[HN Gopher] Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing...
___________________________________________________________________
Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 188 points
Date : 2026-03-24 04:22 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| eschaton wrote:
| 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| My local library can do vhs and all the various smaller form
| tapes that came in between like mini dv. They also support
| cassette tapes and the various consumer projectors people used
| back when home movies were just becoming a thing. They even
| have a large bed scanner you can fill with photos and the
| software will turn them into individual files.
| unkeptbarista wrote:
| There is a network of Memory Labs (1) and many more that are
| not part of the network. Check your local libraries to see if
| they have one. The Kansas City area has one at the Johnson
| County library.
|
| 1) https://memorylabnetwork.github.io
| valleyer wrote:
| Super, super cool initiative.
|
| I would be interested to know what capture hardware they're
| using. As someone who took on this project for my own family's
| videos, I ended up using the Canopus ADVC-110, which captures
| composite (or S-Video) NTSC (plus stereo audio) and generates DV,
| which you can then capture over FireWire.
|
| It worked well for me since it didn't require any non-built-in
| drivers on macOS (though I hear Tahoe drops FireWire support
| entirely -- boo), and it therefore was easily interoperable with
| FFmpeg, VLC, and custom AVFoundation code I wrote.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think the ADVC-110 is made anymore, and my
| experiments with various USB Video Class devices (which would be
| similarly interoperable), mostly based on MacroSilicon chips like
| the MS210x, were utter failures in terms of quality.
| valleyer wrote:
| Looks like Santa Clara is using the VuPoint Digital Video
| Converter -- not familiar with this one, so I'll have to look
| into it.
|
| https://www.sclibrary.org/services/other-services/vhs-conver...
| lldb wrote:
| Unfortunately devices like the VuPoint - while low cost and
| accessible - deliver impressively terrible results. It's a
| composite to usb converter which will fail to handle
| delinterlacing and get the colors wrong.
|
| The best bet for people who aren't going to build a domesday
| duplicator (which decodes the VHS signal in software), is to
| stick to technology from the era. Such as later released VHS
| players which had FireWire out or could even burn a dvd.
| valleyer wrote:
| Thanks for the info on the VuPoint. In general, I actually
| don't mind capture cards not handling deinterlacing, since
| (as long as I correctly understand the format it's spitting
| out) I can handle it myself with e.g. ffmpeg. Color
| problems are a dealbreaker though.
|
| I've looked at going down the RF capture route but haven't
| dipped my feet in yet. Maybe one day.
| sophacles wrote:
| My local makerspace is building a memory lab. It's very cool. In
| addition to the obvious "let's get that old media that's becoming
| harder and harder to play and/or is degrading digitized", there's
| some really cool stuff you can do.
|
| A very useful on is workshops - older folks are often the keepers
| of the family archive and aren't comfortable using technology at
| all, so teaching them not just how to use the equipment, but also
| safe-keep the digital product (backups, etc) is important.
| Additionally teaching concepts like infinite free reproduction is
| helpful because many older folks I've talked to stress about how
| to divvy up the archive among the children/grandchildren/etc, and
| are delighted at the idea of "everyone gets all of it", and are
| also delighted at the idea of "make a family archive that
| includes a more extended group of people and their archive
| combined".
|
| Other cool things we've explored and/or are planning to explore:
|
| * making collages and memes and digital scrapbooks for the family
| as a way of telling the family history/story, doubly cool because
| you don't have to sacrifice the only copy of a picture to do so.
| People feel liberated to do some really interesting things.
|
| * having digitization be a community process by hosting regular
| memory-lab nights. Digitizing everything is a daunting task
| sometimes. There may be a lot of material. There may be a lot of
| context that one wants to capture with the material (labeling
| photos, explaining the photo, etc - I've heard some great stories
| from the old-timers as we digitize their photos). Not all
| memories are good ones... sometimes someone will get to a photo
| and it brings up bad memories. One woman was very glad we were
| there when we got to a section of her photos of her child who had
| died and we were able to give her a hug and let her cry and talk
| about it, and help her work through a difficult thing while
| preserving the memories.
|
| * I've often heard tech people say "sometimes its hard to do
| skilled volunteer work with my tech skills...", particularly in a
| way that is also social and community-building. Helping in these
| sorts of community digitization processes is a nice way to use
| your skills and also bond with community members.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| 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
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| looks like DC's PL has had one since 2024
| https://www.dclibrary.org/using-the-library/digital-preserva...
| mbil wrote:
| 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
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional
| durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional
| harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC
| that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?).
|
| You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the
| SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for
| perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the
| media into your account. You'd need 1000 customers with a 20%
| systems cost to do this full time, which seems reasonable).
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Physically recoiling at this ceo-scum response to OPs comment
| chorkpop wrote:
| I'm surprised it took a whole hour for someone to turn a
| charity into a SaaS
| all2 wrote:
| It is a way to make money. Provide service in exchange for
| money. I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
|
| If he could figure out how to do it without ever spending
| money, that would be amazing and I would fully support it.
| As it stands, I saw what he was asking, did some math to
| sort out how he could manage it full time, and made a
| recommendation.
|
| People are tired of SaaS, I get it, so I suppose you could
| ship an app to do something similar; wire it to talk to
| every possible imaging/recording device and then automate
| the 'download all pictures from this device'. But it still
| takes time. And potentially money.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you read the first line as "make a handsome profit", I
| get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean
| "this service [permanent backup] costs real money to
| operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow", it seems
| perfectly reasonable to me.
|
| Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren't
| free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of
| family memories in digital form.
| aaronax wrote:
| There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Maybe get it archived in wayback machine?
| ray_v wrote:
| Find a local community church, public room, or public library
| and have them allow you to organize a handful of sessions where
| folks can bring in old devices and come up with a workflow
| that's efficient. Run it as a donation event where folks can
| donate money for a new hard drive , or to fund the service for
| other folks that can't afford it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Set it up as a professional business (talk to funeral homes as
| adding it as a value service for well-to-do clients? Talk to
| estate lawyers?).
|
| Once you're making money then you expand your helping others
| for free or discounted.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. Lots of lawyers do some pro bono work.
|
| There's a general saying: either work expensive or work for
| free. Don't work for cheap.
| eru wrote:
| > I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model
| [...]
|
| You can turn any businesses model into a not-for-profit
| business model. Just don't make any profits.
| Animats wrote:
| > but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data
| down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too.
|
| Whatever happened to IFPS and Filecoin? If you paid for
| perpetual storage five years ago, is your stuff still around?
| sib wrote:
| If you're in the US, just send it unencrypted over the
| internet. The NSA will kindly archive it for you and then you
| can submit a FOIA request whenever you need access to it.
|
| Kidding. Sort of...
| goatlove wrote:
| 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.
| kace91 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaytea wrote:
| This might not be correct really, but since my family has less
| than 1 TB of media to backup, I simply have three 1TB HDDs with
| copies of all the stuff. I got the HDDs out of all the
| computers I upgraded to SSDs.
| kace91 wrote:
| That doesn't sound too bad, it's close to what I do now, but
| it's a bit cumbersome to keep them in sync as more content is
| generated.
| mimentum wrote:
| LTO via LTFS is probably your best long term bet.
|
| However, traditional spinning rust (multiple copies) is
| probably the easiest.
|
| Sans DIY solutions, cloud infrastructure would be the costly
| alternative.
| wswin wrote:
| Home NAS, with data redundancy and filesystem with checksums.
| It's great because you can access it from any device and there
| is a ton of FOSS for it now
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Careful! I bought a Synology NAS for this purpose and
| something happened w/ an apparently customer-hostile update
| bc the drive no longer mounts and forums are full of others
| complaining about Synology only supporting their brand of
| drives (?!) which possibility didn't even occur to me when I
| bought the damn thing.
| userbinator wrote:
| Better to use a standard low-power PC with a bunch of HDDs
| as a NAS.
| wpm wrote:
| If you care about the data getting something with ECC
| support is vital
| bitparadox wrote:
| 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).
| philoticstrand wrote:
| Any chance you would share your script? Also do you deal with
| audio sync before or after ripping?
|
| I have a similar project in my backlog, ~100 Hi8 and Digital8
| tapes to digitize before they get too old and fragile.
|
| I already have a Digital8 camcorder and the requisite FireWire
| cable plus TB2 and TB3 adapters for connecting to my Mac or PC.
| Just need to get off my ass and start!
| mackwell wrote:
| 100 tapes is quite a mountain to climb. I would consider
| finding a discount code for a service like southtree (or
| similar) and sending at least some of them to be processed
| that way. I did most of mine manually but had to throw in the
| towel for some tapes and send them in and I found that they
| often had like 50% off promotions and discounts for higher
| scales.
|
| If you are down for the challenge / 100 hours of capture, go
| for it but just wanted to throw that out there because I hate
| to see media be lost to the sands of time.
| mackwell wrote:
| That's the biggest issue with trying to deal with dv tapes -
| the hardware is simply not very robust. Most cameras will
| either start ejecting tapes, eating them, or get filthy and
| start reading poorly with dropouts or damage the next tapes...
| it's the kind of task that just keeps having new roadblocks and
| gets harder with scale (unless you are able to repair the decks
| yourself or willing to just keep buying them - but they're
| eventually going to become scarce as well). The software side
| is relatively simple but can also be complicated by dropouts /
| overzealous scene detection in some software for capturing - so
| sometimes you have to just let it happen and run a script to
| stitch all the files back together into one to maintain sanity.
|
| Sorry I am now ranting, because I had a huge box of them to
| deal with containing a lot of memories and projects that were
| valuable to me personally, and I procrastinated for years but
| finally got it done. Glad I did and those tapes are long gone.
|
| VHS / analog tapes have similar issues but the solutions are
| easier to acquire (millions of cheap vcr's everywhere), and you
| can tap directly into the signal so it's actually a rich and
| interesting community and challenge to improve it. MiniDV is
| just pain for those of us whose prime years shooting footage
| happened to be during its reign.
| mysteria wrote:
| 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.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| 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.
| tuna74 wrote:
| You won't capture identical frames to old footage. If you want
| to do AI slop, just do AI slop.
|
| Old media will have flaws, errors and low resolution (both
| spatial and temporal). Putting an AI filter on top of that will
| only make it less correct.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| Hmm so you don't see any value?
|
| I was thinking if you used the identical old hardware, you'd
| get something close enough.
|
| Personally I prefer to watch analog with an all analog signal
| chain, but am still curious what would happen if you tried
| this.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| shireboy wrote:
| I've often thought this would be a good business for college age
| kids or teens. My parents and other I know are hesitant to send
| off to a 3rd party online. I think if someone local came and
| either did mobile or took and brought back they would trust that
| over even mailin services.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-28 23:01 UTC)