Idea for on the side business. Is this something you'd purchase?

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   sarahspradlinposted 6 years ago

   I know this wouldn't be a full time job. Some places offer this already but if you had someone who would locally convert your old VHS home videos to DVD or a file online, would you be interested?

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      Shogunposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Honestly, it isn't.
      
      I don't recall the last time I've seen a VHS in my apartment, let alone anything I would need to converted to DVD or digital file.

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      1. 92

         sarahspradlinposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         Well I know not movies but most people who were born in the late 90s or earlier have lots of home movies on VHS with no way to play it but thank you for your feedback!

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      psycheskinnerposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      This service is cheaply available, as is technology to do it at home. I don't see the advantage of the provider being local.

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   Shogunposted 6 years ago

   Oh, I understood what you meant. Definitely think you'll find some people interested in the conversion strategies there. Regardless of my input, I do wish you the best of luck, Sarah - embrace the grind, and make it happen!

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3. 86

   Marisa Wrightposted 6 years ago

   I'd say it's a viable business.  In fact, I think it's likely to be more viable now, as VHS players become more scarce. 
   
   If you've got a VHS player at home, you can buy converter kits fairly easily so you can copy them on to DVD yourself - but I suspect a lot of people are like us, and simply never get around to it.  Then the VHS player breaks down, and suddenly you've got a heap of useless tapes.  That happened to us, and we found it almost impossible to buy a new player.  Luckily we managed to fix the old one, but  I can imagine more and more people finding themselves in that situation as time goes on.
   
   For me, the big stumbling block is cost.  It costs around $20 to get a VHS tape converted to DVD here, and while I'd do that for really precious stuff, I''m certainly not going to be converting my whole collection - they're  just not that important. So I'd suggest looking at what your costs would be and how much you'd have to charge, then research how much people would be willing to pay.

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4. 95

   wildernessposted 6 years ago

   No.  We've already done it with all our VHS tapes.
   
   But I have a bunch of old, old super 8 movies, both sound and silent, I'd dearly love to get made into DVD's.

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      Shogunposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Admittedly, I had to Google "Super 8" to read a bit more. Found this tidbit on the Wikipedia page to be rather neat:
      
      "Thanks to over a dozen film stocks, the ease of function and finding a camera, and the ability to do high quality digital scanning to standard motion picture digital formats like 2K and 4K, DPX or ProRes 4444, Super 8 remains a popular format for creating a variety of interesting scenes. Super 8 provides an ideal, inexpensive medium for traditional stop-motion and cel animation and other types of filming speed effects not common to video cameras. Here is an example from filmmaker John Cannizzaro's 50 Feet That Shook The World."

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         wildernessposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         Wow!  I had no idea it was still in use: I haven't seem cameras, film or projectors for many decades.  I've searched for a used projector I could buy, thinking at worst I could record the image on the screen) but can't even find that.

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   Aime Fposted 6 years ago

   I honestly didn’t know it was possible to convert VHS to files. As you can tell I’m not very tech savvy so yeah I’d probably seek out someone else to do it for me rather than do it myself. I wouldn’t be too interested in the DVD conversion as I feel like we’re heading more towards doing everything online and I’d have to get that converted itself again one day... but if you could do VHS straight to file then yeah, I might be interested.

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