Archiving old videos to DVD

[Aleck]

Our local video club have about 200 videos, run times 1 min to 20 min and we would like to archive them in an organised way to DVD. We have 2 approaches: 1 Regard a DVD as a 30 pence plastic disk and copy one video to one disk. 2 Regard a DVD as 4.3GB of space and 'Theme' disks eg comedy, drama. Questions: Can we leave disks open and add new videos as they are produced? We would have a large number of chapters on one disk. Are there any limmits to No. of Menus/ items per menu? We would appreciate any views on the above
Aleck. Chairman, Wave at Long Eaton video club

[redwudz]

You really can't leave a DVD 'open'. But what you could do is encode them seperately to DVD compliant MPEG-2 format with audio and put those on DVD RW discs just as video files.

Then you can add the MPEGs as you go. When you have them all prepared, then author your videos to regular DVD discs, adding videos from the RW discs as wanted and then creating menus and burning the DVDs. Or you can just leave them all on a hard drive after encoding and make up your DVDs from those.

I don't remember exactly how many chapters you can have, (100, I think) but probably more than enough.