This is so neat! I really think AI turbocharges this kind of personal project way more than it speeds up programming for work:

> I was curious about the possibility of doing this myself, and I asked ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, it knew a lot of the various tapes, file formats, sizes, processing, storage, and after it asked some clarifying questions, it was quite optimistic about me being able to do this myself

Between this, it seems like it helped with so many different parts of the process:

1. Asking for how to do technical things, like transfer video from these old VHS to a newer computer.

2. Writing code for the web portal to host the videos.

3. Writing VLC plugins to help with data entry.

4. Transcribe audio into text.

Similarly, a coworker recently made a website that imitates what Alpha School does to incentivize his own kids to finish their homework all in the span of a weekend, and it's cool to think of the kinds of projects that less or minimally technical people can do with the help of ChatGPT to guide them.

Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.

"Once I began to create the metadata I already knew what I wanted to do: create my own streaming platform for our family’s memories."

Immich has become a bit of this for me, my father digitized everything he has, he gave it to me and I dumped it in Immich and spend some time dating stuff. So now I can, with the slide of the finger, drop myself in 1983 and see my own first steps, no audio, video8 quality, still quite magical.

Perhaps normal for all you iCloud and Google Photos fans, but I never wanted that, for me everything was just in folders on harddrives, have been waiting for Immich my whole life I guess ;)

"each MP4 file was likely to be about 3GB. (...) Also, it’s not easy to watch a file like that. You’d need to download the entire file first to even be able to watch it"

I dont think that's true? Even with moov atom at the end of the file, browsers just figure it out, as long as the server supports http range requests. And I suspect the size could be much smaller, given the low resolution of Video8 footage, but maybe author did the reasearch and compression would take too much time.

> I searched for services which offered to digitize Video8 tapes. Most services cost about $20 per tape. Even with discounts for bulk amounts, it would likely have cost about $2k! I considered paying it (how exactly do you value a few hundred hours of childhood video?) but then I noticed how they delivered the videos - a private media hosting solution for 60 days. I knew this would be a huge amount of data, and only giving me and my siblings two months wasn’t sufficient.

I'm not following here. Even if it was several terabytes of video (digitized at high resolution and minimal lossiness for archival purposes), that's plenty of time to download. Especially if you're a developer who can casually spin up a cloud or dedicated server to proxy through if need be? (And $2k sounds reasonable once you start going through "hundreds of hours" at a bare minimum, and again especially if you're a developer with real opportunity cost.)

Also, as far as the video analysis goes, Gemini might've been a better idea?

Thanks for the write up. I think you might be happy to hear that ffmpeg has scene detection built in. But you might be unhappy given how much work you did. In my experience it works pretty well.

An upscale pipeline seems like the next job, by the way! you can pull a lot of quality out of those old videos with modern tools. Enjoy.

@SamPatt Good post, including the clip of grandma's anecdote.

It would be a good idea to add a final step of burning the videos to M-disc. SSDs and spinning platter drives aren't reliable for long-term storage. You could use a tape drive if the file sizes are too large, but M-disc lasts longer and doesn't require pro hardware to read.

I film my kids with the same camera in 2026. I don't know how to explain it, but it feels completely different. When I film something on a phone I feel awkward but with this camera I could film everyone and it's much more comfortable to all (including adults I mean)

Neat! I briefly tried digitizing some old VHS tapes for my family. I was just planning on giving them the files, maybe putting it on iCloud, it's a much smaller collection (and I don't have a NAS already!). I did a few, the time investment was the biggest issue, as well as figuring out the right encoding so as to not take up a ton of space, but still be compatible with everyone's (Windows + Mac) native video players while preserving video quality.

In the early 2000s, we had a camera that saved to an internal hard drive. The only way to watch videos was to either copy them to the computer or hook an RCA cable from the camera to the TV. You could also go from VGA to RCA with the right set of cables.

However, everyone did have a DVD player! So I, similar to the author, wrote scripts to take videos, generate DVD isos, and then burn to DVDs.

I learned about message queues (rabbitmq) with that project and had connected a bunch of old laptops with Linux VMs installed.

I never finished the project and nowadays there are a hundred ways to share and stream digital video. I hadn’t anticipated, at the time, that casting videos wirelessly to our TVs would become the norm.

Way too much work :( At least my video collection is mostly miniDV.

Unfortunately, the author spent so much time just ingesting and managing the video that he did not get to the fun stuff you can do in 2026: index, query, and restore it.

Not related to the tech bits of this, but I finally got around to watching Aftersun a couple of days ago. It's a great, sad film about somebody watching home video from their childhood and reevaluating what was going on.

Wow, Great story. The title was boring, but I'm procrastinating and decide to read on. It's amazing how LLM is supercharging our capabilities. I was just telling my wife that we need to record more videos of the kids. I use my phone but it get's filled up fast, so this has inspired me to buy a dedicated camera for video recording of the family. Thanks for sharing.

Non-native speaker here.

I always assumed Fed has something to do with FBI or the Federal Bank. Please, can someone explain me what Fed means in this context?

Thank you in advance

Like the author I've been in the process of archiving family memories since my parents passed away. In my Dad's case his early fascination with super 8mm film gave way to a lifelong quest to own more Kodak slide carousels than any other human. It's sort of an odd place to be, when you're in possession of so much that _seems_ emotionally, viscerally important, but that ordinary people living their everyday lives take very little actual interest in. I scanned all the slides with a Kodak thing I bought on Marketplace. There were more than 6500 of them and the archive has passed 20GB in size. Now I have a stack of plastic kodak carousels taller than I am and thousands of slides that I can't just put in the trash because it feels wrong.

I'm working on loose documents and photos now with a great Epson flatbed scanner that I've had for years. It's something of an obsession for me now: to finish the job and tie their lives and a good chunk of ours off neatly. When I'm done I'll pack it all onto thumb drives and send copies to my siblings and they will look at a few of them and then put the drives in a drawer and that will likely be the end of it. But I will have done my duty to the old folks, even though it took long enough that I became one. It has all reminded me of how I mourned when I lost a hard drive years ago, and then came to the realization that I hadn't looked at any of its contents in years and that if I lived to be 100 probably none of it would ever have been important again anyway. You can't really keep anything, so do your kids a favor and dispose of your stuff while you can :).

The post is impressive but anyone else feel a bit icky about the comments here? Numbering out the advantages in lists? The phrasing, the exciting exclamation mark(!). This comment section feels like some kind of marketing exercise.

I'm in the process of doing something similar but just planning on throwing them on my Immich instance once they're ready (and that lets me share them with other people as well with the Immich account management).

Love this story too as many others have said. Thanks for sharing this. Maybe someday I will do the same. Luckily our archive of tapes isn’t so large.

> I don’t remember exactly which tape I popped in, except that I saw my mother as she looked when she was around my age now. She passed away in 2013 at 55 years old, and I hadn’t seen her at this age in… well, I don’t know how many years.

Similarly, I found a tape I'd shot in the mid-to-late 80s, probably Christmas 1988. On it was some footage of my dad, who died in 1993 when he was 47.

That's the first time I've seen that tape or indeed heard his voice since he died. He must have been about ten years younger than I am now.

So, the first time I've heard my dad's voice in over 30 years, and the first time his grandson has ever heard him (he recognised his grandad straight away).

Quite a moment, that.

This is SUCH a great story. Thanks for writing up both the human and technology parts with equal love and depth.

So cool! Gave me some motivation to record more things.

That was an amazing read, thanks for sharing!

The AI folks are really getting desperate to be churning out this slop.

A Linux user who’d never installed VLC was weird enough, but the part where they recreate youtube from first principles really strains credulity.

You are so amazing, and you are so lucky to have found this. I read it and cry because I will never have such an experience...