Suggest effective and economic ways to author and store VHS videos

[Plsave]

As we speak, we have been using an off the shelf DVD Recorder and digitizing our videos in VHS(PAL / NTSC and the like formats).

But the problem we face is storage firstly and secondly cannot make them easy to download for others in the group.

The content that comes out digitized is about 4.7 GB (per disc the normal size that a DVD comes with). We have about 1000s of hours of footage we are trying to archive and store for posterity. Please do recommend the best possible way to store this after conversion for later use.

The second issue at hand is that these DVDs generated out of the off the shelf recorders come with four folders and if we were to expose them to be downloaded by others, I guess as we understand it would not be manageable to begin with and gets cumbersome. We would like to see if we can generate one file that can hold all the information that DVD is generated with.

Any help is appreciated.

Regards.

[BJ_M]

a real time H264 encoder is what you need - vitec and others have them ... not cheap though ...

much cheaper would be a real time QT encoder .. problem is that you would still have to either store the data on disks manually - or on hard drives instead ..

as for your current dvd solution - you should ALWAYS be sending a iso image file of the disk -- not just the folders ... (iMO) --

i guess playback would dictate on how you want to store the media ... or is it size ?

[lordsmurf]

Depending on circumstances, you may do better to just mail DVDs. Bandwidth costs are easily more expensive than stamps.