Advice on archiving videos

[niritav]

Here's a complicated question - not technically, though.
My 43-year-old brother is mildly autistic (Asperger Syndrome). He enjoys watching his video cassettes many hours a day. I'm switching him to DVD, since VCR is a dying technology. I have Studio, a Dazzle (170, I think), etc. Right now I'm fine with burning DVD's, but would like to archive my captured videos so that, say, 5 years down the road when a new technology comes on I won't have to spend hundred of hours capturing. Should I store captures as AVI's, MPG's, DivX, etc., or is there a technology to "read back" DVD files (i.e., what's on the Video-TS folder)? As you can see, I'm not an expert.
Any advice / experience would be greatly appreciated.

[redwudz]

If your DVDs are as good of quality as your VHS tapes, you've done about all you can. VHS is not generally that great of quality to start with. Sometimes a bit of light filtering might make some improvement in their appearance.

What I'm getting at is even with Blu-ray and newer technologies, if you are still using the same source, for example a VHS tape, it won't likely look any better. And if you wanted to do it over five years from now, the tapes will be more deteriorated and VHS players will be a lot harder to come by. For the best transfers at present, you need a good VHS deck, probably a TBC for stabilization, maybe a proc amp for color, tint, etc. correction, and decent conversion hardware/software.

A couple of options are to use a DVD recorder from your VHS player, or use a DV camera with passthrough or a external DV converter to DV-AVI format. The DV route is better if you need to do lots of filtering, editing. But it will also require a lot more processing time.

DVDs are a digital format, just numbers. You can 'read back' or copy a VIDEO_TS folder directly if you want, from a unencrypted DVD to your hard drive or to another DVD. If you wanted to filter it or make other changes, then you would have to extract it, work on it, then re-encode it. That will give you quality losses.

And sorry, the answer can also be complicated.

[niritav]

Hi redwudz,

Thanks for the fast reply!
I'm not worried about the quality - it's decent, and we're talking about cartoons and kids' movies, mainly, most of which weren't on high quality on the video tapes, which never seemed to bother him... Autistic/Asperger people simply enjoy watching the same things over and over again. Actually, I'm not allowed to edit or filter anything, because any change in what he's used to disturbs him.
What I would like to do is store everything on an external hard drive, so that I'll be able to re-burn all these movies again one day when technology changes, and I'm trying to figure out which format would be best from the following perspectives: size on hard drive, compatibility with "future software", and mainly - preserving whatever quality I have now.

NiritAV

[redwudz]

It depends on how much running time your videos have total and how much space you have on the hard drive. I would look into Divx or Xvid format. X264 is more compact, but Divx/Xvid is playable on many settop players where X264 is not as common. And it doesn't take up much space. The quality should be fine for the video quality you have.

Xvid videos off the net are commonly about 700MB per movie. You could up the bitrate a little and make them about 800 - 900MBs and they should be very close in quality to your VHS tapes, but take up a lot less space. With a external 300 -500GB hard drive, you can get quite a few hours of video on the drive.

You could encode one to Xvid and see how it looks.

That's just one suggestion.

[niritav]

Thanks again, redwudz.
One more question, if you don't mind: could you rate, by quality, divX, mpg, and vob (i.e., the folders created on the DVD itself)?
NiritAV trying to learn stuff late in life...

[Krispy Kritter]

The difference isn't in quality, but size. Assuming the same level of quality, file size (from smallest to largest) would be Divx, mpg2, mpg.

Note that vob files are containers which include mpeg2 video and audio which meet the dvd spec.

[tug_hill2]

Hello Niritav, I'm doing something similar...! I capture from VHS tapes to uncompressed DV files. I then take the uncompressed DV file and use Vegas Video to make the mpg-2 files. Then burn to DVD.

After all is done - I save all of the uncompressed DV files to a hard drive that I use for storage. If a new playing format comes along, all I need do is to process the saved uncompressed DV file and I'm all set to go.

I did this when mpeg-1 files were the dominant form for vcd discs , then converted everything once again to mpeg-2 format to make DVDs.

Hope this helps...!

Also, Uncompressed DV files are HUGE, I keep mine on 250GB hard drives and currently have dozens of them.

Tug_hill2.

[niritav]

Hi Krispy Kritter and tug_hill2,

Thanks a lot! I think I'm pretty set to go (got a 500 Gb drive... and lots of patience). I have about 80 tapes to convert!

NiritAV