[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[Sridhar the POWERful]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> > > > My mother wants to take all her tapes of my childhood and my brother's
> > > > and put them on a preserved format.  She was originally thinking of
> > > > DVD-R, but she has too old of a Mac to make this cost effective at the
> > > > moment (9600/233)
> > > >
> > > > She'd like to know the easiest and cheapest way of preserving these
> > > > dying videos on either the Mac or the PC.
> > > >
> > > > She was looking at the CD Video Recorder on www.terapintech.com, but I
> > > > was wondering what disadvantages or advantages this held since I am not
> > > > a video person.
> > >
> > > Gah, that's expensive.  If all you want is video CDs, then could you just
> > > buy her a CD-RW drive and something like the Miro DC-30.  The pair of items
> > > shouldn't cost more than about $200 together, plus more hard drive space
> > > will be needed.
> >
> > I would get a used ATI TV Wonder and compress with DivX.  You get DVD
> > quality full-length on a CD.  More than a couple of hours of VHS on a CD
> > with no loss.
>
> The TV shows I've downloaded in Divx were certainly far better than VCD
> quality.  They were also better than rented too many times VHS quality.  They
> weren't brandnew, master grade tape VHS quality though.  And those TV shows
> started with an excelent image quality.  Divx deals with bad image qualities,
> really badly.

But, look at the size of a DivX compared to the size of an MPEG-2 file of
similar quality.  You can always up the bitrate.

> I do recommend finding a way to make top notch digital back ups so
> that when you can afford DVDs, or whatever you can dump video to them,
> or also be able to make actual video tapes as well.

My preferred method is actually a dual-deck DVHS VCR, but that's a little
too pricy.

Peace...  Sridhar