Preserving History

Using my powers for good

13 August 2026

Did you know that VHS tapes don’t actually last forever? They slowly degrade, and if stored badly, or watched hundreds of times, the video stored on them could be lost forever in static.

This summer I volunteered for my local museum, and noticed they had tons of video tapes and other media stored in boxes that likely were not touched since being put there.

Look at all of this stuff! (Sensitive info censored)

I was able to take a majority of them home and convert them into Mpeg4 (.MP4) files and store them on a hard drive to make sure they stay alive for years to come.

Luckily I was already one of those “retro tech” people so I had a Zenith VCR lying around, and picked up an Analog to Digital device (though if you have a capture card and an AV2HDMI adapter you can do almost the same thing).

I was even able to recover the floppy disks because of a computer I got recently (which I will discuss in another blog post) and the cassettes through a cassette player and an aux-to-aux cable.

Regardless, here’s my VHS setup:

My VCR and Digitizer going to work

And just to show how these tapes degrade, here’s a video of one of the tapes before and after just ONE play:

Pay attention to the distortion at the top

So, all in all, I feel good about actually being able to preserve history with my ‘retro’ hobbies.

So if you have any spare tapes lying around that maybe have some family history on them, digitize them! Let their memory live on.