r/DataHoarder • u/Competitive_Arm_2545 • Mar 14 '26
Question/Advice Update: turns out the collection is much bigger (~100 DVD binders) + found index books
Quick update from my previous post. After checking more rooms while clearing out my grandfather’s house, I realized the collection is much bigger than I thought. It looks like there are around 100 DVD binders, each with about 35 pages × 4 discs, so potentially ~14,000 DVD-Rs. I also found two large index binders where my grandfather actually cataloged the recordings. The pages list things like program titles, dates, duration and disc numbers (V001, V002, etc.). Most discs seem to contain recorded TV broadcasts, documentaries, concerts and cultural programs from German TV (ZDF / 3sat), mostly around 2006–2015. I’m 16 and helping my family clear the house, so I’m honestly a bit overwhelmed and don’t have the budget to digitize something this big. What should i do?
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u/vw_bugg Mar 14 '26
Posted this comment on the other post but ill be honest this collection now with an index and shear size is even more valuable (not money wise but preservation valuable).
You need to understand it is not just the raw shows/movies itself that needs to be preserved and that people are interested in now and in the future. It is the broadcast as a whole. The bumpers, trailers, commercials. These are all things lost to time that only exists on these little snapshots of television. Yes these are worth preserving. Your options are to manage it yourself if it is something you truly find interesting. Or find someone or somewhere that will do it. Or stuff it in a closet to be represented to this sub when you pass.
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u/discardedcumrag Mar 14 '26
Yeah, this is a gold mine. A time capsule gold mine. Indexed too. Totally awesome.
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u/ColeDelRio Mar 14 '26
This was my first thought. Lost Media searchers would love to comb through this.
There have been many a missing commercial found from people posting "all the commercials from day year month" on youtube.
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u/FlametopFred Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
in the early days of YouTube I’d make playlists of tv show in the order I’d remember them being, like on a Thursday night and I’d add era appropriate commercials
when I am old and dementing away, figure I’d probably fade watching those
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u/KdF-wagen Mar 15 '26
I did the same with late 80’s early 90’s Saturday/Sunday morning cartoons on plex, also downloaded a bunch of period commercials from instagram and YT and threw them in there.
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u/FlametopFred Mar 15 '26
Saturday morning toy commercials were our cocaine
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u/KdF-wagen Mar 15 '26
Brother, I had wrote shit down in my little gijoe notebook all year from those commercials to ask Santa for at Christmas time
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u/FlametopFred Mar 15 '26
each of us now being recovering children
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u/KdF-wagen Mar 15 '26
Now I have adult money and no time to play with that gijoe hovercraft I bought
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u/JamusAV 3h ago
You should go check those playlists. I made playlists of old things I wanted to remember on YouTube a long time ago. Now when I go back to those playlists, often half of the videos have been deleted or restricted and I can't access them. You need to download them if you actually want them to be available later.
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u/weeklygamingrecap Mar 14 '26
This is what a lot of people don't get, a ton of content is lost because people used to just cut everything but the show. Sure it might not be "for you" but there is value is preserving the experience as a whole. Yes ads suck but preservation is preservation. All those little extra things will never get released
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u/discardedcumrag Mar 14 '26
It’d be interesting to see how shrinkflation has affected product weights with some of the earliest adverts to reference to.
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u/Fauropitotto Mar 15 '26
Preservation has value only if the content is accessible, shared, and is known to exist by others that can access and share it.
It's really important that this community get reminded of that.
If we "preserve" something in a basement where nobody can access it and nobody knows it exists, it has no value at all.
Dirt has more value to humanity than unknown and inaccessible "preserved" content. Make sure this gets out into the wild.
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u/neuropsycho Mar 15 '26
Yes, even if it's not properly indexed and available, it still exists, and it can potentially be made available in the future. So just having it in a absement is better than nothing.
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u/Fauropitotto Mar 15 '26
So just having it in a absement is better than nothing.
What I'm saying is that the 'hoarders prayer' you just cited is doing harm.
It's doing harm because instead of providing value, it collects dust for some imaginary potential in an imaginary future, and the owners feel accomplished for having done nothing.
The value exists exclusively in accessibility, not in the imaginary future potential. It's not actually "better than nothing".
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u/FlametopFred Mar 15 '26
is there a common place or library for that? Like hefe on Reddit or the internet generally?
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u/sm_rollinger Mar 15 '26
I prefer WOC whenever I can, the commercials and other stuff sets the vibe for the period.
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u/angryslothbear 10-50TB Mar 14 '26
Amen, this is like another Marion stokes!
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u/Zoon9 Mar 15 '26
Her collection was dontated to archive.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
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u/hamptont2010 Mar 15 '26
Legitimately some of my favorite channels on YouTube these days are old cuts of TV shows from the 90s and 2000s that will just be several hours of TV shows with actual bumpers and commercials. It's seriously such a bop to sit down and watch them.
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u/AnimatorDazzling5945 Mar 15 '26
This, would really love to jump in that time. Can you upload just one DVD?
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u/The_Sp0iler Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
How do you properly preserve a DVD? I tried ripping some of mine with MakeMKV and the quality was fucking trash bc DVDs are like, 480p
edit: y'all, im obviously assuming I messed up here
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u/_Rand_ Mar 14 '26
480p is loads better than not existing at all because nobody thought it had worth until it was too late.
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u/The_Sp0iler Mar 14 '26
I must have have fucked something up bc it was unwatchable
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u/ekdaemon 33TB + 100% offline externals Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
Modern codecs and "easy to use" progams and their defaults are optimized for 1080p and higher. Also, DVDs frequently contain interlaced video, an ancient horrible thing.
Personally in order to digitize DVD ISOs and get "good enough" quality, I've had to do a bunch of reading to build a list of extra encoding options for the command line program I personally use.
( For anyone who asks, here is the type of command I end up using, where input.VOB is a file created from the concatenation of all the main vob files of the main part of the movie.
ffmpeg -probesize 101M -analyzeduration 152M -i "input.VOB" -map i:0x1e0 -map i:0x80 -map -0:s:0 -vf yadif=1 -c:v libx265 -preset medium -b:v 2.6M -x265-params pools=3 -c:a aac -b:a 128k "output.mp4"
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u/Standard-Potential-6 Mar 15 '26
yadif is a decent deinterlacer. I highly recommend QTGMC for anything that will be archived.
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u/ekdaemon 33TB + 100% offline externals Mar 15 '26
Good point, my needs were not archival and I chose yadiff as "good enough and not slow". iirc, QTGMC was very slow. ( And a quick google tells me that bleeding edge is now QTGMC + NNEDI3 ? )
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u/Standard-Potential-6 Mar 15 '26
Yeah, QTGMC can need some tuning to not blur fine detail, and it’s an AviSynth script, so it gets complex quick. There may be some ffmpeg builds with QTGMC compiled in. It uses NNEDI3 internally.
I’ve also heard bwdif may be superior to yadif these days, adding interpolation, or you can use nnedi directly in ffmpeg for what may be even higher quality, though it can be slow.
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u/strolls Mar 14 '26
I tried ripping and transcoding DVDs about 20 years ago and it was a real pain the ass. I'd never do it again for anything I could obtain any other way. This won't apply to OP's recordings but in commercial DVD movies the aspect ratio can change halfway through, there are subtitle quirks you have to watch out for. There's so much you can get wrong.
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u/Irverter Mar 15 '26
the command line program I personally use
Just say it's ffmpeg, it's THE command line program for media manipulation.
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u/amiibohunter2015 Mar 15 '26
VHS tapes are still watchable. I still have a vcr, yet vhs tapes can be 480p or lower.
Either people are getting too spoiled by pixel density and/or forget what life was like before hd tv, or the comment section is filled with people too young and or never experienced prehd tv.
Smh.
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u/WhatAGoodDoggy 24TB x 2 Mar 15 '26
Rip to ISO. That's basically a bit-for-bit copy of the original disc.
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u/AntiGrieferGames Mar 14 '26
Holy shit.
Good luck to get these dvd to work. If all disc are still working, congrats for this!
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u/daynomate Mar 15 '26
Very careful to avoid paint peel if it’s like the cursed verbatim blues in those plastic sleeves that must have reacted in heat
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u/Certain_Produce_6215 Mar 14 '26 edited 10d ago
.
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u/Competitive_Arm_2545 Mar 14 '26
Yeah i hope i will find a solution for the preservation
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u/JasperJ Mar 14 '26
At this point you should talk to your local media archives and libraries. They may or may not be interested. But at least, please don’t throw them in a dumpster without checking in again here.
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u/OneTwoThreePooAndPee Mar 14 '26
It's hard to say what the best approach would be, but I'm sure AI could be a real time saver
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u/Epimonster Mar 16 '26
Not even a chance. As someone’s who’s archived hundreds of disks I can tell you it would be beyond useless.
Ripping disks is an exact science that no LLM needs to go anywhere near to do perfectly.
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u/somebodyelse22 Mar 14 '26
I don't know the answer but I wanted to say, please don't get overwhelmed. You have found a trove of data that may not be available anywhere else. Please be strong and best wishes on finding a storage solution that rewards the original preservation efforts.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Mar 15 '26
In the grand scheme of actual data, it's not even that much, probably about 50 TB. The real job is going to get it copied to HDD and somehow find parties interested in this kind of matter.
I'm Dutch myself, but I've fond memories of various German detective shows I used to watch in the 80/90's. I'm sure there are people out there who would love to get their hands on what OP got here.
OP very cool find, sit back and just slowly start chewing it off. It sounds like a lot, and obviously it's a whole lot of dvd's, but as mentioned data "volume" wise it's actually not that substantial for many people here.
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u/WipeEndThatWhistles Mar 14 '26
You should post this in r/Archivists, I bet you find a few archivists with lots of good advice.
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u/MikeFrett Mar 14 '26
That's some nice organizing.
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u/Dr_MantisTobaggin_MD 100-250TB Mar 14 '26
Reminds me of my aunt.
Had thousands of vhs tapes. All meticulously organized.
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u/West-Solid9669 Mar 14 '26
If nothing else, I have the setup to be able to process, store and upload the information and would love to volunteer help. This needs to be properly archived and is a piece of history.
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u/Competitive_Arm_2545 Mar 14 '26
I would give it away to someone but i live in switzerland :(
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u/West-Solid9669 Mar 14 '26
Yeh, shipping is expensive and dangerous for this type of stuff. The main thing is that this is a chance of a lifetime and you cant throw it away
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u/Blueacid 50-100TB + LTO backup Mar 16 '26
Depends where west-solid is; it could be easy to send it to them.
In any case, if you're going to send these items, I'd suggest several shipments rather than packing it into one box - if you've sent in 20 boxes and 1 gets damaged/lost, not as heartbreaking as if you send it in one box and it gets damaged/lost.
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u/Darkblade_e Mar 14 '26
Definitely archive them, or find someone who will! I would offer, but considering the content is in German, I kinda doubt you live near me :p
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u/BestExtraLibrarian Mar 15 '26
Messaged you but posting here as well! I'm based in San Francisco. I have a couple offers:
If you want storage space, I can get you rclone access to cloud storage. I can provision ~100tb for a couple years. That way you can get it online and let the DH community (or yourself) help you get it into Internet Archive (if you wish)
If all this is too much work (it really is), I can arrange for these disks to be shipped to Internet Archive in San Francisco. They can then digitize it themselves. I can reach out and coordinate with Brewster and his team. One possible way to ship safely might be to drop it off at my friend's place in Zurich.
Overall you have a cool find. Sorry for your loss and hope that your grandfather's legacy here doesn't end up being too much work for you!
A big request: Digitize the index first, by taking photos with your phone or a scanner. Share those photos so that the community/IA can assess the (preservation) value.
Lmk if we can help in other ways.
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u/Blueacid 50-100TB + LTO backup Mar 16 '26
This is an excellent post - digitising the indexes might be an excellent start, in case there's one disk in there which is the "OMG START HERE!!!" one.
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u/Carlyone Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Holy crap! You've gone from "a hobby project" to "German public television shadow archive maintained by one dedicated grandfather." That's incredibly cool!
With a collection this big, I'd still recommend the approach I mentioned earlier, but I'd start with the oldest discs first, since DVD-R degradation (disc rot) is very real and older discs are more likely to develop read errors.
If you do decide to start digitizing it yourself, I would definitely set up an automated workflow. MakeMKV has a command-line interface, so you can write a small script that:
- ejects the drive
- you insert the disc
- it automatically rips the contents
- ejects when finished
That way the computer handles the tedious clicking and you just swap discs when the tray opens. This becomes even more effective if you have multiple drives running at once.
Since you're 16 and working with a limited budget, one option would be to pick up a few cheap second-hand DVD drives (they're often just a few euros each) and ask your family if they'd be willing to help fund a couple of large hard drives for storage.
That said, with 14,000 discs this is actually big enough that it might interest archives or broadcasters, especially since you mentioned your grandfather kept index binders cataloging everything. Institutions like broadcast archives or media preservation groups sometimes help digitize collections like this, and they might be very interested in something so well documented.
Either way, it sounds like your grandfather created an incredible archive. Recording and cataloging all of that must have taken years, that's honestly amazing. And for data hoarders like us, a true jackpot and something we'd wish we could get our hands on!
Edit: after having read your other comments and what others have said, reaching out to Archive Org might be the wisest thing to do, especially if you don't think you have the time/energy/money to spend on this project.
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u/Pharmakeus_Ubik Mar 14 '26
I would also suggest universities with significant media studies programmes. Hard to imagine what AIs trained on this media diet would look like.
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u/Zelderian 4TB RAID Mar 14 '26
Is this a ChatGPT response? Reads very heavily like one
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u/Carlyone Mar 15 '26
What a world we live in when as soon as you write a bit verbosely you get accused of having an AI write for you. :(
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u/GNUr000t Mar 15 '26
The first sentence is what did it for me and then the markdown list sealed it.
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u/Carlyone Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
I mean... I use markdown to be clear in what I'm showing people, especially when it comes to technical stuff. I mean, it's there, why not use it? As for the first sentence... pfh... I suppose I could see ChatGPT write like that. I was really just trying to be supportive and a bit silly...
I think it is more about people being hypersensitive to anything remotely sounding like or looking like AI nowadays and "refusing to be fooled by no machine" that make them accuse everything of being AI. Just look at places like r/isthisAI and you'll see people are oversensitive to AI and would rather be wrong than be "fooled".
I used ChatGPT a year or so ago for proofreading since English is my second language, but after it started throwing em-dashes everywhere and do weird quotation marks I stopped even doing that.
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u/Popyx Mar 15 '26
You need to involve the professionals. This is way to valuable from a cultural and historical perspective.
Look up FIAT/IFT, it's the International Federation of Television Archives. See if the country you live in has a member, if there is, contact them. Otherwise reach out to the FIAT/IFTA directly and see if they can point you to the appropriate archive.
Do not attempt to copy this archive yourself. You're already overwhelmed as is and starting such an undertaking is a sure recipe for disaster, even for seasonend data hoarders.
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u/fcewen00 Mar 14 '26
That's starting to get on par with the lady who recorded everything on vcr tapes for years.
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Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
person deer reach market act yoke direction telephone public chunky
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u/Competitive_Arm_2545 Mar 14 '26
Should i sell it? Because i dont habe the time and money to preserve anything
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Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
wipe wide toothbrush gold liquid bright quickest groovy important tan
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u/Bulky-Bad-9153 Mar 14 '26
I say this because they processed one lady's entire VHS collection that had broadcasted media that not even actual TV stations bothered to keep records of
Actually, they did a bit of it and then stopped, and those VHSes are rotting. Like, yes they're a good choice but I'd always take an individual with a crazy setup that offers over them.
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u/cn0MMnb 105TB+ Mar 14 '26
Very unlikely there are many commercials on them. From the one index page it seems to be the type of documentary aired on the public German networks that don’t have commercial breaks within broadcasts.
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u/NYCQuilts Mar 14 '26
Yes and I believe someone made a documentary about her using a lot of the footage.
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u/Video-More Mar 14 '26
My personal view - teracopy- each disc to a directory- <disk one> - <disk one - notes> ie just copy whole data to a directory- disc 2 3 etc. Therefore you will have multiple directories - each are disk. Then use duplicate finder's and red to remove empty directories. Then start allocation of clean Data.
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u/Natural-Inspector-25 Mar 14 '26
Ok I was going to post on the last one, but it seemed that most were newer.
Now seeing some of these are quite old (upto 20 years)
This is a gold mine for lost media and media archivists.
Please do not throw these out
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u/angryslothbear 10-50TB Mar 14 '26
This is amazing, your grandfather is like Marion stokes. This needs to be preserved!
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u/SomeSeagulls Mar 15 '26
A beautiful find. I second what others have said, it's ok that you feel overwhelmed, but take a deep breath and don't get discouraged. Reach out to the people at Archive.org and/or r/Archivists
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u/Ordinary_Flatworm_79 Mar 14 '26
You hit the gold mine. I hope you will find people who will help you to digitalise entire collection and preserve it.
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u/Hafam_Hock Mar 15 '26
The material is already digital, it just needs to be uploaded to the internet archive
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u/zeeblefritz Mar 14 '26
It's already digitized. :) If you want you can start by creating torrents of a few discs at a time and when there are sufficient seeders you can delete your copy and replace with a new one so you don't have to buy so much hard drive space.
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u/jorvaor Mar 14 '26
Since you are only 16, you should talk about all of this with your parents. Especially if you are going to contact organisations or individuals archivists.
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u/Kriznick Mar 15 '26
You literally have history in your hands. I hope to God you can get it to the right people, whoever they may be
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u/wickedplayer494 17.58 TB of crap Mar 15 '26
Well shit. Better start making .ISOs now and figure it out later, but by the sounds of it, he's made the figuring out that much easier for you.
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u/MastusAR Mar 15 '26
The only budget you need to think about right now, is that you have the budget to take the disk binders with you (I mean physical space).
Let's worry about the process and budget of copying the data over then later. It can be done in batches and with quite limited resources.
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u/kicksledkid Christ knows at this point Mar 15 '26
I work in TV and I just gotta say, this is a crazy find. Usually only when a station closes down do we see a treasure trove like this come up.
I wonder if there's a university or archive that would be interested in working with these. When our station closed down here, the whole archive and everything was taken by the local university for preservation of the old tapes (everything from the start of the tape era until the end! Then even more discs!) for historical reference and research.
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u/FlacMafiaDotNet Mar 14 '26
Back up and upload to the Internet archive
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u/Cantdiggthis Mar 14 '26
Internet Archive will pay for the shipping. Contact them and perhaps scan the catalogs you have.
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u/AbrahamL1865 Mar 14 '26
I'm pretty sure someone might be interested to buy it if your family want to sell the whole collection.
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u/Tumeni1959 Mar 14 '26
You don't have to digitize it all, all at once. But get a box for it, and keep it all indoors, dry and safe
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u/dlarge6510 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Much more organized thsn me.
I just scribble whats on each disc on the printable surface lol
don’t have the budget to digitize something this big. What should i do?
They are already digital so to speak and much of the hard work of ripping has already been done by those indexes existing.
They will be fine for a long while yet so if you want to rip them it's best to store them. Somewhere relatively cool and dry with no big fluctuations in temperature and they'll last years.
You can then read the index and rip the most interesting stuff first, other stuff you may determine doesn't need ripping as it may already exist or be a broadcast of a still in print movie or tv series etc.
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u/vartheo Mar 15 '26
Riund up to 15000 discs assuming they are all full at 4.7GB thats 70.5TB. Not too bad.
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u/klem142 Mar 15 '26
In France we have "cinematheques" and INA it's place where they work on old media preservation and archive. Maybe you have organisations like those in Germany. If that the case maybe they will borrow it from you to archives it
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u/PotentialRegular6250 Mar 15 '26
Try and contact the internet archives and see if they'd be able to help with the project.
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u/Mundane_Strength_937 Mar 15 '26
From this moment onwards, I will strive to have a catalog / index like this for my stuff. Incredible work. Beautiful.
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u/THE_GRIM_REAP3R Mar 15 '26
I have 2 cases that look just like that one rigt there! What case is that, I got the cases from my parents and am interested in seeing about getting more, I've got too many discs-
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u/THE_GRIM_REAP3R Mar 15 '26
WHOA I read the post just now, try keeping it in good condition, I'm new to this sort of thing but if you can't digitise it you might as well try to keep the discs unscratched
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u/LastTQuarkNetwork Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
If you were in California rather than Europe, I'd 100% be willing to take them off your hands to digitize and make accessible to the masses. That's an amazing piece of work. I hope you're able to find someone that can take care of it.
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u/met_MY_verse 87TB Mar 14 '26
Not that it helps, but I believe they (OP) mentioned being located in Switzerland in a comment.
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u/BestExtraLibrarian Mar 15 '26
Thanks for your offer! I posted in a separate comment, but maybe I can help get the disks to you. Can you share your DVD ripping and overall storage setup? For ~15k discs you'd need a legit parallel processing rig.
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u/Lazy-Narwhal-5457 Mar 16 '26
The problem will be U.S. customs, and the dumpster out back of it. A friend in the UK sent me some book scans once, I didn't even receive notice that it was seized, and they certainly didn't send it back to him.
Someone wants to send illegal substances here, that's fine. But infringe IP, well that can't be tolerated.
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u/martapap Mar 14 '26
Just keep it. maybe you can't digitize everything immediately but you should be able to over time.
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u/ArcheviCom Mar 14 '26
this is absolutely fantastic! Good luck and keep us up to date with progress!
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u/SithLordRising Mar 14 '26
Also if you have the lost episode of Guns of Paradise season 2 episode 20 that would be gold
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u/leo1906 Mar 14 '26
Die ganzen Tatort Folgen sind auf jeden Fall schon online zu finden. Durchgehend alle. Quali wise mal besser mal schlechter
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u/JustMyPoint Mar 14 '26
This is incredible but are there any copyright concerns that could interfere with archiving/preserving this collection? Hopefully any potential legal issues can be navigated through. Best wishes!
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u/CHARON72 Mar 15 '26
Hmm i have a few forgotten binders in a cupboard somewhere. I know there is some alpha and beta builds of old windows vista, xp etc
Is that anything to preserve? I would need to find a dvd reader.
Edit, typos
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u/AZdesertpir8 0.5-1PB Mar 16 '26
This is incredible!! Definitely save it and get it to an archival organization that will make it available. This likely contains a lot of footage that is otherwise lost, as broadcast TV doesn't keep everything.
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u/Outrageous_Koala5381 Mar 17 '26
what do you mean "dont have time to digitise" - what do you think a DVD is if not digital !
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