Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

https://www.axios.com/local/nashville/2026/03/16/nashville-library-digitize-home-movies

by toomuchtodo • 4 months ago

196 45 4 months ago

eschaton• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

valleyer3• 4 months ago

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.

valleyer3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

sophacles• 4 months ago

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.

fitsumbelay2• 4 months ago

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

fitsumbelay2• 4 months ago

looks like DC's PL has had one since 2024 https://www.dclibrary.org/using-the-library/digital-preserva...

mbil• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

all22• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Physically recoiling at this ceo-scum response to OPs comment

aaronax• 4 months ago

There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.

asdefghyk• 4 months ago

Maybe get it archived in wayback machine?

ray_v• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

eru2• 4 months ago

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.

eru2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

torben-friis2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

torben-friis2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

bitparadox2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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!

mackwell2• 4 months ago

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.

bitparadox2• 4 months ago

I thought I had it in git, but it must be on the Zimaboard I was using that's packed away right now

It wasnt a anything special; Cursor could probably make a better one in one shot.

I recall fighting with ffmpeg for a long time trying to fix audio drift in the transcodes, and I think I settled on handbrake-cli (which I think just does ffmpeg itself) because I was getting decent results.

mackwell2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

manofmanysmiles2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

manofmanysmiles2• 4 months ago

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.

userbinator2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

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