Newbie VHS, DVD, Hd DVR To hard drive

[cougs_83]

Hello all I am new to the forum, and new at attempting to capture video. I have quite a few questions hopefully someone can help me out.

I would like to be able to transfer all of my video from VHS, DVD, And my HD DVR onto a hard drive to store everything. If possible, I would like to be able to play from the hard drive directly, and burn back up DVD's in HD to store in case of Hard Drive failure or other issue. From everything that I can Gather there are multiple steps that I would have to take in order to make this work. I have an x box 360, which I believe can be used as a media center to play the files. But from my understanding this is fairly difficult and the 360 is not compatible with many file types. I have been looking into the HDD HD media players. But it seems like many of them come with a hard drive, or can except a hard drive of 500GB. I would like to store everything on the drive, I would like to get one that is at least 1 TB preferably 1.5 TB. Also I have been looking into HD video capture cards to capture video to my hard drive. Would I need Software to rip DVD's if I have a capture card? Sorry there are so many questions. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Oh also I am looking to build a PC specifically to do the things that I listed with the best quality possible. So please let me know any recommendations.

[jameshgross]

See guides on left <---

[yoda313]

http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/support/xbox360/digitalmedia/videoplaybackfaq.htm

There is a good place to start for what type of files the xbox 360 can playback. If you convert to wmv it is nearly guarenteed to play it. Though if you want 5.1 audio be sure to convert to wma with the professional audio 10 codec (available if you download windows media encoder 9 or windows media player 11).


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As far as external devices I do have an alternative for you. You don't need a special media player device. All you have to do is format your harddrive to the mac format hfs. Then it can be read on the xbox 360 with no file size limitations.

Of course you can already do that for free by converting to fat32. However you are limited to files less than 4gb in size. Also I think you need a special fat32 formatting tool for drives larger than a 120gb or so.

But you can buy a program called macdrive 7 (50.00 usd) and you can do it on a pc. I have this and it works just fine. I was able to transfer a 6gb divx file with 5.1 audio and it plays perfectly on the 360.

However if you want to go a media player route you can look into the western digital media player. It hooks up directly to a tv by hdmi. Then you can connect any external harddrive to it (it can even read normal ntfs drives). I think it goes for about 150.00 new.

So there are many options for you.