What do you do with those old home videos and DVDs?

I can’t believe I have a pile of videos someplace in the closet when we don’t own a VCR.

Started shooting home videos, editing them in iMovie and then burning it in iDVD in 2004. So far I have about 37 one hour videos on file. Watching the first ones made me feel like I’m time traveling in the past.

In ten more years, they will be much much older and my expectation is they will be more fun to watch then, but they could also be a little poignant as well. My hope is a kid of mine would keep them for as long as possible. Wish my great great great grandfather left some home videos. Lol.

My ex kept all of ours. I wish I had them to put onto DVD. It would be a real treat to see my little people in their ballet concerts and playing soccer as children.

I digitized the old 8mm, super 8, vhs ones to DVD format over the past 10 years. I do have them on Disk based storage, but I do also retain a physical DVD copy as kind of a “gold Master”. Those DVD copies were vital as I had a recent home break-in and they stole my PC and had copied them to hard disk storage.
I watch them when the mood strikes. My daughter gets a good chuckle out of them.
I have about 1TB of home video’s. They are cataloged by year.

@blueiiznh How did you copy the DVDs to your hard drive? Was it just a disk image or was it a format readable by the pc?

@wundayatta I used Nero of DVDFab to decrypt the DVD to my hard drive. This format can then be read my most DVD applications on the PC. Some of the 8mm converts were in mp4 format, but there are many apps out there to convert video/audio from and to almost anything.

mp4 seems to take up a lot less space, but does it maintain the quality? DVDs seem to have higher quality—am I imagining that? The DVDs I made have problems. A lot of the sound is not registered properly. It was a complicated process making the DVDs once my DVD/vr machine broke. Maybe I should be going back to that, except a lot of the DVDs the machine made do not work.

I put all my VCR home movies onto DVD with a DVD player/recorder. I am not electronically savvy enough to put them on computer, and really can’t see why I would want to do that.

I converted a few VHS tapes to digital. The tape was deteriorating, the format was obsolete and it was easy to make copies of the digital versions and give them to interested parties.

@Skaggfacemutt What if the house burns down? I want to have copies of things in another location. I could make copies of the dvds, but I just find electronic versions easier, because I can put them in the cloud.

@wundayatta That is exactly my point. I am not very electronic-age savvy. What is “the cloud?” Never mind, the answer is probably too complicated for me.

@Skaggfacemutt It’s pretty simple. The “cloud” is anywhere that is not your computer that stores some of your data. All your fluther answers are here in the cloud. If you have a google or yahoo account, all your emails are stored in the “cloud.” What the “cloud” means is on a server that isn’t in your house or under your control. Why the “cloud” implies is that there are multiple copies of the data all over the world, just in case one server here or there dies.