable; you should be using online storage and have multiple offline copies). For one-of-a-kind footage, you want uncompressed data in an AVI or MOV container, not a compressed format.

If this is just bulk conversion of stuff that you taped off of the TV twenty years ago, Kodak Digitizing does reasonable work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is this for archival quality conversion of historically significant or otherwise one-of-a-kind footage (including precious home movie footage)? If so, you want to go to place like DC Video or some other specialized video conversion outfit with actual engineers who can do the best possible conversion of your tapes (and, no, flash drives are not self-stable; you should be using online storage and have multiple offline copies). For one-of-a-kind footage, you want uncompressed data in an AVI or MOV container, not a compressed format.

If this is just bulk conversion of stuff that you taped off of the TV twenty years ago, Kodak Digitizing does reasonable work.

NP here. If I may piggyback… can you tell me more about what you said about flash drives’ stability?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://legacybox.com/products/vhs-conversion

FYI… I found Lbox to be expensive the first time I used them. But since then I’ve gotten regular texts with sale codes. You can probably sign up for those before ordering.

[Anonymous]

NP here. If I may piggyback… can you tell me more about what you said about flash drives’ stability?

They are basically made up of capacitors, which hold a charge and will lose that charge if left without power for months/years. The same applies to SSDs in general. USB flash drives also tend to use rather low-quality flash storage, so data integrity is also an issue with them.

No digital storage is really shelf-stable. Magnetic tape (LTO, etc.) is probably the best, but even that needs to be stored in a standardized format (e.g. GNU tar) and a drive needs to be available for that format (LTO8, etc.). The best way to store this stuff is to have multiple copies in different physical locations both online and offline (mechanical hard disks are more-or-less shelf stable for several years, anyway). Compare the files periodically (e.g. by making md5 checksums) and replace any files which have become corrupted with another copy. Then, migrate the data to more modern storage devices over time.