Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

71k tapes, 400k hours. 480p H.264 (already better quality than VHS) can be encoded at around 300MB/h, so the whole collection would take approximately 120TB, or less than 10 LTO-9 tapes. It's always amazing to see the massive increase in storage density over time, although reliability is a different story; nonetheless, tape is an established good choice for long-term archival.

View on HN

I just wish the LTO-9 drives came down in price, and into the reach of consumers and small startups.

Does the IA have an archive collection where all that data sits? I search IA but multiple collections get shown with varying content and sizes

This comment has details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40705086

Direct link to the videos https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo

A h264 encoded file of a vhs tape is not better than vhs

> (already better quality than VHS)

This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS?

You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.

i think the aim was to put an upper bound on the estimate. so in practise it would cost less, much less perhaps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com