DVD Burning Mod or Standalone DVD Burner

[jradi]

Looking for comments on what I'm planning - here are my thoughts:

I'm not a computer light weight, but I'm hesitant to mess around with my sage setup since its been working so well since I set it up - and lately I've been a little pressed for time and lazy.

I looked at the instructions for installing the DVD Burning Mod and it looks intense.

I've been thinking of buying a standalone DVD burner that can fit up to 8 hours of video on a single dvd (I'm assuming using Divx or some ultra compressed format). I was thinking I could just que up 6-8 hours of video and press record - overnight I'd have a full disc.

The alternative, DVD Burning Mod, sounds like it would take a long time to encode the video in the right format - and then I could only get 2-3 hours of video on a disc. That would take me twice as long to archive shows onto dvd.

What do you think? Anyone try something similar with a standalone dvd recorder??

[jradi]

While I have your attention, I have another question somewhat related.

If I go the standalone dvd recorder method (which is what I'm leaning towards), does anyone have a way to queu up a series of videos?

I read in the manual that if I had imported videos I can create a playlist of sorts, but i don't see a way to do it in the "SageTV Recordings" menu.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by jradi

I read in the manual that if I had imported videos I can create a playlist of sorts, but i don't see a way to do it in the "SageTV Recordings" menu.

Does this question still deal with a list of videos to put on a DVD, or just creating playlists inside SageTV? For playlists: v5.0 only has a video playlist for imported videos; the next version has full playlist support for imported videos and recordings.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

If you're thinking of using the DVD Burning Mod for SageTV, then you must have a DVD burner in your computer. So why would you need an external DVD recording appliance? Chances are your computer or DVD burner came bundled with some DVD burning software. Why not give that a try? Most such apps have some way of compressing/combining several video files into a project for burning onto a single disc.

If not, you can probably buy a retail DVD authoring app for less than you'd pay for a standalone recorder.

[jradi]

Thanks for the info on the next version of sage.

As for the standalone v dvd burner. Currently my setup doesn't have a dvd burner - so I'm debating between buying an internal burner or a standalone device.

I've played the videos in windows media player and I noticed they don't fit the screen very well - lots of black space around them. I'm guessing sage does something when playing back videos to ensure it fills the whole screen. This problem keeps me from being able to use 3rd party software to author my own dvd full of videos so far as I know.

Cost isn't the overidding issue, neither is an elegant solution or end quality of the archive - I'm looking for something that is quick and easy to do - requiring the least input and time on my behalf. I haven't given up on DVD Burning Mod - I just want a comparison before I consider one route over the other...

I like the handsoff-ness of a standalone player that can compress 8 hrs onto a single dvd. Maybe once the next version of sage comes out it might be a viable solution...

[evilpenguin]

I just thought i'd chime in here for a second.

a) When the standalone player says it can get 8 hours on a DVD (i'm fairly sure) it's talking about 8 hours of the lowest quality video you can imagine. Its not divx or anything fancy like that, it's just really lowbitrate mpegs.

b) Setting up the dvd burning plugin isn't really as intense as it looks; the step by step with the pitures really does a good job of explaining things. And if you do have some problems i'm always more than happy to help out if you post in the thread.

c) As for the least amount of input I think the plugin wins there too. You can queue up as many dvd's as you've got disk space to hold them (plus a little overhead for temporary files) and your computer will just crank away in the background. So pretty much you could select the videos to make x number of dvd's before bed and, depending on how much re-encoding the plug-in needs to do, they could all be ready to burn the next morning (thats how I do it).

d) As for the speed if you recorded your videos in a DVD provile (DVD standard, DVD Long, etc.) then more likely than not the plugin won't need to re-encode them so your looking at about 5 minutes per show. If for some reason the plugin does need to re-encode them then you can prolly expect about real time speeds on anything faster than a 1.4 ghz PC.

Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions

[jradi]

Thanks evilpenguin! That's exactly the kind of break down I was hoping to find. You've convinced me to go the cheaper (and from the sound of it) easier solution - looks like a winner on all counts.

Thanks again!

-john