Sharing & Preserving Home Videos

Recently, a number of people have come to the Library on Tech Help Tuesdays expressing an interest in sharing and preserving their home movies.

home movie

Format

The first consideration is format, which include:

Film movies which are on movie reels that are wound into a projector and viewed on a screen.

Tape movies are on cartridges that can be played a VCR or other player.

Digital file movies are typically recorded from smartphones, tablets and video cameras. We can view them on desktop or laptop computers, or on televisions via a media streaming device such as an Apple TV or a Roku.

DVD movies are those that can be played on a home DVD player attached to a television (this format usually results from someone engaging a company to put their film movies onto a playable DVD).

Digital Media

People with film or tape movies need to have them converted into digital media.

Digital media is content that can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics devices such as computers, tablets and smartphones.

Digital media can also be stored (backed up and preserved) onto external storage devices (such as flash drives and external hard drives) and onto physical media (such as CDs and DVDs).

Physical media can easily be damaged so it’s best to backup your important files in multiple places

Digital files can also be uploaded to cloud storage services (such as Google Drive, iCloud and Dropbox).

Cloud services

Digitization

digitization is the conversion of text, pictures, or sound into a digital form that can be processed by a computer.

Oxford Languages

Once a film movie has been digitized, it can be played on a computer or tablet or smartphone and uploaded to a streaming video service such as YouTube or Vimeo for easy sharing.

Tape movies

Digitizing tape movies will involve a brick and mortar company that offers that service or some specialized equipment such as a VHS to digital converter.

Digital file movies

Digital file movies can often be played on a computer through an appropriate application such as Windows Media Player or the Apple QuickTime Player.

Once again (and this is an important point), digital file movies can be uploaded directly to YouTube or Vimeo. Links to the home movies could then be emailed or messaged to anybody who would be interested in viewing them.

Uploading videos to a free streaming service is another method of preserving them and there will be an option to make your videos private (only people who receive the link can view them).

NOTE: Digital file movies have a large file size and a number of them could quickly consume a computer’s storage capacity (necessitating the copying of the digital file movies to an external storage device).

DVD movies

Home movies that have been put onto playable DVDs need to be ripped.

Ripping is the process of copying data from a CD or DVD to a computer. This is done using a specialized application.

This can be done with a specialized application such as Handbrake.

Burning

Once a home movie has been converted to a digital media, it can be burned to a playable DVD (which will be handy for people who wish to watch the home movies on a television and who do not have a media streaming device) via video DVD authoring app (but such apps are getting harder and harder to come by).

Burn is a colloquial term meaning to write content to a CD , DVD , or other recordable disc.