> I searched for services which offered to digitize Video8 tapes. Most services cost about $20 per tape. Even with discounts for bulk amounts, it would likely have cost about $2k! I considered paying it (how exactly do you value a few hundred hours of childhood video?) but then I noticed how they delivered the videos - a private media hosting solution for 60 days. I knew this would be a huge amount of data, and only giving me and my siblings two months wasn’t sufficient.
I'm not following here. Even if it was several terabytes of video (digitized at high resolution and minimal lossiness for archival purposes), that's plenty of time to download. Especially if you're a developer who can casually spin up a cloud or dedicated server to proxy through if need be? (And $2k sounds reasonable once you start going through "hundreds of hours" at a bare minimum, and again especially if you're a developer with real opportunity cost.)
Also, as far as the video analysis goes, Gemini might've been a better idea?
You don't even need to spin up anything - eg AWS datasync will mirror the remote server for you directly into glacier which can be extremely cheap if you're okay with access-a-file-12-hours-after-you-request-it
I'm not familiar with 'AWS datasync', but isn't the point of Glacier that it's really expensive and slow if you retrieve everything? It sounds like a bad idea for videos he planned to download in order to catalogue them. (He might want to delete them or could safely infer that 'no, neither me nor my siblings will want to watch this on Christmas Day', yes, but he still has to look at them first since he doesn't know what's on them at all.)