> I was curious about the possibility of doing this myself, and I asked ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, it knew a lot of the various tapes, file formats, sizes, processing, storage, and after it asked some clarifying questions, it was quite optimistic about me being able to do this myself
Between this, it seems like it helped with so many different parts of the process:
1. Asking for how to do technical things, like transfer video from these old VHS to a newer computer.
2. Writing code for the web portal to host the videos.
3. Writing VLC plugins to help with data entry.
4. Transcribe audio into text.
Similarly, a coworker recently made a website that imitates what Alpha School does to incentivize his own kids to finish their homework all in the span of a weekend, and it's cool to think of the kinds of projects that less or minimally technical people can do with the help of ChatGPT to guide them.
Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.
It would be a good idea to add a final step of burning the videos to M-disc. SSDs and spinning platter drives aren't reliable for long-term storage. You could use a tape drive if the file sizes are too large, but M-disc lasts longer and doesn't require pro hardware to read.
Unfortunately, the author spent so much time just ingesting and managing the video that he did not get to the fun stuff you can do in 2026: index, query, and restore it.
I'm not following here. Even if it was several terabytes of video (digitized at high resolution and minimal lossiness for archival purposes), that's plenty of time to download. Especially if you're a developer who can casually spin up a cloud or dedicated server to proxy through if need be? (And $2k sounds reasonable once you start going through "hundreds of hours" at a bare minimum, and again especially if you're a developer with real opportunity cost.)
Also, as far as the video analysis goes, Gemini might've been a better idea?
A Linux user who’d never installed VLC was weird enough, but the part where they recreate youtube from first principles really strains credulity.
I'm really coming around to the idea for the lucky of us (and I'm assuming a lot about the average HN poster) AI really is a force-multiplying tool
i've been digitizing old family photos recently and the part that surprised me most was how much context you lose if you don't capture it alongside the media. a photo of someone at a table means nothing in 30 years unless you know who, where, when. my parents can still tell those stories but that window is closing.
the AI angle is interesting here because transcription and basic organization are exactly the kind of tedious-but-important tasks that nobody does unless the friction is near zero. if you had to manually label 500 photos you'd never do it. if an AI can get you 80% of the way there, suddenly the project becomes feasible.