Newbie Hoping To Eventually Become A Professional

[Beyonder123]

Hello everyone, I have a lot to say and I've found alot of helpful information on this forum so I finally got an account and am hoping to get some tips and help and keep improving in what I do!

First of all, I am an avid searcher of lost media. I try to track down old shows and other pieces of media that are lost and attempt to make them public. I eventually want to do this on a much more professional scale.

What does this have to do with this forum? Well I spend alot of time ripping VHS tapes since that was the preferred way of storing video for the average consumer for over 20 years. Alot of things were broadcast on television once or twice and then never seen again. I track down VHS recordings people made and convert them to digital.

Now I'm sure there are tons of professionals on this forum and that is exactly why I joined. I want to upgrade my setup. Currently I'm using the, "Dazzle DVC100". I then capture using virtualdub, where I deinterlace it and resize it. I then convert the AVI file to MP4 at a constant frame rate of 59.94 FPS using handbrake. After that I take it to lightworks where I do any final edits I need. Finally I upload to YouTube. In the future I will be uploading the AVI files to archive.org.

I know that is probably very basic and I'm probably not digitizing to the highest potential my tapes have, so I want to do more. I plan on buying an AJA Kona LHI capture card and hooking it up to some sort of Time Base Corrector. I already own a pretty good VCR so I've already got that problem out of the way.

Here are some questions I have:

- Virtualdub seems to be very glitchy AKA I have no video preview when I capture. This makes things very difficult. Can I fix this? How would I fix this?
- What TBC should I buy? Preferably something in the 100-200 dollar range. However if I can get something for cheaper that would work just as well that would be great too.
- What are the benefits of (encoding?) to 59.94 FPS? Downsides?
- Did I use the word encoding correctly?
- Is there a better capture program I should use?
- A better capture card I should buy?

Thanks for everything and I look forward to reading many replies.

[lingyi]

Start by reading this article by lordsmurf at digitalfaq.com: http://www.digitalfaq.com/editorials/digital-video/professional-analog-workflow.htm and this article about VCRs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buying-guide.html and this article about TBCs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/2251-tbc-time-base.html

Note the list of quality VCRs is rather short (and even shorter when you narrow it to down to what's available today) and quality TBCs is even shorter. Also note that a single proper workflow, high quality VCR, TBC and capture device is ~$1000 and you'll need several different VCRs to handle the varying quality of the tapes you receive.

Hopefully lordsmurf will post here as he may be willing to sell you a proper highly quality capture setup (VCR, TBC and capture device). You might also try contacting deter at digitalfaq.com also as he has a solid reputation for refurbishing and selling high quality VCRs (he may have a few TBCs also). Buying piecemeal from anyone you don't know (i.e. eBay, craigslist, etc.) is a crapshoot at best and getting repairs is getting harder to find someone to do them and more expensive.

I haven't done any capturing in years, but your workflow seems overly complicated and prone to quality loss. I'll leave it up to others to comment, but in general, you want to work with the original capture (ideally to a lossless codec) as much as possible, converting only at the end for upload or distribution.

[Beyonder123]

Start by reading this article by lordsmurf at digitalfaq.com: http://www.digitalfaq.com/editorials/digital-video/professional-analog-workflow.htm and this article about VCRs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/1567-vcr-buying-guide.html and this article about TBCs: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-restore/2251-tbc-time-base.html

Note the list of quality VCRs is rather short (and even shorter when you narrow it to down to what's available today) and quality TBCs is even shorter. Also note that a single proper workflow, high quality VCR, TBC and capture device is ~$1000 and you'll need several different VCRs to handle the varying quality of the tapes you receive.

Hopefully lordsmurf will post here as he may be willing to sell you a proper highly quality capture setup (VCR, TBC and capture device). You might also try contacting deter at digitalfaq.com also as he has a solid reputation for refurbishing and selling high quality VCRs (he may have a few TBCs also). Buying piecemeal from anyone you don't know (i.e. eBay, craigslist, etc.) is a crapshoot at best and getting repairs is getting harder to find someone to do them and more expensive.

I haven't done any capturing in years, but your workflow seems overly complicated and prone to quality loss. I'll leave it up to others to comment, but in general, you want to work with the original capture (ideally to a lossless codec) as much as possible, converting only at the end for upload or distribution.

Thanks. I'm going to try to save a bit of money so I can afford that setup. Those articles were very helpful and hopefully I can get into contact with the people you mentioned to buy the setup.

[jagabo]

Well I spend alot of time ripping VHS tapes since that was the preferred way of storing video for the average consumer for over 20 years. Alot of things were broadcast on television once or twice and then never seen again. I track down VHS recordings people made and convert them to digital.

Expect to be sued by an army of lawyers from whoever holds the copyright to those videos. Just because they're not making money off the content doesn't mean they're going to let you.

But, if you're serious about cleanup and restoration you'll need to learn AviSynth or one of the forks of it, AviSynth+ VaproSynth, etc.

[KarMa]

Expect to be sued by an army of lawyers from whoever holds the copyright to those videos. Just because they're not making money off the content doesn't mean they're going to let you.

If OP is making money on this content, sure that's possible. Especially with certain companies that are still around. If OP isn't making money then they will probably just DMCA the website owner. But anytime you handle copyrighted content in ways you are not allowed to, you always open yourself up to being sued or worse.

[Cornucopia]

All of the above. More power to you if you can swing it.
But don't quit your day job - this is NOT the sort of thing that is a big profit maker. Even Library of Congress Digital Archivists, which is one of the epitomes of this sort of work, don't make much.

Scott

[leeoverstreet]

Beyonder123,

What's your YouTube channel? I'm curious to see what you've uploaded so far. Would also make it easier to offer advice.

[lordsmurf]

Expect to be sued by an army of lawyers from whoever holds the copyright to those videos.

There's more public domain works (yet still in demand) that people realize. Note that Wiki entries that supposedly list "all" public domain works are laughably far frrom complete.

But don't quit your day job - this is NOT the sort of thing that is a big profit maker.

This is more about business sense and marketing than not. And Youtube isn't your friend, but rather the enemy.

[sophisticles]

There are so many things wrong with this question that it's hard to figure out where to start:

Newbie Hoping To Eventually Become A Professional

You need to differentiate between "expert" and "professional". "Expert" would be "highly skilled, very proficient, knowledgeable"; "professional" means someone who does it for a living. Do you mean you want to get highly skilled or make a living doing it?

First of all, I am an avid searcher of lost media. I try to track down old shows and other pieces of media that are lost and attempt to make them public. I eventually want to do this on a much more professional scale.

This right here tells me that you will never accomplish what you hope to, because you don't even understand what it is you desire to do. your sentence taken literally may or may not be accomplish-able and it has nothing to do with knowledge or technical skill level, it has to do with money and the ability to acquire the broadcast and/or distribution rights to the content.

In your post you conflate unrelated desires and goals and you use terms that are poorly defined.

What is "lost media"?

What is an "old show"?

What is "other pieces of media"?

What is "attempt to make them public"?

What is "on a much more professional scale"?

If your goal is to find rare tv programming that is rarely broadcast, restore it and then make it available to the public viewing, broadly speaking you would need the following steps:

1) Track down the rights holders, for both the distribution and broadcast rights (2 different things), as well as any other rights holders (it's common for content to have the rights held by different entities with each controlling a certain aspect of the content).

2) Buy the rights or negotiate a licensing agreement.

3) Get the masters, if they exist. The fact that you are talking about VHS, TBC, re-encoding, a budget of $100-$200 and other such nonsense tells me you do not know WTF you are talking about.

4) The master of "old shows" will be in film format so you will need to scan them to digital.

5) Attempt to "clean" and "enhance" the digital versions, as applicable.

6) Encode them to a digital distribution friendly format.

7) Find a platform, such as a tv station to broadcast or a streaming service, like YouTube to distribute.

If you mean you want to track down old VHS tapes, digitize them and upload them to YouTube and you want to expand your "operations" so that more people will see your "work", well...

[Beyonder123]

Thanks for the replies (albeit one harsh one). Here is a bit more information:

I want to clarify that I dont intend on making money off of my found pieces of media. Media finding is just a hobby of mine. When I was saying I wanted to possibly make digital conversion a career I meant as a service. Not connected to my hobby.

Someone asked what my YouTube channel was. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQtpf-2DPzKPnPcmE0S5UCw (not sure if posting that is allowed. Let me know if it isn't)

Someone said if i want a piece of media released i should contact the rights owners. While ideally this would great: it really is unlikely that I would get a response especially when dealing with large companies like fox and Disney. There is a large community out there that search for lost media and if it interests you I suggest looking into it further.

Thanks again!

[manono]

Why'd you add the black bars to them all? They look amateurish as a result. You should upload them in the original aspect ratios without adding black bars. Also, I doubt seriously that the framerates are either 29.97 or 59.94 fps.

Edit later: As I suspected they're supposed to be 23.976fps

- What are the benefits of (encoding?) to 59.94 FPS? Downsides?

You encode to the correct original framerate. 59.94fps is necessary if interlaced and have to be made progressive. Your YouTube videos shouldn't be deinterlaced or bobbed but IVTC'd. Time to learn some AviSynth.

[lordsmurf]

You need a better S-VHS VCR (with internal line TBC), ASAP. Those all have horrible timebase errors. Yuck. Your biggest issue will be acquiring the proper equipment, not just using some crappy old VCR and cheap capture stick.

Ignore sophisticles.
Some of his questions/assertions are ridiculous, nonsensical, or deliberately obtuse.
His opinion of VHS is already documented here: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/391068-POLL-Sanlyn-or-Lordsmurf-EDIT-or-NORM#post2535430

@manono, a lot of commercials are 29.97, not 23.976 film. But even if not, sometimes QTGMC yields better anti-alias than IVTC. However, that said, if you have some sort of default anti-alias for IVTC script, I'd like to see it!

We seem to have some hobby overlap, so I may PM you sometime in the near future.

[manono]

@manono, a lot of commercials are 29.97, not 23.976 film. But even if not, sometimes QTGMC yields better anti-alias than IVTC. However, that said, if you have some sort of default anti-alias for IVTC script, I'd like to see it!

I downloaded one of the episodes (the 'Lost' one) to have a look. It's supposed to be 23.976fps. However, you're right about the sometime aliasing or the fields just not lining up properly with VHS caps so you can perform a real IVTC. In such instances I might do it this way:

QTGMC(FPSDivisor=2)
TDecimate()

It just rubs me the wrong way to create duplicate frames purposely. Sometimes you might make it 59.94fps as the lessor of two evils when there's interlaced content mixed with hard telecine. You get that with anime sometimes, or progressive 29.97fps and hard or soft telecine.

[sophisticles]

Ignore sophisticles.
Some of his questions/assertions are ridiculous, nonsensical, or deliberately obtuse.

You two deserve one another. He comes here asking a question he doesn't even realize he asked and you guys are acting like it's not fundamentally misinformed.

Further, I think you need to add a disclaimer to your responses in this thread, informing people that you can not be trusted because you have a vested financial interest in keeping a 40+ year old technology alive.

Let's be honest with ourselves, VHS was never a high quality media in the first place and over the years, like all magnetic media they deteriorate in quality over time with picture quality degrading substantially inside of 10 years.

This guy comes here saying he wants to track down "old shows" on VHS, doesn't define what an "old show" is, are we talking the 50s, 60s, 70s, who knows, he wants to digitize them presumably "restore" them, make them "public" and become a "professional" at it!

This is so stupid it's boggles the mind.

Of course you're going to encourage him, you make money from digitizing VHS; I can understand with home movies, where the highest quality "master" is the original VHS tape that something was recorded on but for TV shows?

Stop acting like what he is asking isn't idiotic.

[Beyonder123]

Ignore sophisticles.
Some of his questions/assertions are ridiculous, nonsensical, or deliberately obtuse.

You two deserve one another. He comes here asking a question he doesn't even realize he asked and you guys are acting like it's not fundamentally misinformed.

Further, I think you need to add a disclaimer to your responses in this thread, informing people that you can not be trusted because you have a vested financial interest in keeping a 40+ year old technology alive.

Let's be honest with ourselves, VHS was never a high quality media in the first place and over the years, like all magnetic media they deteriorate in quality over time with picture quality degrading substantially inside of 10 years.

This guy comes here saying he wants to track down "old shows" on VHS, doesn't define what an "old show" is, are we talking the 50s, 60s, 70s, who knows, he wants to digitize them presumably "restore" them, make them "public" and become a "professional" at it!

This is so stupid it's boggles the mind.

Of course you're going to encourage him, you make money from digitizing VHS; I can understand with home movies, where the highest quality "master" is the original VHS tape that something was recorded on but for TV shows?

Stop acting like what he is asking isn't idiotic.

Thanks but I really didn't ask for your opinion about whether or not I should do this.But how I should go about doing it. Calling my project, "idiotic" is pretty out of line.

[sophisticles]

Thanks but I really didn't ask for your opinion about whether or not I should do this.But how I should go about doing it. Calling my project, "idiotic" is pretty out of line.

Having a hobby is not idiotic, your expressed desire, which you clearly still do not understand what you said you wanted to do, is idiotic. And the smurf acting like it's not, as if it's a perfectly reasonable goal, isn't doing you any favors.

In fact, you still haven't received a decent response to your original question, other than the one I gave you and the fact that you do not realize it is sad.

So you keep on believing that you will become a "professional" at the silly thing you outlined and keep believing that smurf and friends helped you.

I'll just sit here chuckling to myself.

[chris319]

I really didn't ask for your opinion about whether or not I should do this.But how I should go about doing it. Calling my project, "idiotic" is pretty out of line.

I agree. There are already enough bullies on this board.

[_Al_]

sophisticles - he is saving possibly unique content , why are you talking about VHS being old and all, that might evoke a chuckle itself, considering the topic, .... it might not be broadcasted, it might not be on BD and he might not have latest Nvidia card , ... and he revealed his content already

[lingyi]

If not for hobbyists, who may eventually become true professionals, numerous videos would likely be lost or at least unseen. While YouTube is a less than ideal delivery medium, it sometimes encourages/reminds others to seek out better sources. And sometimes an OTA VHS recording IS the best source available. I'm not a Star Wars fan, but AFAIK, the infamous Christmas Special has never and likely will never be officially released.

[lordsmurf]

deteriorate in quality over time with picture quality degrading substantially inside of 10 years.

This is a myth.

The true longevity of magnetic consumer analog is in the 35-65 year range, if stored properly (not attic, basement, outdoors).

The only problem I come across, in terms of "degrading affecting image" is some 80s BASF tapes where the oxide is flaking. I see it maybe twice per year, not often. I'm thinking moisture does it, based on the climates of the tape home.

but for TV shows?

Again, there is a market for it. Very niche.

[sophisticles]

Again, there is a market for it. Very niche.

Evidently it's so "niche" that he doesn't know how to use Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Cybersix-Complete-TV-Series/dp/B00L1WJGPG

I just checked out his YouTube channel, he seems to have a thing for Cyber Six and he's willing to track down "old" VHS tapes (it's funny that he considers the year 2000 "old"), spend up to $200 to buy the equipment to try and digitize them then spend the money to "restore" them instead of spending 30 seconds checking Amazon to find that for $28 he can get the complete tv series on DVD.

Listen, I get his desire, I am a huge fan of The Classic 39 Honeymooners, but I would never spend time and effort to track down old VHS tapes, digitize them, "restore" the, when I can go to Amazon and spend $29 and get the originals professionally scanned from the original film stock, and authored on Blu-Ray for $29 (which is exactly what I did by the way).

Pro tip to anyone else that wants to take the path the OP is planning, go to Amazon first and make sure that the studios that own the rights to the content haven't already done what you want to do with much higher quality and at a price that is right.

[lingyi]

This OP posting "lost" and "censored" content as well as commercials that are likely unavailable on commercial releases.

I understand your dinging the him/her for the desire to go from almost nothing to a professional, but everyone's got start somewhere.

[lordsmurf]

Evidently it's so "niche" that he doesn't know how to use Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Cybersix-Complete-TV-Series/dp/B00L1WJGPG

I doubt that's what he refers to, probably just practice. You also fail to realize that older toons can be cut and censored, and some have WOC value. But this isn't what he's referring to anyway.

I just checked out his YouTube channel, he seems to have a thing for Cyber Six

Yes, and they look pretty terrible, lack of TBCs, as I mentioned above.

and he's willing to track down "old" VHS tapes (it's funny that he considers the year 2000 "old"),

At first glance, I find it funny as well ... but then realize it's 20 years ago. Our age is showing.

spend up to $200 to buy the equipment to try and digitize them then spend the money to "restore" them instead of spending 30 seconds checking Amazon to find that for $28 he can get the complete tv series on DVD.

Again, you're assuming that's what he wants to do. I don't think it is.

Listen, I get his desire, I am a huge fan of The Classic 39 Honeymooners,

That really is a great show, isn't it? I mostly a fan of toons and B&W era TV.

but I would never spend time and effort to track down old VHS tapes, digitize them, "restore" the, when I can go to Amazon and spend $29 and get the originals professionally scanned from the original film stock, and authored on Blu-Ray for $29 (which is exactly what I did by the way).
Pro tip to anyone else that wants to take the path the OP is planning, go to Amazon first and make sure that the studios that own the rights to the content haven't already done what you want to do with much higher quality and at a price that is right.

If it is available, and unmolested, I fully agree.
But if nothing else, those old recordings can make for good conversion practice.

I understand your dinging the him/her for the desire to go from almost nothing to a professional, but everyone's got start somewhere.

Beyonder123 has that deer-in-headlights curiosity, the sort of person that makes for a great student, at least from what I see so far. He probably can learn this, and go far, at least as a serious hobbyist.

[johnmeyer]

Beyonder123 has that deer-in-headlights curiosity, the sort of person that makes for a great student, at least from what I see so far. He probably can learn this, and go far, at least as a serious hobbyist.

After all the attitude and snark directed at the OP in this thread, I am really glad to see this statement. As you very rightly point out, he's a "newbie" who's just trying to learn.

[lingyi]

Beyonder123 has that deer-in-headlights curiosity, the sort of person that makes for a great student, at least from what I see so far. He probably can learn this, and go far, at least as a serious hobbyist.

After all the attitude and snark directed at the OP in this thread, I am really glad to see this statement. As you very rightly point out, he's a "newbie" who's just trying to learn.

He/she has the critical ability to ask questions and be willing to learn, take advice and get the proper equipment.

Unlike so many others who just say, I have ABC equipment and want to do XYZ, tell me everything I'm missing in between in one paragraph, no more!

[Beyonder123]

Hello everyone. I'm back again. I recently did some PC upgrades and purchased a JVC HR-S7900U; which was on the list of suggested VCR's. I also purchased a GTX 1070ti (didn't know if that would help but thought I would mention it). I'm hoping to buy a TBC-1000 in the coming months so fingers crossed for that. And also I'm looking to buy a good capture card.

The capture card I was going to get after researching was the ATI All In Wonder card. But from what I've gathered I need an old motherboard/windows version for that. I run windows 10 so that wasn't an option. My second choice was an AJA Kona, but that isn't virtualdub compatible. So lastly I've come to the conclusion that I need an Matrox MX02 HD + analog PCIe capture card.

I got this information from here http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/3200-best-ati-wonder.html

Information is sparce online for that last card unless I'm understanding wrong. Is this card actually an external system? Is https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F123848883953 this what I am needing?

Or I could be on the completely wrong track here and i need a completely different capture card altogether. Any input would be welcomed.

[johnmeyer]

I have an old ATI All-in-Wonder card and I found it to be nothing but trouble. My experience with it is why I so often recommend that people capture using DV when doing VHS even though DV has compression artifacts and color issues that make the results slightly inferior to what you might get with the All-in-Wonder if you can actually get it to work reliably.

The problems I had were that it dropped frames which results in visual discontinuities which are obvious and jarring. By comparison, I've never dropped a frame when capturing using DV.

Other people here can suggest more modern capture solutions that might work better. For instance I have a Hauppauge 1512 capture device that, if I were going to do a lot more SD captures, I'd be tempted to enhance by purchasing the composite input feature. Out of the box it provides HDMI and component capture and is useful for offloading video from my PVR.

So, bottom line, I am not a fan at all of the ATI All-in-Wonder that I still have because I'm not sure I was ever -- even once -- able to get a good quality capture. (P.S., I just remembered that another problem was that I could never configure the proc amp settings to give me video that had proper levels.).

[orsetto]

On a related note, not every official studio streaming, dvd or BD release is perfect. Its amazing how often they screw up badly, be it from sloppy remastering or being too cheap/unable to pay for original music license extensions, or unwilling to challenge nutbag "artist complaints" in court to set sensible precedents once and for all.

i.e., "The Honeymooners Classic 39" set cited above has been plagued with muddy low sound issues in a couple of the best episodes, so one still needs to capture a broadcast version to fully enjoy those. "The Odd Couple" and "WKRP" series sets have been put thru a cheese grater to delete every scene where Felix or Johnny so much as hums a bar of remotely known songs, to avoid paying ludicrous license fees. Most absurd of all, the funniest self-aware gag of the old "Roseanne" show has been permanently censored due to the bizarrely humorless rights holder of "The Patty Duke Show" song.

A pet peeve of mine is this "music license" BS: somebody really needs to slap these extortionist music rights gatekeepers HARD until they wake the hell up from 1981 and deal with reality. Who exactly does it benefit to insist on a $50,000 fee to use a song in a BluRay vintage TV series set that would be lucky to see 5,000 unit sales @ $49? Inevitably, the movie studio tells the music rights holder to go eff themselves and substitutes some generic crap song, or worse deletes entire scenes, destroying the mood and memory of the original TV show/movie. That songwriter/publishing company then ends up with zero-nada-nothing for their ransom attempt, and another piece of our cultural heritage gets mangled or lost.

Wash, rinse, repeat thru countless classic TV and movie home video releases. Again: who benefits from this stubborn irrational greed? Forty years since VHS kicked off the home video revolution, and these music morons STILL cannot come up with a reasonable, consistent, fair supplementary license addendum that covers home video sales for movies/series episodes that ALREADY paid an in-perpetuity fee for broadcast, cable and every other use EXCEPT home video.

So, yeah: theres reasons some "hobbyists" still need to chase down and preserve VHS tapes. At least for individual personal use: apparently the whole "share it with the world via youTube" paradigm may be grinding to a halt soon, given the recently successful suit against Google that goes into effect this spring (expect hundreds of thousands of take-down notices based on Google not sharing their ad revenue with music publishers).

[leeoverstreet]

I use a Matrox MXO2 on Windows 7 and have had quite good results. Some caveats... The software and drivers don't officially support Windows 10, although the last entries in some dusty old MXO2 forums detail how to get it to work, supposedly. Also, I use Adobe Premiere 2015, and have held off upgrading for the same reason. Same said dusty forum entries detail how to move some files around to different folders to get things to work in later versions of Adobe Premiere, but still. I'm itching to upgrade Premiere, so I may default to capturing with Matrox's ugly little capture utility. As far as I can tell the results are exactly the same as capturing in Premiere. Also, I'm an odd duck compared to the recommendations found here on Videohelp. I started my capturing before learning about Virtualdub, using Matrox's slightly compressed MPEG format. But it's intraframe and 4:2:2, and at 25Mbps, I honestly can't tell any difference between it and lossless in Virtualdub, so I just kept on rolling with the Matrox format. Matrox's MPEG format isn't played correctly by every video player in the world, but VLC plays it perfectly (use the Yadif 2x playback method for perfect 60fps video), and Premiere has no issue with it. So that's good enough for me. Although the MXO2 has a "consumer" vs. "professional" setting for the video signal, it can still get tripped up by a poor tape, for which some external TBC of some sort helps. It also has automatic video leveling you can turn on, and that seems to help some with tapes that have a lot of high video levels (a family beach trip, for instance). The MXO2 can be a bit fussy at times, and needs a reboot if the computer has gone into sleep mode or hibernation. Generally, though, the picture quality is great, depending on what you send it.

For me, since everything I plan to do will end up being shared on YouTube or Vimeo, that's where I judge my final results. I convert each field to a frame, then upscale to 1080p60 and crop off the head switching noise at the bottom and black lines at the top. I'm happy, especially when the source tape was good in the first place. Check out my results at https://www.youtube.com/user/theleeoverstreet. Most of the videos have technical info in the description where I mention the tape, tape speed, VCR that recorded it originally, etc. If you scroll on down through my television videos, you'll see some camcorder tapes, including VHS, and even some late 90's anamorphic Hi8.

[jonbey]

A long shot, but speak to Exeter University ...
A fried studied there in 1991-1994. He told me that they had a guy that recorded everything on the TV for the university archive - his job was to just keep the 4 video recorders recording (think only BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Ch4) . I only remember this because my mate told me how useful this guy was for catching any shows that you missed - he'd happily lend out any tapes that were requested.

There might be a room full of UK TV from the 1980s and 90s somewhere in the depths of Exeter Uni. Or they might have binned them all years ago.