UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives The UK police service is planning to launch a procurement to purchase tech and services worth up to £75 million ($102 million) in order to digitize its VHS archive. According to a tender notice published last week, Bluelight Commercial - a not-for-profit buyer that acts on behalf of the emergency services - says the police …
I would not be surprised if many private CCTV systems were still using VHS.
I suspect much of the VHS archive is material gathered during an investigation and needs to be archived for n years. This service would thus be protecting the recordings from further degradation and make them more an accessible and thus useful. I suspect only those who have satisfied government and Police vetting need apply.
There are quite a few old buildings in major cities around the world that can't have their systems upgraded because the infrastructure for the CCTV system was placed when the building was constructed, and would require gutting the entire structure to replace it. I imagine those ancient systems are still using VHS recording in some capacity out of necessity, since there's also still a factory somewhere in the world that's producing CRT monitors specifically for that application as well.
Nah, I've installed CCTV professionally, it's all upgradable. You'd never build a system that wasn't maintainable.
The places still using legacy stuff are only doing so because they won't spend the money to replace it.
"since there's also still a factory somewhere in the world that's producing CRT monitors specifically for that application as well."
The one remaining manufacturer of CRT displays buys up old stocks of the tubes to use, as nobody can make the tubes anymore.
I can recall UK TV police procedurals that a tape was inserted at the commencement of an interview - I don't know if it was a video or audio tape or even if it was actual practice.
(Back then, in these parts, interrogation involved a copy of the A-K, a wrecking bar and waiting for the train to pass in the tunnel under the station.)
If such tapes were made they would need to be retained I imagine for decades especially if any part was introduced in evidence.
I would guess that such evidence must also maintain the chain of custody. Any reproduction must be an incontestably exact copy of the original.
NEAL interview recorders (audio recorders) were at one time ubiquitous. They still make them, though they typically use CDs these days and there are other suppliers. The police seem to have a preference for video these days and there is a range of PACE-compliant recorders for both fixed and portable use. Whereas the audio systems seem to rely on multiple physical media to protect against tampering (the accused gets one of the simultaneous recordings), the video systems appear to rely more on digital signatures.
Unfortunately, police forces don't seem to be keeping on top of the management of physical evidence (the rate of growth seems to increase as forensics improve) and it goes missing with unfortunate frequency. Whether digital storage will be any better remains to be seen.
I followed the link to the tender, but as far as I can see the tender does not say how much material needs to be digitised. £75 million might be ridiculously large or small (and the same could be said for the timescale).
Am I missing something or is it normal for government tenders to be a pig in a poke?
I recall many years ago that a company successfully bid £120m to telecine the BBC’s entire film archive into a search engine optimised digitally accessibly format.
Then it was demonstrated that one (randomly selected) day from the beginning of the 1930’s had more than 100 hours of footage ranging up to more than 5,000 hours for events such as 6th June 1944.
I would be very wary of taking on a police contract to digitise anything (especially microfiche) unless you knew the exact extent of work to be done.
"I would be very wary of taking on a police contract to digitise anything (especially microfiche) unless you knew the exact extent of work to be done."
When it comes to government contracts, invariably there will be caveats placed in the "small print" by the winning bidder that the government department will either not understand, not be aware of or simply not care about because "other peoples money" such that the commercial provider will still make a very nice profit out of it.
The tender is for the provision of systems and services which will be used for the digitisation of media, not the actual digitalisation of media.
I suspect the total value will only be obtained if all police forces contract, which would indicate this is circa £3m per force over 4 years (£750k pa). Which doesn’t look excessive.
What is draw my attention is other than microfiche, it doesn’t include hard copy materials, which would suggest these are already being scanned into the Digital Evidence Management System.
That actually sounds like a good use case for AI, rather than forcing a person to personally watch every hour of every video.
Though I'm not sure how you define the "copy is good". Digitization is a simple process that's 100% a known quantity. There's no chance that the digitizer will fuck up, it will perfectly digitize what the RCA or S-video output from the VCR is providing it. What there is a chance of is that the VCR playback will glitch, with tracking errors causing rolling or snow on the picture. Or the tape will snag or break. Maybe you can retry digitizing part of it with a person monitoring it trying to manually help where possible but if the tape is old and flaky the tape is old and flaky.
If you were to utilize artificial stupidity, there will be many false positives and false negatives as to if a copy is good.
When it comes to thousands and thousands of VHS tapes, there is a slim, but non-zero chance a digitizer will fail to produce a valid video file (or someone will run the VHS player wrong).
I can think of some scripting to do sanity checking on the video file output (i.e. is the video format corrupted, is there a video and audio stream, is the duration plausible, is the file size plausible for the duration, is the needed metadata embedded in the correct format), but someone would need to at least fast forward though the output for there to be confidence the digitization worked correctly.
Each standard VHS tape encoded a video stream and an audio stream, although the encoding method for such was very convoluted, with different fields for different parts of the video stream (the chroma values etc).
Digitizing to a PNG per each separate field would render the encoded video useless, as you couldn't play it without replicating what a VHS player does and you would have lost the audio stream.
To ensure that nothing is lost, as a lossless video and audio format (with compression) might be wanted, but for the vast majority of cases, a decent lossy video codec at acceptable quality settings will ensure that the evidence continues to be retained at a negligible level of quality loss.
If proof that the video was digitized from a VHS tape is wanted, metadata of the encoding methods and dates etc and maybe even PNGs per field/frame from every second (or really every 15 seconds will do) would be sufficient evidence without increasing the storage requirements by an unacceptable amount.
I once found some really nasty porn on a user's laptop. You can guess what type of porn it was because we handed it over to the police. Turns out they had a special and quite well-staffed unit looking into this sort of thing, they called me in for a witness statement in a room that had huge stacks of VHS tapes in it. I do not like to imagine what was on those tapes.
I once had to look through a users laptop and storage after an accusation of nasty material being present.
Spoke to plod first (were very helpful to advise us on how to go ahead initially without contamination) and I and one other co-worker went through the machine and drives.
That was not a happy day at work. We found nothing inappropriate but there was material that had the potential to be misinterpreted.
Even though nothing was found it was still an very uncomfortable experience.
I've met a few guys that do the real work with the police, they often look haunted and can't do the job for long as it is damaging.
Winkypop,
I bet they still reqire the ability to use VHS. There's still going to be a lot of legacy CCTV systems out there, that they need to talk to.
I imagine they've got loads of old stuff about, still on VHS, and as Roland6 said, maybe their VHS kit is approaching end-of-life and they're wanting to get the smaller amount of stuff they've had to keep this long transferred across. Rather than maintaining kit.
It could be storage related.
VHS tapes tape up a LOT of space, so even if you can still source the VCRs from eBay or whatever and don't really have a problem continuing to use VHS you might like the storage space back. They'll have to continue being able to deal with VHS for decades, because there will always be cases where some criminal has VHS tapes that are suspected to contain evidence (child porn or whatever) they need the ability to look at.
Even if you had the space keeping track of what's what would be time consuming, plus you have to worry about degradation of tapes even when stored under optimal conditions (and I'd wager they mostly aren't) You'd hate to see someone terrible get out on appeal because the evidence against them became unviewable.
Kids of the 80s – of which I was one – loved our "arcane magnetic tape formats". Whether it was taping our fave tunes off the Top 40 onto audio cassette, or taping late night Monty Python off the telly onto VHS, it was a major part of our lives. Not to mention all the computer games that came on cassette.
In fact, thinking about it, I’m sure I had a copy of Police Academy on VHS, back in the day. Now there’s irony for you.
And not really all *that* arcane even now. I mean, if you take some of that magnetic tape stuff and glue it onto a disk shaped object, set it spinning and put the read head on a swinging arm sort of mechanism, you can get the information quicker by skipping straight the bit you want instead of waiting for the entire tape to spool. Excuse me while I pop down to the patent office.
"converting ... CD, DVDs to an electronic file format"
Erm? CDs and DVDs *are* already digital containing data in electronic file formats - Audio CDs have no filesystem, just raw digital audio; other CD formats like Photo-CD, CDVideo, and "data" CDs do have filesystems (ISO or UDF) containing files in various electronic file formats; DVD-Video discs have a UDF filesystem with files in IFO, BUP, VOB, etc electronic formats.
No. Apart from anything else, there have been a number of convictions overturned on appeal after the wrongfully convicted have spent decades in prison. And even in countries which have a "statute of limitations", it depends on the crime as to whether it applies at all and if it does, over how long a period before expiring.
Here in the UK there pretty much is no such thing as a statute of limitations other than about 6 months for some very minor crimes. The Wikipedia page has a decent summary and covers most of the exceptions.
Were you asking for a friend? ;-)
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