Hiya! My name is Terry J. Aman and welcome to this inaugural effort of Videofuzzy, an audio podcast to accompany my humble brag/shame/therapy as a media packrat. It’s an audio podcast so as to reduce my temptation to include clips of videos that I’ve archived. While it’s totally legal to record the things they broadcast on the teevee, I don’t want to run afoul of anyone’s copyrights. Also, because I don’t want to have to remember halfway through recording an episode whether I wore pants or not. It’s not my intention to burden anyone with unnecessary information in this podcast so the question as to whether I did remember or not shall remain a mystery.
As I said, I’m a media packrat. I’ve been archiving media, mostly on VHS tapes, since the 1980s, and I continue to do so to this day. These days I’m recording directly to DVDs and since I started doing that in December or so I’ve filled about 70 or so discs. As for the VHS tapes, that collection grew to hundreds of tapes until by 2012 it had taken over an entire five-shelf storage unit in my home, stacked double and triple tapes deep. I’d started to transfer them to DVDs way back when, and had made a pretty good dent in them – more than 2,000 discs – until the VHS half of my VHS/DVD recorder broke down. When I moved to Bismarck, I’d gotten it down to just a couple of packing crates. All of those tapes, all of that media I’d collected over the years now fit into about a dozen or so DVD carriers, so … progress.
However, I still had VHS tapes, and no VHS/DVD dubber, until a very thoughtful Christmas gift from my mate, Ralph, I was finally able to start transferring them again.
On a good day, I could transfer three tapes. I would set a tape to transfer before I left for work in the morning. I’d stop at home before going for a swim and set another tape to transfer, which usually gave me enough time to transfer a third tape to transfer overnight. I could get a few more processed over weekends, but within a few months, I’d plowed through two boxes full of VHS tapes, and I could finally resume the process of discovering what the heck was on all of these discs!
Because that’s the main thing, right? I mean, it’s great to have all of this media, to have the equivalent of entire disc sets of beloved shows, canceled shows, obscure shows it’s hard to find anywhere, concerts, documentaries, I mean, it’s 2017 and a lot of media – a lot of media – is available on Netflix and YouTube and Hulu and Amazon and a person could easily spend hundreds of hours running all of these memories to earth and thousands of dollars accessing them through some pay service.
I’ve got them all on disc, but for the life of me I don’t know where any of them are. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did manage to catalog 200 or so before moving to Bismarck in 2012, and when I transferred my three Carol Burnett and Friends VHS tapes I made a point of writing on those three discs “The Carol Burnett Show.” But that’s three discs in more than 2,500, and learning curve, the first DVDs I recorded, I didn’t realize I could transfer an entire tape to a disc, so my first few hundred discs only have 2 hours each on them. I could’ve gotten a lot more done if I’d read the manual sooner, but on the plus side, the recordings on those discs are of much higher quality (tho I suspect they’re all in 4:3 aspect ratio – that’ll be an interesting discovery – how the shows recorded to VHS versus how they looked on the old fatback teevee I had.)
Didn’t matter. I was ready. I was finally going to catalog what was on all of those otherwise undifferentiated discs! Off we go! Disc 229, ready for indexing, when …
There was a third box.
I had two boxes of VHS tapes in my back entryway, waiting patiently for me to get a new VHS/DVD dubber, waiting for years for me to complete this transfer process. I had them all processing, two or three a day, so much effort getting them transferred, I was just about done, and there was this THIRD BOX of TAPES in my closet. AGH!
I got to work on getting them transferred too. Pretty sure that’s all the tapes I had, which was plenty enough. At the end of that process – I recorded the tape with Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner’s “Haunted Honeymoon” on it toward the end of March – I had 2,567 discs in 12 bulk DVD carriers, not counting the DVDs I’m recording directly from the DVR.
See, while all that was going on, I was also piling up recordings on my DVR. TNT, god love them, have been running four “Supernaturals” a day, which is 20 episodes a week. I noticed this right as the show hit the spot where I’d stopped recording them in 2012, so my first thought was “Score! I get to pick up right where I left off!”
Well, there’s been about five seasons since then, four seasons in syndication, that’s 22 shows per season, carry the 1, that is a buttload of shows piled up on my DVR. It’s a major commitment to try to shotgun four seasons of a show to your DVR at 20 episodes a week and maintain recording space on your DVR so, between “Supernatural” and the marathon run-up to the new season of “Doctor Who” in April, I was floating between 90% full and 100% all the time. For the past few months it feels like all of my free time has been spent archiving television, recording shows to disc so as to get them off my DVR.
Ralph and I watch “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy!” and “@midnight” on weeknights, generally followed by last night’s episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” which is already a lot of television. We watch the night report on KX and then there’s a few other shows I watch, including “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” “The President Show,” “Doctor Who” and “Class.” We watch “Bob’s Burgers” and “Archer,” I watch “Fargo” and “Better Call Saul,” and otherwise I’m getting through “Supernatural.” Once I clear that out – I’m down to about 40 episodes, so it won’t be too much longer now – I’ll be able to focus on cataloging my DVDs, and get this archiving project underway for realz.
Happy viewing!
