Back in the 1980s and 1990s, people recorded everything on VHS tapes — TV shows, commercials, music videos, school lessons, birthday parties, news broadcasts. VCRs were common in living rooms, and if you missed something on TV, you recorded it for later. Today, most of those tapes are collecting dust in attics or have been thrown away. But not all of them.

The Internet Archive’s VHS Vault is a massive and growing online collection of digitized VHS tapes. Anyone can explore it. You don’t need a login, you don’t need to pay, and you don’t need to know much more than how to use a search bar. Just go to archive.org/details/vhsvault and start looking.

What the VHS Vault Actually Is

The VHS Vault is part of the Internet Archive — a nonprofit digital library that collects and preserves content from across the internet and older media formats. The Vault is specifically focused on preserving video content that was originally recorded on VHS, the home video format that defined an entire generation of media use.

Most of what’s in the Vault was digitized from personal collections or old boxes of unlabeled tapes. Others come from people who knew what they were saving and wanted to share it — collectors, media historians, archivists, or just people who had a VCR and a habit.

What You’ll Find Inside

There’s no single theme to the Vault. It’s a chaotic, fascinating mix of what people once cared about enough to record. You might find:

• Full episodes of long-forgotten TV shows

• Local news broadcasts from the 1980s

• Commercials for toys, cereal, soft drinks, and insurance

• Educational tapes used in schools

• Music videos taped off MTV

• Concerts, interviews, public access programming

• Saturday morning cartoons and anime

• Home videos from birthdays, graduations, and family vacations

In some cases, a single video contains a full evening of TV -  with everything included, from the show to the ads to the channel's logo in the corner. These are time capsules, not just content.

Two Collections Worth Highlighting

The Marion Stokes Tapes: Marion Stokes was a woman in Philadelphia who recorded television news 24 hours a day, every day, for over 30 years. She started in 1979 and didn’t stop until 2012. Her collection filled entire rooms -  over 70,000 VHS tapes. The Internet Archive is working through them, digitizing one of the most complete records of televised news ever made.

The NostalgiaEthereal Collection: This is a fan project that gathers strange, funny, or rare clips from the 1990s and early 2000s. If you ever saw something weird on late-night TV or remember the bumpers between cartoons on Nickelodeon or Fox Kids, there’s a good chance someone has saved it here.

How to Use the VHS Vault

You don’t need to sign up or install anything. Visit the collection at archive.org/details/vhsvault, and start browsing.

You can:

• Use the search bar to look for keywords, titles, or topics

• Filter by year, creator, or subject

• Watch videos in your browser using the built-in player

• Download files in formats like MP4 if they’re available

Some videos are high quality. Others are grainy or glitchy — that’s part of the charm. You’re watching media pulled from old magnetic tapes, after all. The look and sound are part of the experience.

Why This Matters

VHS tapes weren’t built to last. They degrade over time. What’s worse, many of the shows and broadcasts recorded on them were never preserved anywhere else. Networks threw them out. Production companies disappeared. Public access stations never made digital backups. If no one had pressed "record" back then, that media might be lost forever.

The VHS Vault helps fill those gaps. It preserves not just entertainment, but a cultural record: how people spoke, what they watched, what they wore, what they sold, and what they thought was important enough to tape and keep. This is everyday history, saved against the odds.

A Place to Explore and Remember

Whether you're researching 1990s advertising, looking for a cartoon you half-remember from childhood, or just curious what was on TV in 1987, the VHS Vault is worth exploring. It’s strange and funny and nostalgic and sometimes deeply moving.

Start here: archive.org/details/vhsvault
What you find might surprise you.