Info: L.A. area Home Theater Forum member looking to find good home for 5000(!) vintage VHS and Beta tv recordings

I had to do the same thing when I sold my home in the SF Bay area. I had over 6000 titles. Most of them from Satellite broadcast off of my Big Dish from the early 80's and later on in to the 90's before I got a DVD recorder.

I tried to back up as much as I could but I just didn't have enough time. I gave away what I could but most of it went to a recycle center that had a special drop box for magnetic media. The sad part was some of the stuff was raw footage from live broadcast news and sporting events. The back haul feeds to the networks.  When the networks would cut away for commercials the camera and mike was still on and sending the signal to the networks. You would see hear all kinds of things that were not meant for public viewing.  I hope your stuff finds a good home and the good stuff ends up on the spleen!  

SilverWook said:

"I have a fantastic collection of VHS and Beta I assembled back in the 90s... rare movies that haven't been released to disk, off air broadcasts, animation that has since been censored, weird public access programs... amazing stuff. I carefully catalogued everything on index cards and always recorded at SP on high quality stock."

Whoa!  In the words of Louie DePalma from Taxi:

            
"Would you believe it? I'm salivating! I'm actually salivating!"

An early circulation of THX 1138 (or other movies!) from one of those off-Broadway TV stations that can't afford updated releases ... dare I even think it's on his tapes?  And cataloged?  What are we waiting for?!   :O

SilverWook said:

It's not my stuff. My house isn't big enough for dead video formats as it is. ;)

I knew a guy with one of those big dishes in his backyard when I was in college. He apparently saw a lot interesting stuff on those live feeds.

Are those big dishes still usable in this crazy digital age?

 The Big Dishes are sill alive and in fact there are still quite a bit of raw feeds and a lot of programming. The the receivers are inexpensive and have HiDef with the latest video codecs, They have hard drive and memory card storage for recording and but it takes a lot of patience to get set up the programs are scattered all over the sky.  It is a niche market now more then ever.

Maybe we should pool some donations and see what we get?

If you read the post, he is not looking to give all the tapes to the same person?

TServo2049 said:

If you read the post, he is not looking to give all the tapes to the same person?

Sucks to be him then, LOL.

:)