[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 01:09:23PM -0400, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > > My mother wants to take all her tapes of my childhood and my brother's
> > > and put them on a preserved format.  She was originally thinking of
> > > DVD-R, but she has too old of a Mac to make this cost effective at the
> > > moment (9600/233)
> > >
> > > She'd like to know the easiest and cheapest way of preserving these
> > > dying videos on either the Mac or the PC.
> > >
> > > She was looking at the CD Video Recorder on www.terapintech.com, but I
> > > was wondering what disadvantages or advantages this held since I am not
> > > a video person.
> >
> > Gah, that's expensive.  If all you want is video CDs, then could you just
> > buy her a CD-RW drive and something like the Miro DC-30.  The pair of items
> > shouldn't cost more than about $200 together, plus more hard drive space
> > will be needed.
> 
> I would get a used ATI TV Wonder and compress with DivX.  You get DVD
> quality full-length on a CD.  More than a couple of hours of VHS on a CD
> with no loss.

The TV shows I've downloaded in Divx were certainly far better than VCD
quality.  They were also better than rented too many times VHS quality.  They
weren't brandnew, master grade tape VHS quality though.  And those TV shows
started with an excelent image quality.  Divx deals with bad image qualities,
really badly.

Andrew, my recommendation, get her something like a Miro DC-30 (or whoever
it was that sells the DC-30 instead of Miro now), and start playing with
archival methods till you find something satisfactory.  I say the DC-30
because it is a good pro quality board, but it is less finiky and more use
friendly than say the Truevision Targa boards.  Then, see how well she likes
sample Divx CDs, VCDs, etc.

I do recommend finding a way to make top notch digital back ups so that when
you can afford DVDs, or whatever you can dump video to them, or also be able
to make actual video tapes as well.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd