LegacyBox rip off!
 

THINK TWICE ABOUT USING LEGACY BOX. i SENT THEM 5 VHS AND 4, 8 mm TAPES. After 6 months and over 200 dollars paid I get 2 VHS tapes and 1 , 8MM done with a grand total of 15 minutes of crappy video on a thumb drive!! I requested a refund and they sent me back 70 bucks!!! The remaining 3 VHS and 3 , 8MM tapes labeled cant do these. What a rip off!!

We've been warning about them for years, You should have done your home work before putting your memories at risk.

They sure aren't getting better, and are only getting worse and worse. Quality was certainly never their strong point.

Thankfully this site on the other hand is a valuable resource when it comes to digitizing these tapes the right way and I am forever grateful for it. At least this could be considered a learning lesson for the OP to try and find a more reputable service.

Can you suggest a good site for the service?

I have a cheap VHS player its old and plays every one of the 5 VHS tapes I sent them with little to no distortion!

I have been getting quite a few recommended videos on YouTube from various digitizing services showing their "behind the scenes" operations. Most of them don't have the recommended equipment, likely due to it being expensive (ex: TBCs and high end SVHS decks). All of them get media that LegacyBox rejected and/or damaged.

The problem is the analog-to-digital transfer process doesn't scale well and its hard to do a volume business, maintain high quality, and charge a reasonable price. A place like LegacyBox can't babysit any capture. If a tape doesn't immediately play and produce a picture, the workers likely stop it, flag it as "unplayable" and move to the next tape in the giant queue.

I was curious how the quality came back using one of these services. Anyone care to post horror story samples?

vwestlife on youtube sent some mixed media over to them as a test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSj3RbdhjzA

Let me transfer these tapes for you, as I've long wanted to do a head-to-head showing how overly crappy LegacyBox is. At this time, I'm not accepting new projects. But I'll make an exception for this.

PM me. :)

I recall watching that - He didn't really disclose how he did his own captures though that he used to compare to Legacy Box's. in terms of hardware chain/software in the video.

My guess is that he used the process here that he did in comparison to the cloner alliance pro box here which he terms his "normal capture method" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dehmSV2CxDc

Spoiler - It's passed through a miniDV camcorder to Firewire and then deinterlaced with QTGMC - essentially that's the ADVC-110 pathway which gets a lot of hate around here haha.

I still think DV has its strengths (ease of use, no audio sync issues, multiplatform, not too unwieldy file sizes), but I'll eventually have my testing posted of like 10+ different capture methods on the same starting source material so others can decide for themselves. Mainly lacks in the chroma subsampling department and that's probably the one thing I'd change if only allowed to change one thing.

I take issue with this. :no2:

"hate" is an excessive and emotion dislike of something. Hate is adjacent to love, another strong emotion. (The opposite of love is indifference, not hate.)

Now then, many of us don't like the ADVC boxes, but it's because of facts. Not emotions. Boring, unemotional, indifferent facts. Those facts include: 1990s video encoding quality, altering colors, macroblocks -- ie, worse than DVD-Video MPEG (with adequate bitrate), far worse than lossless. Now, you can have the weak opinion of "good enough", but it's really more of an excuse, simply being an apologist for a lousy outdated/ancient tech/device from 25+ years ago.

Sometimes being accused of "hate" is more a statement about the accuser having a weak standing. :wink2:

This is myth, false, not accurate whatsoever. DV boxes are not magic, and can/do drop frames (thus also have audio sync issues). Same reason = lack of proper TBCs.

To bring the conversation back on topic, for most of us, dislike of LegacyBox is simply because they do a crappy job. A lot of my work in the past decade was fixing what places like this had screwed up.

I personally get tired of seeing their stupid ads on CNBC during morning hours. I'm not sure what's worse, them or the "gold mine" life insurance ads.

Unfortunately, it can get emotional for people who have their precious memories destroyed or lost by this company.

Southtree / Legacybox / Kodak Digitizing Box are all the same. All work is done in their facility located in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A lot of people don’t get any money back. Legacybox doesn’t really charge much because there gear is way cheaper and they don’t put any work into it. Lordsmurf is top of the line with thousands of dollars in gear being used on your tapes. It’s a big difference people have to look into to appreciate. In this stuff the super cheap people are the ripoff. https://youtu.be/9iQc_qomHiI?si=VsIPW2_r2gO-srMm The crazy thing to me about that video is how much he says those videos are worth to him then when it comes time to digitize then he goes with the cheapest people possible.

Digitizing them is different than playing them on a VCR. Digital is a signal represented by 1s and 0s. It’s either on or off and you have to have a perfect signal to capture correctly.

Gotmemories thinks that legacybox doesn’t have a monitor on every transfer and they just rip everything from a stack of DVDs afterwards. I’m not sure but they create unreasonable price expectations.

-- merged --

Look at the indeed.com ex employee reviews and the Better Business Reviews from Legacybox customers. That whole thing is just all marketing. It’s them dumping money into marketing to get more people in. They aren’t charging enough to worry about quality. They worry about quantity.

I've mentioned this multiple times. Look at both Indeed and Glassdoor reviews, from both current and former employees.

... but also realize that companies can pay Indeed/Glassdoor to remove posts. So given the large % of bad, it's got to be really bad there. And then some companies have been caught giving bonus payments to drown out legitimate negative reviews with fake paid positive ones.

Based on multiple reviews I've read in the past (and hopefully are still posted there), LegacyBox employees are not "video people" and usually have zero education/experience/background in video. All you need are the same qualification as the person that asks "do you want fries with that?"

So that's who you're trusting your videos with. :eek:

LegacyBox is what you refer to as a "conversion mill". And these "mills" really are not much different from actual mills. At a mill, stuff is not refined. Raw material is put in, and it's rough processed.

At places like this, you and your memories do not matter. You're a number. You're cattle.

If all you want is "something digital" -- and not quality -- well, there you go! But if you want your tapes to be properly archived, stay far away from these places. You're not getting what you deserve.

Mill gear is generally consumer fodder, the same items you can buy yourself from a thrift store. The sort of gear sold at Best Buy, Amazon and Walmart, either current or past. This isn't advice to buy that low-end junk, but rather a warning of the low-end schlock generally being used at these places.

THANKS!!! What do you make of the " do it yourself " kits on Amazon?

Complete BS garbage. Amazon is 100% Chinese junk for video capture hardware. That's the sort of crap that content mills use. You want to trade up the quality of work, not recreate the bad work at home.

Partially off-topic, but considering this is the company that made an entire advertisement suggesting it’s perfectly fine to dispose of or burn your original media after they “transfer” it… not at all surprising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz_7cD-WnQo

When I first starting trying to digitize my videos I made some bad decisions because I didn’t know any better and I didn’t look into anything. Looking back that was my fault.

I feel bad that for you for Legacybox screwing you over but in my personal opinion that was partly your fault also because you didn’t really look into that and you were trying to do it the cheap easy way. You have to look past the marketing.

You are still using the same mindset that lead you to Legacybox. This stuff just isn’t supposed to be that cheap. Don’t look at google reviews from people that dismiss everything as "well that’s just VHS". Look into the gear that they use and if they don’t tell you what gear they use then don’t use them. There’s a reason they won’t tell you. Legacybox won’t tell you what they use.

Look into what a Timebase error is. Understand that Clearclicks and all that have nothing to prevent timebase errors. There are many other reasons those are bad.

The codec digitalfaq people use prevents loss during deinterlacing and other things.
There software is designed specifically for VHS.
Everything is specialized.

The VCRs used by Lordsmurf and some other members here give them a huge quality boost. The gear they use is from a time when the world cared about this task and it’s the best ever made. Really this is a professional trade.

Mostly agree with what’s been just explained, but it’s my understanding that deinterlacing does technically damage the video, and even the best, currently used deinterlacing filters only minimize the damage. Upscaling the video also damages it, but like with deinterlacing, proper precautions can and should help minimize it.

If there’s ways to deinterlace and/or upscale the files/footage resulting from the tape ingest/capture without damaging anything, I would love to hear it, although I suspect when assessed and negated properly, the damage done to the footage from either action is about as noticeable as the signal degradation introduced by external Time-Base Correctors (which is to say negligible due to the benefits outweighing the damage).

There isn’t a way to prevent loss during deinterlacing. You’re right. I typed that wrong. Huffy minimizes losses during deinterlacing. Deinterlacing is always throwing out information. I saw that later on but i couldn’t edit it then. Some TBCs are more transparent than others. That is another good thing about this forum though. If you say something incorrect it is corrected. Anyways I just wanted to encourage him to look into it more before he buys anything else. The resale on the do it yourself kit he’s talking about is probably not good so you most likely will be stuck with it.

Correct, deinterlacing is damaging.

Interlacing is how the video exists, and it should be retained when possible (which is almost always).

Modern HDTVs still accept interlaced content, and deinterlace only on playback. And this is the desired way. The deinterlacing happens at playback, not by molesting/damaging the source to force it to an ephemeral need.

And the reason modern TVs stil support interlacing is because modern broadcasting signals are still interlaced, as interlace exists for bandwidth reduction. We'd have far less TV channels without interlace (which may be a good thing? :laugh:)

Correct.

Impossible. Damage can only be mitigated.

It fully depends on the quality of the TBC. All TBCs add some % of processing noise/artifacts/affects, which is why "transparency" matters. Some TBCs are crap, should not be used. Some so-called "TBCs" are not TBCs whatsoever -- including mislabeled TBCs, such as Tenlab junk, and well as the half-wit (mis)use of random mixers, DVD recorders, etc.

Furthermore, damage from interlace/upscale, even "proper", tends to have vastly more obvious side effects, compared to the suggested TBCs with reasonable to excellent transparency.

... and to bring this back on topic...

You could never have these sort of discussions with the low-knowledge workers at these transfer mills. It'd be a total "deer in headlights" moment if you tried!

Yes, that is exactly what happened, my keyboard (or device, not sure which) removed it because it doesn’t know the word “deinterlacing” (but it does know “interlacing).”

That is my point, no one can tell me of such a method(s), because there isn’t one. I should have made the ironic/rhetorical quality of that a bit more clear

That makes sense, and I've edited the above posts to reflect this. :congrats:

I seem to have missed where you typed that at all here. The first interlace/deinterlace comment was mentioned by Haunted_TBC. Methinks some more folks cross-posted threads, too many tabs open!

Well I’m sure your busy and skim read some of this. You probably expect a paragraph that talks about one point that is made at the beginning of the paragraph and not a run on paragraph but I got you.

Anyways I’ll watch that when I’m posting.

Actually speed reader more than skimmer. But those walls of text bog me down.

This thread has meandered some -- all good stuff, mind you -- and the interlace topic came from left field. Haunted_TBC seems to attributed it to you, but then you never discussed interlace.

Thanks! My friend has a conversion kit Im going to play with it then probably send you mine! Very nice of you!

The more you play the tapes, the more you risk damage. Just remember that. :wink2:

Apparently, the “red sticker” scourge is starting to get really bad at Legacy Box/Kodak Digitizing/Southtree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBnDZojOwQw
Roughly half of tapes sent to them get the sticker now regardless of tape?
(Partly unrelated, but looks like several PV-9451 with no TBCs?)

Certainly looks that way, piles upon piles of consumer VCRs and Macbooks, quality be damned.

This might be slightly unrelated but I remember heading down to local transfer service to get some super8 film reels converted and was able to talk to guy who operates the conversion of tapes and film, even got to see a good chunk of the digitizing equipment he used. Should've probably stayed a bit longer to see what other VCRs were in their collection, along with capture cards and TBCs, but I do remember seeing a JVC S-VHS ET unit along with a Panasonic ES15.

Asked the guy what TBC(s) he used and he replied with that he always uses the internal TBC in the VCRs, though he did told me that he does use a frame TBC in the chain if it is absolutely needed, so it seems like they do use some frame TBC(s) which is good. I just never got a good look at exactly what models were being used.

So hey, at least this local service seems to know what they are doing and are using proper equipment for the job. Doing a much better job than Legacybox could've ever dreamed of

Came across a new video posted by popular video VWestlife, where he goes into great detail about how bad the ElCrapo and EasyCrap devices are. He actually shows footage of Emerald Coast’s workflow as an example of people doing a disservice to customers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NuquTDhjGY

Don't be fooled by these single person shops that are criticizing legacybox, They are as bad as them, Sure they run moldy tapes on their machines because they have cheap crap equipement, it's not a big deal if it clogs or break, I'm not saying that legacybox use high end machines, they refuse them probably for safety purposes, they employ these young kids and they don't want them to get sick and sue them, There is at least 3 shops that are doing this sort of videos about "how they do it better" with elgato and VHS/DVD combos hooked up to cheap Dell laptops.

I ran into that mold situation recently.

Somebody had a slop shop convert his videos, and their work sucked. So he sent it to me next, to try to get better quality. In his batch of tapes, one tape was heavily molded. But I'm unable to process about half of his tapes, because the slop shop did not clean the deck between uses. You can easily see which tapes were transferred after that mold tape, because those have mold on them as well. And no, it's not a case of "maybe they all had mold", due to how and where it now exist in the clamshells. So now he has multiple tapes with mold, due to it being transferred tape to tape, for several tapes.

He now requires SpecBros, for proper cleaning and transfer. Not let another idiot handle them, and likely lose his childhood memories as a result.

Quality shops do not touch mold tapes, because they don't want to risk $$,$$$ of equipment. Mold needs special cleaning, and then special mold-only transfer setups isolated from other tape use.

Yeah, I wouldn’t trust Emerald Coast or their name-dropped business model/inspiration, GotMemories.
Emerald Coast actually responded to the VWestlife video defending their use of ElCrapo, saying:

He doesn't realize that VWestlife doesn’t run a business, but regardless, I find it hard to take seriously the claims made by both Sean from Emerald Coast and Phil Thomas from GotMemories that the “industry” is in a pricing race to the bottom. If anything, it’s likely more of an excuse they make for themselves as why their own workflows “suffice” (and why their prices are high!)

For someone who is not a tech savvy and does not want to bother with doing it himself because he doesn't know how to even if he has a cheap VCR and an Elgato I can see these type of business may fit the bill. But for the rest, they think these guys are professionals and use "professional" gear and their mom and pop VCR won't cut it not knowing that these guys are exactly using the same crappy mom and pop VCR and a chinese crappy capture device.

Just few days ago we had an argument over at VH with someone who thinks these guys and the likes like Kodak are the official professionals that use equipement better than say a high end S-VHS VCR from JVC. A guy like this is a perfect victim for them and there are a lot of them unfortunately.

"Kodak" = LegacyBox. Same company.

I can at least respect Got Memories because it does come through in his videos that he genuinely cares about helping his customers, and he tries to do the best he can with what he has. You can hear his contempt for the borderline fraudulent work of LegacyBox and their ilk. Now, it's true that he has settled for using low-end workflows and isn't a digitizing master by any means. But he's not claiming to be focused on super high-end quality or having the best equipment. His business is to just get stuff transferred and looking good enough to be watchable by his customers, especially after they've been shafted by one of the big trash companies.

I've run through several of his videos and always saw him treating the tapes respectfully, and carefully doing the troubleshooting he knew how to. He is light years ahead of LegacyBox. And if his customers are being treated well and are 100% satisfied by getting a "good enough" digital file of their tape, then he's not hurting anyone, unless he were to promise someone that he'd provide the highest quality digitization available.

On the other hand, the Emerald Coast Digitizing guy is clearly just trying to capitalize on an opportunity to make money by imitating what he saw from the Got Memories YouTube videos. His videos show a constant lack of care for delicate items and wrong or questionable practices. I would never want him anywhere near anything of mine or anyone I know. He's a small increment better than LegacyBox.

He doesn't think VW does this as a business. His "I guess send them to you?" and "What's your business name?" comments are just immature, facetious, sarcastic remarks. It's a passive-aggressive way of saying "At least I started a business to do this, and you didn't," which is trying to deflect the negative criticism aimed at his work and making the argument that "I do this as a business, therefore I am an authority." We've all seen people like this in different industries who get triggered and lash out when the facts of their poor work are brought to their attention. Yet another reason to avoid.

You can take them very seriously. But just because it applies to them doesn't mean it applies to every other business. The way they (and many other business owners) think is only in terms of "I have to be the least expensive or else people won't buy from me." AKA the high volume + low profit business model where you are competing based on price. So, due to their viewpoint, they are telling the truth when they say that LegacyBox being less expensive is difficult for them.

I don't think they're making excuses for their quality. I think it's more likely that they have zero interest in the technicalities of high-quality capture, and literally just don't care. E.g. the typical "VHS was always horrible quality anyway!!" justification.

Most people think of them like this youtube guy but they are actually getting Legacy box quality.

As I mentioned in the past, analog to digital workflows don't scale too well. You aren't going to be able to maintain quality with a low price on top of a high volume of tapes. That and having to maintain all that equipment in good working order.

I have been approached a few times on whether I could do tape transfers for people. Just about every time I've asked what they had, they usually want dozens of tapes transferred. Not going to happen as I have a day job, plus they wouldn't like the cost I would charge per tape. Generally I stick to friends and family and transferring a handful of tapes from time to time. The last "big" job I attempted to take on ended quickly when I found out how crappy Sony's early 90s 8mm tapes were.

Gotmemories is using Elgatos and really bad hardware with no TBCs and he charges 30 to 50 a tape to run your tapes through composite VCRs with bad capture cards and captures to MP4. He uses an Elgato on DV too. No FireWire. Gotmemories has a ton of transfers going at the same time and it’s just him there. He said he does that alone so he can’t watch all of those transfers too closely.

He is still way better than Legacybox. I have talked to an ex Legacybox employee now and he has sent me photos of the inside of that place and their operation. They would run a tape deck to a Funai DVD recorder fed composite to it. Once the tape was transferred, if it was a digital order, they would rip the DVD in a batch processor and then make a 2MBPs MP4 of the DVD rip. They have what they call "PODS" where 1 technician would be operating 80 tape decks at once. Each 16 players would have a multiviewer (a composite only security system) and they would be able to preview the video payback. Thing is that a tech could run 80 tapes at once but there was never a known way to have them care enough about hours passed through the machine for cleaning, if the tape itself was bad, etc. There are around 32 of these stations in a warehouse. Some pods have 8mm, MiniDV, and VHS. Some have just 8mm,some have just VHS. Betamax and PAL were segregated in their own pod called "foreign" Think of the heat dissipation also. You're talking about 5 Mac pros per pod, plus bodies, plus machines, plus so much more. Photo scanning, film transfers, and reel to Reel were a disaster also.

They have two eighteen wheelers over their with parts machines wilting away. Useful parts. Main board, pinch rollers, hell even buttons and drums. Management would say it’s easier to buy new machines than fix them.

They don’t even check for blue screens or anything since the transfer process didn't alow for it. They also record a max of 6 hour tapes. Never SLP 8 hours since the transfers took too long. The mentality was it's "good enough for consumer tapes". The customer wouldn't know the difference and they would have chopped it up to it being "vintage" and "old". Each Mac pro (Intel) when they went digital has 16 Haupauge Composite+Audio capture devices chained to it via USB and bespoke software that could run all 16 at once running through 1 Sonnet USB 3 PCIe card.

To top it off they charge you in advance then you can’t get your money back when you figure out you’ve been royally f’ed because it’s been like 6 months since they charged your card.

If anyone has any questions about the Legacybox workflow then ask. I’ll upload some pictures later.

Bespoke is a proprietary software made for that system. They use ankr usb hubs and chain 4 capture cards per hub. So they have these boxes going usb out to a hub, then to a PCLE card. The work bespoke is defined as made for a particular consumer or user. There is no official name for the software.

The front they put up is they care because they know their customers care about it. They ensure they do while they throw out quality for the sake of time. What happened was they got too big for their britches and couldn't keep up with demand. They pocketed profits, expanded but never considered going for better quality or better care and instead took inspiration from LITERALLY AMAZON on how to streamline their processes.

Of here's a fun fact, the audio tracks on their captures is backwards. Whoever coded the capture software didn't set up the left and right channels correctly. So a rocket flying right to left on screen will have the audio be inverted.

Every... Single... Tape.

Also there warehouse storage isn’t climate controlled.

Post pictures then. What kind of VCRs they use?

I have quite a few pictures. The only reason I haven’t posted them yet is the guy wants me to get rid of the metadata first so I have to figure out how to do that. You’ll know I’m telling the truth once you see the pictures. There’s also an 11 second video of pallets of boxes of tapes they had setting outside for days because of something they were doing in the warehouse.

They had a specific set of model machines they would buy since they were more robust and the insides were swappable.

Panasonic AG-1330
Panasonic AG-2560
JVC HR-S series decks
Sony SLV-700's
And a few more.

I sent him a link to this chat and asked his permission to post everything. He didn’t want to post it himself.