Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow’s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.

I will have to use a PC with connected display for playback as is. It would be so nice to serve it up to a HDM player with its connected display on the network.

It is worthwhile, IMO, re-watching this production by Ken Burns! Applause! :)

Edit: captured it all. 124 GB total but can be trimmed a little bit -- often did not manually stop a given night's show.

I thought it amazing, though I am resigned to purging it off my HD DVR after I rewatch it.

I think a backup USB hard drive is the best and cheapest way for now.

It won't show up on HD DVD or Blu-ray for a couple years, the DVD set is available now.

Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow’s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.

I will have to use a PC with connected display for playback as is. It would be so nice to serve it up to a HDM player with its connected display on the network.

It is worthwhile, IMO, re-watching this production by Ken Burns! Applause! :)

If you really want to archive this, besides a HDD that can be played by a PC or perhaps by a PS3/XBOX360, one option would be BD-R 25GB @$10 (or if you're really into long term archival and money is no object, a DL BD-R @$30).

Assuming the mpeg2 streams are in the clear, there are apps that can create BDMV authoring on BD-R/BD-RE. Your collection will fit on 3 DL 50GB BD-Rs for $150, or 6 25GB BD-R @$60. Your other option is 16 8.4GB DL DVD-R for $32 (DL DVD-R are about $2 each) or 32 4.7GB DVD-R for about $8 (25c a DVD-R disk).

Its broken into specific chapter segments that should fit on DL DVD-Rs.

thats probably your best best as you probably have a DL DVD burner in a recent PC.

Or you could go the BD -R route if you pony up for that hardware and the media.

If you really want to archive this, besides a HDD that can be played by a PC or perhaps by a PS3/XBOX360, one option would be BD-R 25GB @$10 (or if you're really into long term archival and money is no object, a DL BD-R @$30).

Assuming the mpeg2 streams are in the clear, there are apps that can create BDMV authoring on BD-R/BD-RE. Your collection will fit on 3 DL 50GB BD-Rs for $150, or 6 25GB BD-R @$60. Your other option is 16 8.4GB DL DVD-R for $32 (DL DVD-R are about $2 each) or 32 4.7GB DVD-R for about $8 (25c a DVD-R disk).

An HDM disk would be a bit more portable, however a $100 500GB external HDD would be much cheaper, easier, and faster than some of those options.

An HDM disk would be a bit more portable, however a $100 500GB external HDD would be much cheaper, easier, and faster than some of those options.

If you are playing this on a PC or maybe a PS3 (don't know about xbox360 playing .ts files), then a USB-HDD will work fine.

If all you have is a BD or HD DVD player, optical disks would allow you to play them as their 'native' HDM disk. (The software can be tricky on both sides --- if you are comfortable with the authoring, you'd be comfortable with hooking up a PC anyway to your HT).

Alternately, there are $300-$400 HDD-based highdef media players that spit out HD over component video. All you do is copy the files onto the HDD on the mediaplayer's HDD and it will play.

It doesn't solve the longer term archival issue of getting more captured/camcorder content unless you're prepared to keep buying USB HDDs. I'm up to over 4TB of USB-HDD, half of that in a series of NAS boxes like these :
http://www.hi-techreviews.com/reviews_2006/Vantec_NAS/NAS.gif (these things are stackable and work with 500GB HDDs) FS is fat32, so limit of 4Gb is max-size for each file.

Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow’s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.

I will have to use a PC with connected display for playback as is. It would be so nice to serve it up to a HDM player with its connected display on the network.

It is worthwhile, IMO, re-watching this production by Ken Burns! Applause! :)

Ever notice how Burns documentaries are 50% about what the subject matter is supposed to be about,and 50% about American black/white segregation? Give or take 20%. Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, WWII. Think about it and...discuss.

Ever notice how Burns documentaries are 50% about what the subject matter is supposed to be about,and 50% about American black/white segregation? Give or take 20%. Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, WWII. Think about it and...discuss.

Isn't that integral to all of the subjects? Or are you saying he should downplay or omit that aspect of the subject?

Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow’s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.

I will have to use a PC with connected display for playback as is. It would be so nice to serve it up to a HDM player with its connected display on the network.

It is worthwhile, IMO, re-watching this production by Ken Burns! Applause! :)
I would buy an external SATA-HDD enclosure with USB2 and/or Firewire interface, which allows you to change the HDD conveniently, like this one: http://www.raidsonic.de/de/pages/products/external_cases.php?we_objectID=3748 (sorry, page in german, but I think you'll find a comparable one locally). This way you could replace HDDs easily and keep them like data "cartridges". There exist also mobile racks like the ICY BOX IB-169, for installation into desktop or tower computers.

D-vhs

D-vhs

+1

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.


If time is the issue then keep it on HDD. If not, consider D-VHS or even red laser DL DVD-9. (I'm told those can play on HD-DVD players if authorized correctly.)

Hard drive, no question. Most convienient and cheaper than anything except a truckload of DVD-Rs.

I am in the process of doing this by transcoding to h.264 video. The 2.5 hour episodes are about 15gb mpeg-2 files (actually dvr-ms media center files) and using a program called MCE Buddy after only 12-15 hours of pegging a core 2 duo at 95-100% utilization I wind up with an appx 2.5gb h.264 encoded 740p avi file. The 2 hour shows are slightly smaller (1.8gb), so I should be able to get 1 or 2 of the 7 episodes on each single layer DVD.

Picture quality so far has been near perfect and I can play them back on the TV hooked to my Pentium-D Media Center AND on my XBOX 360.:)

Your collection will fit on 3 DL 50GB BD-Rs for $150, or 6 25GB BD-R @$60. Your other option is 16 8.4GB DL DVD-R for $32 (DL DVD-R are about $2 each) or 32 4.7GB DVD-R for about $8 (25c a DVD-R disk).

It's amazing to think that were this actually available on HDM, it probably would cost $150, and $40 for the DVD set. Markup stinks.

Go Hard Drive...and maybe back it up to another Hard Drive or optical disc so you don't lose it.

Hard drive, no question. Most convienient and cheaper than anything except a truckload of DVD-Rs.

D-VHS tapes are pretty cheap if you already have a D-VHS deck. The decks can be obtained pretty cheap too on those auction sites.

Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow?s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

I'm thinking my time is valuable and keeping it as MPEG2 TS on a hard disk is worthwhile since that is so easy to do with a cheap external Hard Disc Drive with no extra labor on my part.

I will have to use a PC with connected display for playback as is. It would be so nice to serve it up to a HDM player with its connected display on the network.

It is worthwhile, IMO, re-watching this production by Ken Burns! Applause! :)

Too funny...I also have a MyHD and am planning to cap all the HD reruns.

I may make hd-dvds out of it...would take about 20 DL DVD-Rs...

Have you tried running null packet stripper to see if the TS files shrink any?

Chris

Have you tried running null packet stripper to see if the TS files shrink any?I've run that tool in the past but seem to recall it messes up seeking (chapter forward, etc) with playback using the MyHD MDP-130.

I saved mine to an External HDD that I used Macdrive 7 on. The Xbox 360 can read HFS+ formatted HDD's and has no file size limitations either (unlike Fat32, which is the only windows format it can read...no NTFS)

I saved them and converted to H264...the 360 plays them great (stereo only though)

any questions on how I did this, PM me.

If you don't need them in the .ts container, you could always compact them into a more efficient MPEG4 container with readily available software. Your file sizes will be significantly smaller than the space hogging MPEG2 transport streams. From what I saw, you're not losing all that much in compressing (if you don't overcompress) since so much of the material is old footage.

is there a way to convert my store bought DVD's into MPEG4 AVC?

Ken Burns, "The War" has been superb so far and MyHD capture card has done a great job so far in capturing 107GB of 1080i MPEG2 video and DD 5.1 audio. Now the question is, how to best archive it after tomorrow’s night final capture? Buy a cheapie HDD and external USB 2.0 kit to archive as is -- or go through the laborious effort of trimming and re-coding to a smaller amount of DL DVD-R's?

You might find these items useful.

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg64_usbtosataidebridge.htm
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg67_driveshields.htm

Stick that drive in a cheap silicon rubber drive shield, hook it up to the bridge, copy the data, then disconnect the drive from the bridge. You can reuse the bridge on other drives in the future. In this way you could use bare drives as large, semi-affordable storage media.

is there a way to convert my store bought DVD's into MPEG4 AVC?

This is slightly off topic for this thread. Legally, if the discs are NOT CSS protected, you can rip them and use any decent transcoder to convert them to AVC, WMV, VC-1, Xvid, etc. If you've got a media server, it totally makes sense to convert from MPEG2 to MPEG4, since MPEG4 is so much more space efficient.

I have a 500gb HDD hooked to my 360, can it read VOB files?

Ever notice how Burns documentaries are 50% about what the subject matter is supposed to be about,and 50% about American black/white segregation? Give or take 20%. Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, WWII. Think about it and...discuss.

I don't think the War was 50/50 on the subject, felt more like 80/20. And part of the reason why it did pop up is the documentary didn't focus just on the war, but specifically 4 towns that it affected. I think that's part of what made it a fresh take on the subject.