As others are saying, rip anything you can't download from anywhere else otherwise just download. I've been through this too and ripping old VHS or DVD takes a lot more time and hassle than downloading it.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Prioritize ripping those that are no available digitally.
I would only rip the ones that you can't download. To get a decent quality transfer from tape, you will need to connect a time base corrector between the VCR and capture card. Unfortunately, they are rather hard to find now and expensive.
And even with a perfect capture of a tape that somehow hasn't aged, VHS quality is still crap compared to even DVD, let alone HD formats.
And it will probably take 40 years to accomplish versus a few days of downloading. This isn't even a question worth considering for me but I understand that some people have reservations about piracy, though there's an argument that this isn't it since they're just digitizing what they already own.
a TBC unit might be absurdly expensive these days BUT a VHS>DVD-RW unit is cheap and needs a form of time base correction to record to digital and that corrected signal is sent to the video out ports, this also strips VHS copy protection that messes up the VHS>DVD internal copy so you have a clean signal to capture out the back.
I used a Panasonic DMR-ES35V and a Black Magic intensity shuttle capture device to rip ads from our collection. and the shuttle has zero tolerance for dirty signals, recording stops when it drops a frame so you know it's doing the TBC right.
Honestly you should only be archiving television or videos that didn't get a DVD release.
Why would a time base corrector be needed ? I haven't used one before and my transfers came out fine.
I would just download them. It's a lot easier to just put the list into Radarr and wait.
Depends on what you value. VHS rips are trickier to find (though not impossible by any means, just need the right tracker like myspleen)
If you have the time archiving is always valued. If someone else has already archived don’t always assume theyve done a better job. With more niche stuff like vhs and vinyl rips it can be easy to assume that but you’d be surprised how often the rip is terrible, either done with awful equipment, the person had great equipment but their copy was in rough shape, or they just didn’t know what they were doing.
Especially if you have 500 tapes you’re bound to have some niche titles and gems someone is dying to see archived, guarantee it. And even the “classics” in your collection you may be surprised to see the current rips aren’t great or just don’t exist. Like 60-70% of my ratio at red is vinyl rips for this reason. I don’t have particularly fancy equipment (some people on there have $10,000+ setups, mine is a little fancy but like $300 fancy) but I do have like 1200 records
If you’re not in private trackers this could also be your way in
Adding to this, movies with dubs in a specific language (in comparison to widespread tongues like English) might be tricker to find if not impossible decades later.
Downloading them would maybe be a good way to find if any of them are hard to find and someone else might appreciate a copy available even if the quality isn't great. if they are findable in better quality but the VHS or DVD has ads, PSAs, bumpers, special features, etc between that might be rare too
Depends, are you trying to archive your tapes, or are you trying to archive the movies on them?
Even if they’re your tapes there are trackers that value this. Home movies not so much (maybe, there are probably some out there) but trackers that value vhs rips of 80s/90s/2000s shows with the original commercials/bumpers/etc?
Most definitely, that stuff is coveted some places. Even if you don’t have the original commercials and bumpers if you just taped old shows you might be able to help restore old shows to their original glory. Like the people who take 90s cartoons and restore the cut content and original soundtracks.
Beavis and butthead, Daria, the state, etc all have torrents out there where someone went through and restored content that had been cut over the years and restored licensed music that in basically all cases has still never been restored for streaming. Even if you get paramount plus or whatever platform you can watch those shows but they are not the same, they have edits and “soundalike” music because it’s not worth the money to secure the rights that weren’t secured back when streaming or even releasing entire seasons of shows onto physical media was a thing that anyone thought would happen.
The source of the material to “fix” is a combo of rips from the streaming networks, which is much higher quality, with old vhs rips to fill in the gaps for content that was censored or cut for time over the years. when a new vhsrip of a coveted show comes out people can go a bit nuts, especially if it’s a key episode and in very good quality
So if you grew up watching them and rewatch them now you spend 14.99 to see it and a scene is missing here, a song is wrong, and it sucks. Or you can pirate it and you get what was originally released
There might be versions of movies on those tapes that aren't available anywhere else. From an archiving POV ripping them could be invaluable to the community (ie the world). There are still lost Dr Who episodes that are found this way.
True, there could be one of those editions that were later edited for whatever strange reason.
The ethical pirate would rip them and make them available as torrents. Out of 500, there's probably a lot that is unfindable.
Start with your favorites, go as far as you (and your bandwidth) can.
I don't have a problem with this, its easy enough to throw in a tape in the morning, then another at night. In a year I'd be done.
However, I don't think many people would want them due to the low quality. I myself actually enjoy vhs quality but I know many want the highest possible for their media.
Low quality is better than no quality. That is, something is better than nothing, and options are always good.
But odds are that these already exist online if they were big enough for commercial release back in the day.
I'd say download everything and keep track of what you can't find, then rip those because there will probably be people in the data hoarder or lost media communities who would love to hoard and share it.
I myself actually enjoy vhs quality but I know many want the highest possible for their media.
Do you watch them as intended on a CRT TV or are you using a modern LCD/OLED to watch them? I've noticed that old games look like shit on a modern TV because CRT offered some smoothing of the image and made the quality appear better. With games you can fix this with all kinds of shaders, but I'm curious how a VHS would appear on a 65" OLED. It's not quite 1:1 with games since it's all analog but how good is it? I don't think I've used a CRT or VHS in 20+ years.
Both. Have a few crts, a projection tv, and 1 flat-screen insignia i got for free. Can't game on the insignia because of terrible input lag. Vhs looks surprisingly not terrible on it though. All post processing shit is turned off that can be disabled.
Years ago, I ripped parts of my relatively small VHS collection - at least the part that wasn't copied over and over. The low output quality and slowliness of the process finally got me to abandon the idea. I ripped maybe a dozen movies or less and none of these still are in my collection. All of them replaced by way better copies. OTOH video codecs were not what they are today and a recent VHS rip might look a lot better at smaller file sizes. Idk about audio quality but mine was abyssmal; absolutely no competition to DVD audio.
I'd say it's fastest to download, as mentioned using radarr etc... to throw in the full list. Then afterwards look and see what couldn't be found and rip those (and yeah others mentioned making them available to others after you rip them could be a great good deed to share the hard to find ones)
I would archive all those 500 vhs tapes. Nostalgia. There are some private trackers encouraged people to upload it. Even a commercial ads from the 90s (of course you cannot just compare it with movies vs commercial ads) are being uploaded despite low quality. Or you could find some collectors.
Be kind. Rewind.
Grab what you can, add to radarr and you'll likely get the absolute bulk of them. There may be some odd ones out, and those are the ones I'd rip.
For the rips themselves, what I ended up doing for family tapes is a generic s-video capture device, ffmpeg to rip.
I capture for the full length of the tape, play it, take a peek that everything came in well, and find the end to trim (also ffmpeg).
Then that version I'll make an archive, and I'll transcode a copy for media server use.