Storing movies on hard drive. Format?

[willgill]

My hobby (other than Sage tinkering) is home video making. Thus far I've been making edited DVD's out of the Digital8 raw footage. I've been printing labels on the DVDs, making DVD cases, the whole shabang.

Two issues, first, these DVDs are beginning to take up space. Second, home-burned DVDs don't last forever. I want to compress them into some format and put them onto a hard drive on the network.

Does anyone have any tips? Which format to use.. WMV? MP4? Other? I want something that SageTV plays well.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by willgill

My hobby (other than Sage tinkering) is home video making. Thus far I've been making edited DVD's out of the Digital8 raw footage. I've been printing labels on the DVDs, making DVD cases, the whole shabang.

Two issues, first, these DVDs are beginning to take up space. Second, home-burned DVDs don't last forever. I want to compress them into some format and put them onto a hard drive on the network.

Does anyone have any tips? Which format to use.. WMV? MP4? Other? I want something that SageTV plays well.

I use Divx compressed using Dr. Divx. I have about 520 movies stored across 4 200g drives.

[stanger89]

IMO VC-1 (WM9) or H.264 are the only formats I'd consider encoding into. These are the codecs of the future (being used in IPTV, Satellite, and HD DVD/Blu-ray). They're also the most efficient codecs out there.

[ChePazzo]

HDD space is realtively cheap. Photos/home video is something that can never be replaced if lost, so I am pretty paranoid. Every photo that I have taken since 1999 as well as all home video is stored in native format in 3 or 4 different locations. The only changes I make are to change filename or to chop video into clips (from back when my camera recorded to tape). Other than that, I keep it in the format in which it was recorded and I keep a few copies). This way, as technology advances, I can always encode those originals to the latest and best formats.

I take some of my home video and save it as MPEG2 8Mpbs vbr for playback on my MVPs. This also makes it easy to create DVDs from them, but I would never consider them the master copy.

I would suggest, reguardless of what format you use to store stuff on the server, getting some HDD and using RAID to protect the data and keeping the raw unconverted unedited data there.

[willgill]

I think I'm going to go H.246. When I encode to WMV 9 and play it back in SageTV, it crashes. Maybe "crash" isn't accurate, it actually reboots my computer. .. no BSOD or anything, just hard reboot.

I share the sentiments about home video footage, but storing in DV format would take.. I can't imagine how much space. I think I'm going to keep editing my videos and putting them in DVD format. I'll also output to H.246 and store on the hard drive. Then I'll have 3 versions, tape, DVD and H.246 on a RAID mirrored NAS. I also decided to go with half-thickness DVD cases. I think I may even ditch that for just a zippered DVD storage binder.

[Trike]

Got a question, I want to take all my old movies, (commercial and homemade) and put them on hard drive storage to reduce the shelf space demands and have them in safer storage then old VHS tapes that are fragile and easily damaged. Can anyone suggest best way to transfer the data to storage and what I'd need to get in the way of software and equipment to do this for some 300 movies. I also have another 100 DVD's I like to convert to the drives for storage as well. Last question, what is the best way to play back this data into a TV for viewing.?
Trike

[tahoetim]

We just bought a magnavox zv-427mg9 vhs-to-dvd burner for $150. My wife is burning each vhs tape to a dvd. I am then ripping her dvd's into the hard drive for viewing. We are putting the dvds into a safe place. After we get all of our 16 years of home movies converted, we plan to pass the unit around to family members.

You stick in your tape, a blank dvd, and push "dubbing". that's it.

[KarylFStein]

I did this a while ago with all my VHS tapes. I connected the VCR to a Hauppauge (150, 250, or 500--I forget, but it is important for commercial tapes as I'll explain below), set up SageTV to use Channel 1 for the composite input on the card, then did a manual recording on Channel 1 to get an MPG file. Then I cut the leading and trailing space out with VideoReDo, used DVDStyler to author the DVD (and be able to put say 4 episodes of Dora the Explorer on a DVD), and burned with ImageBurn. There's probably an easier way, but it was just a one time thing.

One problem I had with some commercial tapes is they had copy protection on them. Only one of my Hauppauge cards worked--the others would get a few seconds of the video and then record a blank screen. I *think* it was the 250 that did it. So, if you're dumping commercial tapes, make sure whatever hardware you use will not choke on copy protection. The commercial things I wanted to keep like Disney movies I got on DVD anyway, but some things I had weren't on DVD, or were only going to interest my kids for another year or so and are long gone now.