Catalog your VHS collection

VHS collecting is one of the most active corners of physical media and has almost nowhere to catalogue itself. The home video catalog holds 8,379 VHS releases, 1,477 of them in a member's collection, and it treats a tape as its own object: this sleeve, this distributor, this certificate, this dub — not just the film printed on it.

Why tape, and why now

Tape is the one home video format where the object is genuinely perishable. Oxide sheds, splices let go, a deck eats one. It is also unreproduced: thousands of titles were never reissued on disc, so the tape in your hand holds the only surviving version of that transfer — that dub, that cut, that pan-and-scan crop someone made in 1987 and nobody repeated.

Catalogue a Blu-ray and you have described something you could buy again. Catalogue a tape and you have described something that is on its way out.

What a VHS entry records

One entry for the film, a separate entry for every release of it. A VHS release holds:

• Format — type VHS, with a free-text description and a quantity
• Video standard, run time, aspect ratio and colour
• Packaging, classification, territories, languages, audio, subtitles
• Identifying codes — catalogue number, barcode, BBFC reference
• Companies, each with a role and a date
• Notes

The tapes here are better filled in than you might expect: 7,928 carry company credits, 7,321 at least one identifying code, 3,866 an aspect ratio and 2,249 notes.

Aspect ratio also holds a real mess. 3,019 tapes say 4:3, then 234 say "1,33:1", 112 say "1.33:1" and 42 say "1:33:1" — three punctuations of one number. 4:3 is the one to use. Most tape is pan-and-scan, so a letterboxed tape is worth saying out loud in the description or the notes.

Packaging is where tape differs most from disc

Discs come in a handful of shapes. Tapes came in everything: Slipcase 2,625 · Keep case 1,990 · Clamshell 619 · Cardsleeve 249 · Other 150 · Snap case 112.

Big-box and clamshell rental tapes are a collecting category of their own — oversized cardboard and hinged shells that only went to video shops, often with artwork no retail edition got. People track the colour of the plastic: 20 entries say "Clamshell (White)" rather than just clamshell. A different shell is a different release, not a different copy.

Pre-cert, screeners and rental releases

The free-text description on a format row is where collectors put the tags that matter: "Slipcase" 196 · "Pre-cert" 55 · "PAL" 23 · "Clamshell (White)" 20 · "Screener" 15 · "Rental Release" 12 · "Clamshell" 12. The other 7,738 are blank, which is the honest state of this data and the easiest thing here to improve.

Pre-cert is the big one. Before the Video Recordings Act 1984, tapes sold in the UK were not certified by the BBFC at all, and a wave of titles went out uncut, unrated and then off the shelves. Those tapes are among the most collected objects in the format, and telling a pre-cert from the later certified edition is exactly what a catalogue entry is for. Certification on the later tapes is recorded too — 2,358 BBFC reference codes catalog-wide.

Region does not apply to tape, the video standard does

VHS has no region coding. There is no flag on a tape and nothing in a VCR to check it against. The catalog has 507 tapes with a region value on them, which is mostly people reaching for a familiar field out of habit.

The real question for tape is the video standard, and that one is filled in: NTSC 3,349 · PAL 2,570 · SECAM 59, with 2,371 not yet recorded. A PAL tape in an NTSC deck is not a refusal, the way a Region 2 disc in an American player is — it is a picture that will not lock, rolling or stripped of colour, because the machine cannot read the signal. Fill that field in and an importer knows what they are buying. Region codes explained covers the standards in full.

Betamax, CED, Super 8 and the rest

The same fields take the other tape and oddity formats, which is why they get no page of their own:

• Betamax, 86 tapes — 29 NTSC, 15 PAL, five of them tagged pre-cert
• VCD, 157 discs
• CED, 51 — RCA's SelectaVision caddy discs, credited mostly to RCA VideoDiscs and RCA SelectaVision VideoDiscs
• Super 8, 27, and D-VHS, 16

Small numbers, and each one a format nobody else is keeping a list of.

Your copy, and what to add next

Condition matters more on tape than on anything else here, and it belongs to your copy, not the release: the entry describes the edition, your copy describes the object with the crease in the sleeve and the wobble in reel two. A copy records condition, where you keep it and what you paid, the last two private to you. The scale is in condition grading explained.

The most-credited distributors show who has done the work so far: Warner Home Video 638 · Silver Vision 336 · Columbia TriStar Home Video 272 · Paramount Pictures 236 · Titan Sports 205 · BBC Video 181. Wrestling tapes are a large visible chunk, which says as much about who catalogues as about what is missing.

So add the tape you own if it is not here, and if it is here with a blank format description, say what it came in. Where the data came from is in what happened to Filmogs; the arguing about it happens on the forum.