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Service
Tapes and discs, turned into files you can keep.
We digitise standard VHS and audio cassettes, pull CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays onto an external drive or USB stick, and duplicate discs you own. Tapes are done the cheap and cheerful way - an ordinary VCR, a USB capture stick and free software, set up with care - which is good enough to relive old memories and isn’t an archival-grade job. Judge it from the two complete sample transfers on this page, and if you’d rather do it yourself, we show exactly how we do it.
What we do
Physical media doesn’t last forever. Tape degrades, discs rot, and the players get harder to find every year - laptops stopped shipping with optical drives a decade ago. A VHS tape is usually given 10 to 30 years, even stored well, which puts most family tapes at or past the end of that already. There isn’t a better time than now. This is the same job we already do for businesses sitting on old archives, now offered to anyone.
Tape to digital
- Standard VHS home videos - the full-size tapes
- Standard audio cassettes - music, interviews, dictation, old recordings
Video tape is standard full-size VHS only - we’re not set up for the small camcorder formats (VHS-C, Video8, Hi8, MiniDV) and would rather say so up front than have you post a box we can’t play. If that’s what you’ve got, mention it anyway when you email: what people ask for is part of how we decide what to add.
Tapes are transferred the cheap and cheerful way, with modest equipment and free software. Here’s the whole process, with diagrams - and guides for doing the same yourself, if you have a working VCR and a few spare evenings.
Discs onto a drive or USB
- CD, DVD and Blu-ray copied to an external hard drive or USB stick
- Audio CDs to proper archival-quality files, verified track by track
- Music CDs you own, backed up for your own personal use - provided the disc carries no copy protection
- Data discs - old backups, photo discs, project archives - read off before they fail
- A read attempt on scratched or ageing discs, with an honest answer if one can’t be saved
Disc duplication
- Short-run CD, DVD and Blu-ray copies of your own material
- Discs burnt from files you supply, not just disc-to-disc
However it arrives, you get
- Ordinary files on a drive or via download - nothing proprietary, nothing locked
- Sensible file naming so the collection is actually findable afterwards
- Optional backup to cloud storage you own, if you’d rather not rely on one drive
- Your originals back
How it works
Tell us what you have
Roughly how many tapes or discs, what kind, and what you want out the other end. A rough count is fine.
Drop off or arrange pickup
Sydney-based. We’ll sort out the practical bit with you and quote before anything starts.
Files back, originals back
You get the digital files - or the duplicate discs - and your originals returned. Both are yours.
Our process
Cheap and cheerful, and here’s exactly how.
There’s no rack of broadcast gear behind this service. Tapes are transferred with an ordinary VCR, a USB capture stick, a USB cassette player and free software, set up with care. It’s good enough to relive old memories and share them with the family. It’s also something you can do yourself: each guide below walks through this same setup, step by step.
VHS: a VCR, a capture stick and free software
- Each tape is checked for mould before it goes near the machine.
- An ordinary VCR plays it in real time, out through its yellow, white and red line-out sockets.
- A USB capture stick feeds that into OBS Studio, which is free, recording at 720 × 576 and 25 frames a second.
- One FFmpeg command sets the picture shape to 4:3, without re-encoding anything.
The capture stick we bought: DIGITNOW! USB audio and video capture card (paid link — Amazon AU).
Cassettes: a USB player and a careful level
- The same mould check comes first.
- A USB cassette player plays each side in real time, straight into the computer.
- The input level is turned down so the loudest moment on the tape can’t clip.
- Each side is recorded at 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo and saved as a lossless file.
The player we bought: ELASO USB cassette player (paid link — Amazon AU).
What this level won’t do
- Steady a wobbly tape. There’s no time base corrector in the chain. A good tape captures well; a worn one comes out as wobbly as the VCR plays it.
- Clean anything up. No noise removal, stabilising or colour correction. What the tape holds is what the file holds.
- Match a hi-fi cassette deck. The player is a basic portable, with no Dolby decoding and no head adjustment tape by tape.
- Pass as archival grade. For the few tapes that must be preserved as well as they can be, the higher levels are another job. Keep your tapes either way.
Better equipment as demand grows
This is where the service starts, and we’ve kept the outlay modest on purpose. As demand grows we’ll invest in better equipment. For video the next step up is an S-VHS deck with a time base corrector and a better capture device; for audio it’s a serviced hi-fi cassette deck.
What people ask for decides what we buy first. If your tapes need more than cheap and cheerful, tell us when you email.
As an Amazon Associate, Digital Greenhouse earns from qualifying purchases. You pay the same price either way. Doing it yourself takes one evening per tape, in real time. If the box is bigger than your patience, email us a rough count instead.
Sample transfers
Two real transfers, straight off the tape.
Both clips below came off standard VHS through the setup above. Nothing has been retouched, stabilised, or cleaned up - what you see is what the tape held, including the tracking noise at the head of a recording and the softness the format has always had. Play the web version here, or download the full-quality file, the same kind you’d get back, and inspect it yourself.
Sample 1 — advertising break
Download the full-quality file (.mkv, 73 MB)Sample 2 — longer advertising break
Download the full-quality file (.mkv, 166 MB)The full-quality files are Matroska (.mkv). Most browsers won’t play that container natively, which is exactly why the web previews above exist - the downloads are there to open in VLC, MPV, or whatever you already use.
Specification
What the files actually are.
Most transfer services won’t tell you this. Here is the exact encode you get, so you can check it against anyone else’s quote.
| Full-quality file (what you keep) | Web preview (what plays above) | |
|---|---|---|
| Container | Matroska (.mkv) | MP4 (.mp4), faststart |
| Video codec | H.264 / AVC, High profile, Level 3.0 | H.264 / AVC, High profile, Level 3.1 |
| Stored resolution | 720 × 576 (PAL D1) | 768 × 576 |
| Pixel aspect → display | 16:15 → 4:3 | 1:1 square → 4:3 |
| Sampling | Native BT.601 line sampling, straight off the tape - no rescaling, no cropping | Resampled once, to square pixels, for browser playback |
| Frame rate | 25 fps, progressive (deinterlaced during capture) | 25 fps, progressive |
| Chroma & depth | 4:2:0, 8-bit (yuv420p) | 4:2:0, 8-bit (yuv420p) |
| Video bitrate | ~9.4 – 9.8 Mbit/s on these samples; it varies with the tape | ~1.8 – 2.0 Mbit/s (x264 CRF 21, preset slow) |
| Audio codec | AAC-LC, 48 kHz, stereo | AAC-LC, 48 kHz, stereo, 128 kbit/s |
| Sample 1 | 1:02 · 73 MB | 1:02 · 14.7 MB |
| Sample 2 | 2:16 · 166 MB | 2:16 · 36.0 MB |
Three things worth understanding about that table. The recording aims for a set picture quality, not a fixed bitrate, so the bitrate follows the tape: these two short, busy samples sit a little under 10 Mbit/s, and full-length tapes have come out between about 1.4 and 4.6 GB an hour, with noisy, worn recordings making the bigger files. The two resolutions are the same picture, not different ones: PAL D1 stores 720 × 576 with slightly non-square pixels that display as 4:3, and the web previews are simply resampled to square pixels at 768 × 576 so every browser gets the shape right without having to honour a pixel-aspect flag. And the previews are re-encoded purely to be playable in a browser at a sane download size, which is why they’re roughly a fifth of the size - judge the quality from the full-quality files, not the previews. Every line in that table can be checked rather than taken on trust: run ffprobe over the files you just downloaded and you should get exactly these numbers back.
FAQ
Common questions about media transfer
Can I send my tapes or discs in?
What does it cost?
Which formats do you handle?
What quality do the files come out at?
.mkv) file and flagged to display at 4:3 the way PAL always has. Nothing is cleaned up or stabilised, and there’s no time base corrector in the chain, so a worn tape comes out as wobbly as the VCR plays it. Cassettes are recorded from a USB cassette player at 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo and saved as lossless files. The full video specification and two complete sample files are published above.