My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
sampatt.comThis 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.
> 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.
I'm really coming around to the idea for the lucky of us (and I'm assuming a lot about the average HN poster) AI really is a force-multiplying tool
I'd love to see the imitation of alphaschool . I would work on my own , and i'd love the inspiration . Any chance you can share ?
completely agree on the personal project angle. for family media specifically, the barrier was never really technical, it was the combination of effort + organization + knowing what to do with the output.
i've been digitizing old family photos recently and the part that surprised me most was how much context you lose if you don't capture it alongside the media. a photo of someone at a table means nothing in 30 years unless you know who, where, when. my parents can still tell those stories but that window is closing.
the AI angle is interesting here because transcription and basic organization are exactly the kind of tedious-but-important tasks that nobody does unless the friction is near zero. if you had to manually label 500 photos you'd never do it. if an AI can get you 80% of the way there, suddenly the project becomes feasible.
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.
Just fyi, you can just use BDXL discs(get them while you still can!) they use technology identical to M-Discs and should last just as long.
I assume the backup is the copy in R2.
That's better than nothing. Personally, I wouldn't consider it archival storage, so much as the possibility that 20 years from now Cloudflare (or a holding company) pays me $100 compensation for my lost data!
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.
On the professional end of digitizing old libraries, I've seen it all. They have cart systems that will automatically load a tape deck, the tape deck rewinds the tape, the system plays the tape while digitizing from the beginning until the end of the tape or end of control track. Once it is done, the tape rewinds, ejects and the robot removes the ejected tape and starts over. This is great for cassette based formats. For reel based formats it still involves an operator threading the tape and changing the reels. Even with the automation, it is a chore.
You could look into one of those VHS to DVD systems. Sure, it's SD MPEG2, but the source was a VHS. At least you're not tying up your computer system to do this. It also means not needing a NAS.
> 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?
You don't even need to spin up anything - eg AWS datasync will mirror the remote server for you directly into glacier which can be extremely cheap if you're okay with access-a-file-12-hours-after-you-request-it
I'm not familiar with 'AWS datasync', but isn't the point of Glacier that it's really expensive and slow if you retrieve everything? It sounds like a bad idea for videos he planned to download in order to catalogue them. (He might want to delete them or could safely infer that 'no, neither me nor my siblings will want to watch this on Christmas Day', yes, but he still has to look at them first since he doesn't know what's on them at all.)
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.
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.
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
Yes, based on context fro. a quick skim of the content, it sounds like its a jokey reference to working the FBI phone switchboard
Thank you, that's very appreciated!
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.
The post has 8 comments at the time of your comment and they look pretty organic for established accounts.
There are now organic looking comments. Maybe it's just the way some people sound.
I asked ChatGPT and it told me it was marketing.
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.
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).
So cool! Gave me some motivation to record more things.
This is SUCH a great story. Thanks for writing up both the human and technology parts with equal love and depth.
That was an amazing read, thanks for sharing!
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...
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.