How To Digitize Your Old (Analog) Movies, Music, and Photos

Digitize Your Analog Life

In researching a client’s question about scanning documents using Optical Character Recognition, (that led to yesterday’s “quick reco” article) I came across a series of articles by Jon L. Jacobi, published by PCWorld, which is a comprehensive How To for converting your analog media into high-quality digital files.

Digitize Your Analog Life includes recommendations for the hardware and/or software you (might) need to get the job done. Here are the articles by category:

• Digitize Your Music »
  “In my lifetime, music has been delivered on vinyl, cassettes, eight-track tapes, CDs, and audio DVDs. How do I listen to it now? Usually with a PC or a smartphone, and occasionally with an MP3 or other media player. I downloaded much of that music or ripped it from CDs, but the rest of it came from LPs and cassettes.“
• Digitize Your Movies »
  “Analog movies can be the easiest–or the hardest–medium to digitize, depending on the format you’re working with. While older camcorder and video formats such as 8mm and Hi8 or VHS and Betamax tapes are easy to transfer, digitizing film can be difficult at best.“
• Digitize Your Pictures »
  “Film degrades with time and exposure to the elements, albeit far more slowly than you might imagine. Fortunately for posterity’s sake, it’s easy to digitize and even restore some of the original luster of your film, using today’s flatbed and film scanners, plus appropriate software.”
  [related: How To Scan Slides]

• Digitize Your Documents »
  “Scan your documents into your hard drive. We have tips on scanners, OCR software, Web OCR, and converting your books to e-books.”

There are many advantages to digital over analog, and let’s face it, it is getting harder to find working betamax machines, and needles for the phonograph… If you are ready to take on the project of converting your old media into digital format, reading Jon’s tips are a great place to start.

Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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A Quick Reader Question Answered

Q: I have some new videos that I cannot get to play. My computer says it cannot open TS.IFO and it does the same with TS.VOB. My friend says I should convert the files, but I have never done that before. How do I convert?

A: The “dot IFO” and “dot VOB” are file extensions associated with video DVD’s. You could install a program to convert the files into a format that Windows Media Player recognizes, such as .WMF – but that would be pretty slow. And you could try downloading codecs and try to ’empower’ Windows Media Player to play those movies – but downloading codecs can be a risky business.

So my reco’ is to install a “player” that can handle DVD movie formats, and my reco’ of players is VLC, which is free and you can find it here.

Today’s free link: Folks, when you get a message saying “Windows cannot open .xyz “, that means it doesn’t know which program to use to open that file type, or doesn’t have such a program. The first thing to do is identify what a “.xyz ” is, and the place to do that is FILExt.com.
Enter the file extension into the Search box, and FILExt will tell you what you need to get to open/run it.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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