r/VHS

My collection of 80’s/90’s toys, VHS, and DVDs has been slowly growing and I needed a place to store everything. Instead of just buying a normal shelf, I thought it would be fun to recreate the vibe of walking into Blockbuster on a Friday night.

So I built a Blockbuster style display shelf with the classic blue and yellow colors and made a Blockbuster Video lightbox for the top.

Now it basically feels like I have a tiny Blockbuster in my house.

Still half tempted to start charging late fees to myself just for old times sake !!!

Like all of you I love collecting VHS tapes. I couldn't find a collection tracking app that did what I wanted so over the last 7 weeks I built ReelSwap.net aims to solve several problems.

1. The first digital archive of community contributed VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, and CED cover art.
2. A database capable of tracking multiple release and distributor variations of the same title.
3. Automatic peer-to-peer trade matching based on what you want and what others have.
4. An online Texture Archiving toolset for standardizing the preservation of physical media cover art.

The ReelSwap Catalog is where you can see all the community collection items in one place with specific format, distributor, and release variation information.

The Collection and Wantlist are how you manage your collection and set up conditions for automatically matching with other users for trade opportunities.

The Texture Archiver tool is accessible from the details page for each item in your collection. Here's a brief demo of how it's used.

https://youtu.be/CRiTYYwLq-4

It's not necessary to create texture archives to enjoy the site, you'll still be able to have a great 3D Shelf View based on textures others have archived. The goal isn't to require every user to archive every tape they own, it's to have at least 1 archive of every tape for historical preservation. The first user to upload an archive texture map for a specific release becomes the community texture for everyone. If you choose to upload your own, you will see your actual tape in your Collection galleries.

The Trading page is where you'll see receive and manage trade matches.

The Community page is where you can find and follow other users and explore their collections.

Your user profile can be customized based on how you want to use the platform.

The site is functional on Desktop and Mobile, but for the best experience for the time being use the Texture Archiver tool on Desktop. Our future roadmap includes a more automated process for creating texture archives so stay tuned!

If you're interested please consider joining. It's totally free. Check out the FAQ page for lots more information. I'll be creating some more detailed videos to support the site in coming days.

This is the beta release so there are bound to be bugs. Please use the Feedback form in the bottom right corner to report any issues. Most importantly be cool and have fun!

Ummm what do I do?

Just found these tapes at a thrift store! I don't understand Japanese, and there's no subtitles, but it's still a pretty cool find. Anyone else collect VHS like this?

Bottom text says “collectors edition”. pretty cool

could this be why it isn't working ??

alas I did not find this at the bins. had to trade a copy of the thing for it but it was worth it. one of my all time favorite movies. HACK THE PLANET!

I got this movie before I started collecting VHS movies again. It was tucked away in a drawer for idk how long, and I've decided to finally put it with the rest of my collection.

Has anyone here watched this one? I watched it years ago as I was curious about it, and I mostly remember the car scenes being sped up. Also the bad acting. It's clearly inspired, or may be considered a rip-off of the Mad Max movies, mainly Mad Max 2. It did also come out the same year Beyond Thunderdome did though.

I'm thinking of giving it a rewatch soon as I don't remember much else about it. Is Wheels of Fire a favorite of yours? Who here has it in their collection?

I didn't realize how old this one was that it had a VHS release. Just happened to spot it at the bottom of a VHS rack at Goodwill today. Haven't watched it before but I've heard good things.

Took a bit of a drive and waiting in line but I scored a large addition to my factory-sealed VHS collection.

Todays find.

Small display of some of my collection organized by year of release. Thinking I might rotate the selection every now and then.

Just a fun new addition

I picked these skate tapes up awhile ago at the bins and can only find very little info about them online except that they are legit tapes and have Tony Hawk and Rob Dyrdek in them. any info you can provide would be great. I'm thinking about just gifting them to my skater friend who collects skate tapes.

Wanted to get a new shelf, but I think I should down size instead. My question is what should I get rid of or put in storage. how would you go about it.

This is an older pic of the collection, but should be enough to give a broad idea of what I could lose or stash. any input would be helpful.