Front Desk - Digital Archivist: Preservation and Archiving Forum

Start here — a map of the community

Marshalleq — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:26:22 +0000

New here, or just not sure where something goes? Here's the whole place at a glance.

Help & How-To — where the questions live:

Capture Bench — getting your tapes, photos and film into digital. Start with the video and audio walkthrough threads pinned at the top.
Repair Shop — mould, sticky shed, "no signal", dropouts: rescuing tapes before you capture them.
Decode Lab — RF capture and vhs-decode, the deep end: deck choice, RF taps, the lot.
Vault — backups, storage, file formats: keeping your archive safe for good.
DdD Capture Toolkit — help, bug reports and releases for the batch-capture toolkit.

Community — where we gather:

Gear Exchange — buy, sell, swap, and gear reviews.
Show & Tell — your restorations and before/afters. Show off; we love seeing them.
Lounge & Lost Media — off-topic chat, and "what on earth is this?" mystery formats.

Welcome — you're here:

Front Desk — the charter (how we behave around here) and introductions.

Not sure which forum fits? Post in the closest one and a moderator will quietly move it if needed — no harm done. And when in doubt, just ask.

— marshalleq

Welcome — how this place works (read me first)

Marshalleq — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:25:33 +0000

Welcome — whether you've come to rescue one box of family tapes or you're knee-deep in a thousand, you're in the right place. If you want the longer story of what Digital Archivist is and why it exists, the About page covers it. This post is the shorter, more important one: how we treat each other here.

The short version: this is the friendly, patient corner of the analog-archiving world. A few promises, and a few asks.

Our promises to you

No question is too basic. Genuinely. If you're not certain what a VCR even is, ask — everyone here started at zero.
You'll get a kind, useful answer. The first reply a newcomer gets sets the tone forever, so we take that seriously.
No gatekeeping. We don't sneer at cheap gear, at Windows or Mac, or at "doing it the wrong way". There's a spot on the quality ladder for everyone, and we'll meet you where you are.

A few asks of you

Be kind. Debate the ideas all you like — never the person. (The house line: debate is welcome, but the friendly, constructive kind.)
Help us help you. A quick search first, then give us the details: what gear, which format, what you tried, and what actually happened. A photo or a short clip works wonders.
Pay it forward. The best threads here become the answer the next person finds — so share what you work out.

There's really only one hard rule, and it's the one that keeps all of the above true: be kind, or be removed. Tone is the entire point of this place.

New? Say hello in Introductions, and have a look at the Start here — a map of the community post to find where your question belongs. Glad you're here.

— marshalleq

Resolved footer issue, added new cross post functionality

Marshalleq — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 10:40:29 +0000

Well I've been absent for a while, but that's because I've been hard at work soldering with electronics and so on (thanks to @captain for loaning me his oscilloscope) for the new RF capture method and now I can being to tell you all about it and share results on this site. There has been some examples which are simply amazing improvement and without a doubt the best quality I've seen so far. This should be the final main piece for the video capture series, so watch this space!

Oh, and I also fixed the annoying footer at the bottom of the community forums.

Enabled recaptcha, Fixed email

Marshalleq — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:23:50 +0000

Well that didn't take long, even with no members and only being online for a number of days, two fake spam accounts were already created, so recaptcha has to be enabled unfortunately. There was an issue where no email was being sent, meaning you would not be able to reset passwords which has now been fixed. I have now listed the site on all the major search engines which will take a while to populate. There are some minor site related technical things which I need to take care of, but it's starting to look fairly good. In the mean time, I will focus on optimising the existing articles and start making a plan for the mega comparison article that needs to be completed. Hopefully someday somebody reads this and found this site useful! :D

New features added

Marshalleq — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:33:51 +0000

Today, being able to mention someone easily @administrator style got a lookup upgrade, an ads manager has been added for future monetisation to help fund this site, we've added ability to upload all sorts of new attachments and the ability to embed videos from a wide ranging list of sites into posts. A number of site refinement activities are going on in the background including getting added into various search engines and I found the time to write the first article in the capturing photographs series.

Sign in with Google, Microsoft, Reddit, LinkedIn, Discord and Github added, Upload limits and captcha

administrator — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 05:25:36 +0000

Features / Changes

To make it easier for everyone, I have now added single sign on capability. Please leave your feedback in the forums if you find any errors with this or even just found it useful!
File upload size increase. Given we are working with large files, I have upped the upload limit to 500MB, hopefully this is enough but do reach out if you need more while we are optimising this site.
For now I have opted not to enable a captcha option, in the hope it's one less barrier to driving engagement with this community. If it turns out we get too much spam I will enable it.

Known Issues

When viewing on phones the menu background is green and very hard to read
When viewing on phones the login page does not open properly, preventing login

These will be fixed as soon as I can get to them.

Forums are Live!

Marshalleq — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 03:31:01 +0000

Today, the forums have gone live, accepting a few tweaks here and there while we bed in the new system. The companion website has soft launched today, with new content to be added over the coming weeks. I will not be making a point of promoting it just yet, while I ensure that the content is broad enough and hopefully without too many errors. It is my hope the combination of the web site and the forum will bring together a friendly community of like minded, (but not too like minded) Digital Archivists, that share their ideas, questions and troubles across a broad range of topics that support and grow this community for ourselves and by ourselves. Of note is the lack of content around scanning at present, which is in progress but not yet complete. If you have a project archiving photographs, film, slides, negatives, positives etc then please do ask in the forums and I'll endeavor to support you 1-1 until this site (with a little luck) grows it's member base.

Welcome to the site and I wish you well, wherever you are.