Why weren't my items digitized?Updated 3 hours ago
Great question!
We digitize nearly all consumer photo, audio, and video products. For a full list, you can check out this article here:
What media types do you convert?
If your item is on that list and was not digitized, there are several likely reasons:
- The item was blank.
- The item was damaged.
- The item was unreadable by our digitizing equipment.
- The item violates our content policy.
Blank Items
This is the most likely reason for un-digitized items. Sometimes that unused VHS tape ends up in the same closet as everything else, and after 20 years, it's hard to know what is what. It's not a problem though; we're happy to check it out and make sure nothing is there.
Damaged Items
Damage is another common reason an item isn't digitized. The most common culprit is water, followed by some sort of physical damage or warping to the tape or media. Water especially is deadly for tapes, film, and photos, which is why it's so important to digitize your items today! Some items with minor water damage can still be processed, but the more damage there is, the more difficult it becomes.
With Digital Media, like DVDs, the most common cause of damage are scratches. Deep grooves, deformations, or bits that have flaked away can prevent the disc from being read.
Unreadable Items
There are some formats we don't support, and some items that despite our best effort, we cannot read. Some examples of items we can't read are rarer specialty formats, like VTR, or VHS-D, or more commonly, Digital Media items like unfinalized discs, rip-protected DVDs, or wiped re-writable discs.
Unfinalized discs are characterized by a ring on the back of the disc. When recording most discs, they need to be finalized by the recording player or camcorder to "set" them so that they can be read by other devices.
Rip protected DVDs are usually the product of other digitizing services. When digitizing your memories to DVD, some services lock them to prevent them from being transferred to a computer. DVDs from Legacybox are never locked and yours to use however you like.
Content Policy
We do not digitize explicit content. Items with strong sexual, violent, or offensive content may not be digitized.