For those of you too young to remember, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the dominant format of home video was the Video Home System, better known as VHS. VHS tapes were absolutely everywhere, used for both watching the latest movies on your home screen and capturing home movies with a handheld camcorder. It absolutely dominated the market, beating out both the picture quality of Laserdisc and the Sony-backed Betamax. Unfortunately, following the advent of DVDs in the 2000s, VHS was gradually left behind, leaving a lot of precious memories to gather dust on a forgotten shelf, not to mention a lot of exceptionally valuable releases of certain films.
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If you’ve got some old memories locked away on a VHS tape that you’ve been meaning to retrieve, it may seem impossible at a glance. You can’t exactly feed a reel of magnetic tape into a drive on your computer, after all. What you can do, though, is utilize various systems and services to convert the footage on that dusty tape into a digital format, after which it can be safely stored in your local or cloud storage, as well as sent around to your family and friends to fondly reminisce upon. There are a few different ways to go about this, but the ideal method depends heavily on the kinds of old-school hardware you have available to you.
