Archiving dvd's

[Gooch]

Hello all,

I'm currently busy transfering about 350 soccer matches from VHS to DVD using the LG DVD recorder with a 250Gb drive. I record onto the hard drive first, as each video tape contains multiple games and I'm often putting one game per DVD to preserve what little quality there is (the original recordings were in SLP). I then record from hard drive to DVD.

The bottleneck in the process is dubbing to DVD, which requires manual intervention - putting in a blank DVD, recording, and finalizing, a process which altogether takes about ten minutes.

Anyway, I'm resigned to doing that.

But after I have everything digitized on DVD, eventually, I'd like to archive (and index) it all on hard drives. My question is: What is the best way to record hundreds of DVD's onto a hard drive? Are there DVD drives that take in multiple discs to decrease the amount of manual intervention?

Oh, and why am I not going directly to hard drives now? Well, I just couldn't find software that made things as simple and worked as reliably as the DVD recorder. I figure if I did the job a year or two from now, I would be going straight to hard drives.

[Gooch]

Guys, no help? Was it such a poor question?

[CrayonEater]

I see a few problems with your proposal, though it is probably for the better that you are recording to DVD, assuming you are using quality media. The thing is, if you want to archive everything to HD, understand that your HD probably won't last. That's why few people use them for backups/archiving, not for long-term archives anyway. Even then, you need to have a rotation plan so that one HD is installed in a machine, another serves as a backup and, preferably, is connected only as needed, and, perhaps, a third is kept off-premises in case of flood, fire, etc. In other words, HD rotations aren't exactly for the faint of heart or for those who aren't willing to spend a bit of dough. By contrast, with DVDs, you can simply make a second copy of each DVD (preferably on high-quality media, and a different brand from the original). Then you just keep the copies (I call them the "backup set" or "archive set") in a cool, dry, safe storage. If the "active set" (the ones you actually use) is occasionally monitored for degradation - if you start seeing problems, you immediately discard the "active set" and make a backup of your high-quality, "backup set" (the stuff on the high-quality media) and then use that as the new "active set".

If you just want to have an HD full of soccer matches, the best method for getting it onto your HD is to simply copy it from the DVDs, putting each DVD into a separate directory. Although DVD-ROM drive Changers do exist, they are expensive, very hard to get, and don't do the copying automatically so they really don't save you much time. It might help to have two DVD drives so that you can load one while the other is copying. That's about as fast as you're gonna get.

Also, keep in mind that you may need more than one HD to back up what you are trying to back up, I'm guesstimating from what you are saying here. 250 Gb doesn't go very far these days; that's only about 50 DVDs. If each match is 1 DVD then you are looking at needing six more HDs. Now, you *could* use a Divx capture card and capture directly to HD - Divx/xvid take about half the space DVD video does for the same quality, but you may need an appreciable investment in hardware, and worse, time, if you've already converted a considerable amount of your VHS collection to DVD.

[mattypj]

Maby you shoud just wait for the blue ray dvd's to come in to the right price range, that could take another year or so but it would be well worth backing all your games up on about 20 blue ray discs rather than 300 of the current dvds. You could fit 12 games on a 50 gig blue ray dics asuming that all your games would normaly take up 4 gig on a current dvd.

This would mean that you capture the games on to your computer, when you have 50 gig of games you transfere them to a blue ray dvd.

However as i said you may need to wait a while to do this otherwise it will be very expensive.

Ps, By the way, I love your user name, I wish i had of thought of it first!