Purpose & Philosophy of the Meerkat Meade Video Collection

We're also lazy. Over the years, we've developed two catchphrases that describe our video philosophy.

Catchphrase #1: We don't watch TV; we have a machine that watches TV for us. We have jobs and an active social life (insert quote from The Breakfast Club here: "...sad and demented, but social...") We set the timer to record a lot of stuff. Even when we're at home, there are other things to do besides watching TV. Early on, we stopped trying to edit out commercials and such; life is just too short for that sort of nonsense. (In retrospect this turned out to be a very wise decision: eighteen years down the road, sometimes the commercials are much more entertaining than the shows.)

Catchphrase #2: Videotape is cheap. This was true even in the late 1980s, when tapes were $2.50 apiece in bulk; nowadays they can be had for fifty or sixty cents apiece. Catchphrase #2 has two corollaries, which we live by: When in doubt, tape it and Once it's taped, save it. That's how we wound up with more than fifteen hundred tapes.

Early on, we learned a valuable lesson about the terrible price of false economies. Thomas had bad-quality, off-the-air recordings of the PBS Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. After we had cable, the local PBS station decided to re-run the series. To save money, we used the same tape, recording the new over top of the old. Except -- horrors -- the old version was seven episodes, while the new was edited down to only 6. And our only copy of the 7-episode version was gone, gone. We have never found the 7-episode version again. On the plus side, we have never again erased an old or poor-quality recording until we were sure the new version was satisfactory. (Usually, we just don't erase anything, because...say it together with me, now...Videotape is cheap.)

Another thing -- since we care more about content than quality, we almost always record things on the 6-hour speed. Yes, go ahead and wince; doesn't bother us. As I said, we are neither cinephiles nor videophiles. Things we really care about, we buy on commercial DVD. Otherwise, we just want to see the show.

And one last note, something to keep in mind as you read through this document: No, we are not insane. We are SF Fans, and believe it or not, there is an important (albeit very subtle) difference.

History of the Collection

Since Thomas and Don tend to like the same things, there was a lot of duplication in the merged collection. However, we both used the 6-hour speed and piled lots of unrelated stuff onto the same cassette. Unraveling everything to cull duplicates would involve way too much work. So we resigned ourselves to having two series of tapes, D (for Don) and T (for Thomas).

At the time, most blank videocassettes came with adhesive labels that included two or three sets of single digits, so that you could identify your tapes by attaching, say, a 5 and a 3 to indicate tape number 53. Both Thomas and Don used these, but after they passed number 100, a problem emerged: there were not enough 1s.

The solution was obvious and easy; we capped the D and T series at 120 tapes each, and started on a new series, A (for Atkinson). After we reached A:120, we started S (for Sakers). Following S:120, we started on middle initials, names of friends, names of pets...all in all, we went through T, D, A, S, G, P, C, R, F, H, M and most of J and Q before becoming Completely Overwhelmed. (It took until M to realize that we really didn't have to go past 100 with any one series.)

Arrangement of the Collection

LEFT: An example of a portion of one of our handwritten lists.

The answer was obvious. We started a new, combined list as a wordprocessing document on the computer (a Commodore 64 named Alan). This new list was by title, not tape, and it was in alphabetical order. We updated the list monthly, printing a fresh copy each time. After fumbling through dozens of handwritten sheets, a printed alphabetical list was heaven. At this stage, keeping our video list on the computer was a big convenience.

LEFT: This is what our printed lists looked like.

Time passed, the Collection grew, and in 1988 we transferred the list to The Giant Space Amiga (our trusty Amiga 2000). At the same time, our needs became more sophisticated, and we set up a database instead of an alphabetical list. The database allowed us to include -- and search for -- information like genre, actors, etc. We started printing the main list quarterly, with a smaller cumulative update to cover the time between printings.

As the printed list passed 100 pages, both updating and printing became more onerous. The last printed list came around 1995; after that, we decided it was easier to simply look up things on the computer. By this time, we had plural hundreds of tapes, and we realized that keeping our catalog on the computer was no longer a convenience...it was now a necessity.

The database was useful because it could be sorted, at need, by title, tape, genre, or just about any other criterion we needed. Printing specialized lists, such as all the Dr. Who episodes in order, became simplicity itself. Around 1996-97, the video catalog moved from The Giant Space Amiga to the Mac platform: first Mac-El, our PowerBook 150; then our Bondi Blue iMac (the Meerimac). Along with the iMac came color: since the different tape series were labeled in different colors, we matched those colors in the database. A single glance could tell us the color, number, and location of the tape that held any particular program. Finally the catalog moved to JediMac, the flat-panel iMac on which the catalog resides today.

LEFT: This is what our database looked like onscreen.

Maintaining a catalog of videos involves one major problem: determining what's on each tape (i.e. indexing). There are two approaches. The first (the sensible way) is to write things down as they are recorded. The second (the troublesome way) is to go back and skim through full tapes, writing down what's on each.

We always had good intentions. It's difficult to write titles on a videocassette while it's in the machine; we kept an index card for each video, and tried hard to keep running track of the contents. But we weren't always there (remember, we do a lot of unattended recording), or we wouldn't get the episode title, or we had to wait to come up with our own description, or...well, there were a million excuses for not doing it the sensible way.

Indexing full tapes is a nasty and time-consuming job. Unless you want to devote six hours to each tape, the task involves lots of fast-forwarding and rewinding to find the start and end of each program. It usually takes twenty to thirty minutes to index a single tape. The result: through the late 1990s, we fell further and further behind. Unindexed tapes piled up, until by June 2004 we had probably 200 unindexed tapes with several years' worth of programs.

Just a short digression on some special terminology that we've found useful. Sometime in the early 1990s, Renfield began to call the first episode of any series by the title "Arrival." We've kept up this practice ever since. In an astonishing number of cases, the first episode actually is called "Arrival." Even when it's not, we put "Arrival" in parentheses after the real title.

Again, when Star Trek: The Next Generation titled their first clip show "Shades of Grey," we were so amused that we started using "Shades of Grey" as a title for any clip show. (For those who don't know, a "clip show" is a retrospective episode made up of clips from previous shows. These were very common and quite popular in the days before VCRs. Nowadays, programs continue to do clip shows.)

We tried everything. In the 1980s, wooden drawers that stored 15-20 videos each were in vogue. Later, various shelf arrangements became popular. For a while, we stored our videos on cheap bookshelves from Ikea. But finally, we realized that we needed to construct our own custom shelves.

Thomas designed and built video shelves out of half-inch pine. Most people store their videos upright, like books, with the spine facing out. In order to pack the maximum number of videos into the minimum vertical space, we decided to store ours horizontally, with spines facing down. (If you pitcure a videocassette in its cardboard sleeve, we store them with the open part of the sleeve facing down.) A videocassette measures about 7.5 inches in length, so our shelves are 8 inches deep. Videocassettes have a width of about 4 inches, so we put our shelves about 5 inches apart. With 36-inch-wide shelves, we store 36 videocassettes on each shelf.

One side benefit from storing videos the way we do: the cardboard sleeves do a great job of protecting the cassettes from dust.

ABOVE: Videotapes on our custom shelves.

Why Digitize the Video Collection?

First, there are simple physical qualities. DVDs are smaller and easier to store than videocassettes. Although all the facts aren't in, on the whole DVDs seem more stable and longer-lasting than videocassettes (some of our early videos are in the neighborhood of twenty years old -- nearly twice the accepted lifespan of 5-10 years for commercial-grade videotape).

Second, there's the fact that DVD recorders and blank recordable DVDs have finally become readily available and inexpensive enough for us to afford such a project. Our DVD current recorder cost about $250 in June 2004. By taking advantage of sales, we've been able to find blank DVDs for less than a dollar apiece in bulk. (Better prices are probably available online by buying in larger quantities.) This updates our catchphrase #2: DVD media is cheap. Stated simply, the price is right.

The most compelling reason to convert the collection, though, is the transfer from analog to digital content. Once a program is in digital form, it is potentially much more permanent. Digital content can be reproduced without loss, and can be migrated to new formats (the same way our video catalog has migrated over the years to new computer platforms). When the successor to DVD appears (we're hoping for the video equivalent of iTunes and the iPod), our collection will be poised for quick migration.

Arrangement of DVDs

First, no more letter series! Our original impetus -- the shortage of stick-on 1s -- had vanished with computer-printed labels. We decided to stick with numbers only, starting with DVD0001 and moving toward DVD9999. (It took us 18 years to rack up 1,500 videocassettes -- we figure that four digits will take us well into the next digital format beyond DVD.)

Second, no face labels. The DVD recorder allows us to give each DVD a name, which the disk remembers. In addition, we write the number directly on the disk with a Sharpie (not to be confused with a Shar-pei, which is something else entirely) (and not very good for writing on anything).

Finally, our DVDs are stored in CD cases, which can easily be labeled with printed inserts that give DVD number and contents on one simple sheet.

First and foremost, the single most important thing is this: we made a copy of our VHS tape database to work with. The original database remains intact, frozen at the point the conversion project began. Already, we've needed to refer to that old database several times; we anticipate needing it more in the future.

You may recall that our database is color-coded, with the color of text matching the color of label on each tape. We decided to use plain black-on-white for DVDs, so that we could easily distinguish DVD holdings.

First we added to the new database all our commercial, pre-recorded DVDs. (There are well over a hundred of them.) Instead of a number, we give each of these the code DVD. We shelve commercial DVDs on a bookcase in their original containers. [Okay, let's be honest -- we pile most of them on the floor by the TV, because the bookshelf is (a) a long walk away, and (b) already full.]

Next, we sorted the list by title, and found all the duplicates -- that is, things that we already had on tape, but had replaced with commercial DVDs. This included a lot of individual episodes of series like Futurama, The Simpsons, South Park, etc. We would not need to transfer these titles to DVD. This is a core realization in making the whole project easier: we would not need to transfer things that were already on DVD. All we needed to do was identify those duplicates.

We decided to identify duplicates in the catalog in two ways. First, we added the notation "(on DVD)" after the title. Second, we changed the color of those entries to a very light grey, making them almost invisible (and very easily identifiable).

LEFT: A portion of our catalog, showing items that are already on DVD

Now the catalog was ready for the project to begin.

When we transfer an entire tape to a single DVD, changing the catalog is simple. After sorting the list by number, we go through the listings for the tape in question, changing the tape number to the corresponding DVD number, and changing the text color to black. Here's what it looks like, with a hypothetical lineup of shows:

D:042:1 Lost in Space: Reluctant Stowaway, The D:042:2 Star Trek: Classic: Tholian Web, The D:042:3 Futurama: Anthology of Interest 1 D:042:4 Stunt Man, The D:042:5 Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror 8

becomes

DVD0016:1 Lost in Space: Reluctant Stowaway, The DVD0016:2 Star Trek: Classic: Tholian Web, The DVD0016:3 Futurama: Anthology of Interest 1 DVD0016:4 Stunt Man, The DVD0016:5 Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror 8

Some DVDs contain entirely new (unindexed) material. We enter these from scratch, just the way we did with the old tapes.

Often, a DVD contains something from one tape, something from another, and one or two unindexed programs. With things from a tape, we change the numbers and colors as above; with the unctaloged stuff, we make new entries. Gradually, listings for tapes will vanish, replaced by DVDs. When we have no more tapes listed, we're done.

Along the way, we are always conscious of finding and greying-out duplicate entries.

Once a disk is indexed, we use cut-and-paste to transfer the information to a template that prints a paper insert, and we're done.

Since space is an issue (what with new stuff, we're anticipating having well over 2,000 DVDs by the time we're finished), we chose to use thin jewel cases like those made by Fellowes (pictured below).

ABOVE: Thin jewel cases, pack of 50.

These thin jewel cases come in an assortment of colors, which turns out to be very helpful. Instead of putting spine labels on every case, we use small tags on every tenth disk (10, 20, 30, 40, etc.) and we change colors every five disks. We try to alternate light colors with dark, to make the difference more obvious.

As mentioned above, we use our existing VHS shelves for DVDs. The height is perfect. Five DVDs are almost exactly the same width as one videocassette; we reckon that we can store 175 DVDs on a shelf that held 36 videocassettes. It's depth that's the problem; at 8 inches, our shelves are about three inches too deep. A solution is close at hand. Three videocassettes stacked against the back of the shelf make a perfect backstop. Fortunately, we have no shortage of used videocassettes. If we construct new custom shelves in the future, we'll make them less deep.

LEFT: DVDs in their multicolor cases on our custom shelves. (underneath a row of videotapes awaiting conversion)

We continue to shelve commercial, pre-recorded DVDs on bookshelves, in alphabetical order. It seems the best way.

Procedures for Digitizing

Disk quality: We have read alarming stories of dye deterioration rendering CDs and DVDs unreadable after a while. The best advice we've found says to stick with silver or gold DVDs, rather than ones made with blue or green dyes.

Yeah, right. Try to find gold DVDs at any affordable price. The cheap, bulk DVDs we've been buying are blue. We decided to live with the risk, for now. When the more reliable disks get cheaper in the future, we can copy existing blue disks onto better ones. We hope this will happen before there's any deterioration.

On a related subject, so far we've had good luck with blank DVDs. As these words are being written, we're recording DVD number 0175 -- so far, we've only had two or three disks fail.

Future Improvements

Multiple Recorders: As prices of DVD recorders continue to fall, we anticipate getting one or two more. Obviously, two VCR-DVD recorder pairs would double our production and halve the completion time. Given our limitations, we figure that three would be the ideal number.

High-Speed Digitizing: The Holy Grail would be some form of high-speed digitization. We picture a dedicated machine that would accept both VHS tapes and blank DVDs, whirr to itself for a half-hour or so, and then spit out a DVD copy of the tape. We imagine that such a machine will come out just as we near the end of our digitizing process. Ah, well, c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la grille pan.

Don's Ideal Video Recorder: For twenty years, Don has had a vision of his ideal video recording machine. TiVo is a step in the right direction, but there's still a long way to go. Don's ideal video recorder would store at least a week's worth of programming on all channels, so that when you're reading TV Guide and you notice a great program that was on three days ago, or when someone says, "Did you see that really good documentary on pre-Columbian contact between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres," you'll be able to punch up the program and watch it.

Combine this machine with the super-video-iTunes/iPod, and you'd really have something to crow about.

The ultimate step, of course, is all video on demand, any time, any place, every program that's ever been broadcast. (We envision, of course, a fleet of faster-than-light ships that will fan out and capture TV transmissions from the early days of live television.) Of course, by then our current TV programs will look awfully pale compared to the full-immersion virtual reality that will be the state of the art....