[Marc D Carra]

I'm just curious as to how everyone stores thier archived HD recordings? There's three options that come to mind, all with their own advantages and disadvantages:



DVHS (advantages- easily viewable, cheap enough - disadvantages- fragile tape, takes lots of space if you have many tapes)


Hard Drive (advantages -easily viewable with the right setup, multiple recordings can fit on one drive - disadvantage- EXPENSIVE)


DVDR (advantages- really really cheap, takes up little space - disadvatages- takes time to burn recordings, takes time to restore back to hard drive)


I'm primarily using DVDR right now. I've got probably 1000 discs stored in binders. They are hard to sort this way when you add another title so I'm thinking of making custom DVD covers using existing cover artwork and adding a "HD Recording" banner on the spine and cover. Then I can put the DVDRs (maybe 3 or 4 per movie) in a little ziplock sandwich bag and store them in their corresponding case. It would make sorting alot easier and when someone comes by to watch an HD movie, they could browse through the DVD cases. Of course then it takes 10 or 15 minutes to copy the discs over to the PC for viewing... I can't wait for Blue Ray!


Marc.

 

[GaryHDTV]

I'm also using DVDR. You forgot to mention the best advantage of doing so... reliability.


Gary

 

[Marc D Carra]

Yes, that's exactly what scares me about hard drive storage. If the drive goes bad, you lose ALL of the recordings. If a DVDR disc goes bad, you only lose part of a single movie.


Marc.

 

[PVR]

Piles of hard drives in trays. Convenience won out for me.

 

[dahester]

I'm using piles of hard drives in trays, but I'm starting to see one drive show the S.M.A.R.T. alert. That got me thinking, "It's time for real backup". So now I'm migrating to DVD-R.


If you are not using NullPacketStripper, you should be. Some of my recordings shrink by 45% with no quality loss. I use 890MB file partitions. 5 files can go on a 4.7 GB disc. 9 files should fit on a dual layered 8.5 GB disc.


Does anyone load up 2 or 3 DVD-ROM trays and play directly from the discs? If so, what's your system configuration? Can you cue up the discs in a playlist?

 

[Marc D Carra]

Yes, I have 2 DVDROM drives in my system. I can stream directly from DVDR and playback is fine.



Marc.

 

[aaronwt]

3.5 Terabytes of hard drive space for my HiPix recordings.

 

[shah8]

Hard drives are a great short to medium term storage, and they can work well for moving HD from one place to another and have it immediately viewable...


DVDrs here. May not have 1000, but I have serialized (so I can find whatever, whenever) all of my disks, and I'm up to 556 disks. Got a long way to go before I can be certified as pathological.


Darius

 

[nabsltd]

Quote:

Originally posted by Marc D Carra DVDR (advantages- really really cheap, takes up little space - disadvatages- takes time to burn recordings, takes time to restore back to hard drive)

There really isn't any reason to restore back to the hard drive except for more edits. A DVD-ROM at 2x can handle an HDTV bitstream, so a 10x drive will have no trouble.

Quote:

Originally posted by dahester If you are not using NullPacketStripper, you should be. Some of my recordings shrink by 45% with no quality loss. I use 890MB file partitions. 5 files can go on a 4.7 GB disc. 9 files should fit on a dual layered 8.5 GB disc.

I edit out commercials, but I have less than 5% of packets being "null" (in one form or another) on CBS, NBC, and Fox. All three have the solitary sub-channel and use at least 18Mbps for the MPEG video plus AC-3 audio data.

 

[Johnny Begood]

At the beginning I was only using hard drives. Then as I almost never come back to something I've seen once, I switch to DVDRs backup.


I did it with zipped files but since the creation of the terrific NullPacketStripper utility there is almost no use to zip (in fact zip does a little better than NullPacketStripper but not a big difference).


Plus the new DVD-DL format coming, you will soon be able to put some short movie on one disk.

Quote:

Originally posted by Marc D Carra Yes, I have 2 DVDROM drives in my system. I can stream directly from DVDR and playback is fine. Marc.

Which system have you ?


I've got a MyHD card and I never succeeded in using several DVD-ROM to watch a movie from several DVDR.


J.

 

[DAVE2]

what are you recording in hd to have 1,000 half hour dvdr's in HD?do you have a dish 5000 with modulator? or are you just archiveing OTA?


I don't know about myhd cards but with the fusion cards you just edit the tpl file to indicate multiple drives with the multiple files of the one movie/show.


dave

 

[KevinYee]

Lots and lots of drives loaded in the Inclose trays.


I also have about 500-600 burned to DVDR. The shows that I know I'll never watch I burn to DVDR. If there's a remote chance I'll want to watch it, then I leave it on harddrive.


I do have a DVHS player, but I only use it to copy tapes to harddrives. I don't use it as an archive medium.

 

[Marc D Carra]

Quote:

DVDrs here. May not have 1000, but I have serialized (so I can find whatever, whenever) all of my disks, and I'm up to 556 disks. Got a long way to go before I can be certified as pathological.

Darius, you sound like my girlfriend. She thinks I'm nuts recording all this HD, until one of her friends comes over to watch a movie, and DVD suddenly isn't good enough for them



Quote:

Which system have you ?

I'm using a P4 2Ghz system. Nothing special. I should point out that, altough I can stream from the DVDROM drives, I have to manually select then next drive, once a disk is done.



Quote:

what are you recording in hd to have 1,000 half hour dvdr's in HD?do you have a dish 5000 with modulator? or are you just archiveing OTA?

I'm have a Dish 5000 with mod, A DBV PC satellite card using TSreader, and two 169time recording systems (one for Bell and one for Dishnet). Come to think of it, maybe I am nuts.



I just tried NullPacketStripper, and it works great on HBO/Showtime stuff shrinking the files to nearly half the size. HDNET Movies though, are only reduced by less than 10%. Why the drastic difference?





Marc.

 

[jsjames]

Mine are on hard drives and DVHS tape for now.

I'd like to start archiving to DVDR, what brand of DVD-Rs have you had the most success with and what deals. Actually, maybe this should be in another thread.

 

[shah8]

HDNet Movies have a higher bitrate, so their movies have fewer null packets to strip.


If a very old HBO transfer shows up, try nullpacketstripper on one of those...they have *very* low bitrates...then the difference between 19.4MB/s CBR and 10.8MB/s or 14MB/s VBR can get pretty large.


HDNet is probably something larger...


Darius


Brand matters when you are trying to back up a dvd or otherwise burning a dvd video disk. Almost all non-fraudulent dvdr blanks will store data and stay good no matter what. The big guys of this kind of thing generally use some standard brand, use Nero with multi off with DAO on.

 

[HiDefDon]

My HTPC has 520GB worth of disk space. I remove commercials and then archive to DVD-R media. I tried NullPacketStripper on my home PC and it reduced file sizes by only ~10%. My HTPC does not have an internet connection and NullPacketStripper would not install there. For me, the 10% is not really worth the extra step anyway since 10% generally will not reduce the number of required DVDs/movie.


I am storing the disks in binders with ~150 disks in my collection now.


I too, an waiting for Blu-Ray DVDs.


DonP

 

[cpalmer2k]

what's the best way of edting commercials out of recorded HD programs assuming you have the .ts files on your hard drive (copied from D-VHS)?

 

[bpearse]

OK, I am the oddball here. I have about 60 movies still on Digital-8 tape (remember DVTransfer, anyone?) and another 30 or so on DVHS. Never used DVDR, although I do have a recordable drive.


And now, to show my ignorance, where do I find NullPacketStripper? Odd thing, I just did a search for that term, cutting cut and paste to take it exactly as mentioned here, and I find no results! I know it is listed right here in this thread, but seach will not find it.


EDIT:

=====


OK, Google'd it and found it. That is the slickest utility since DVHSTools and DVTransfer.


bob

 

[Kipp Jones]

Three D-VHS and one AVHDD.

 

[Carl Romanik]

Count me as another oddball. I've been using DDS3 and DDS4 tapes and a simple back-up utility called "Ultra-bac".


Advantages: media has been cheaper and more compact than hard drives (it may be about equal now). "Near" real-time playback with no interruptions. Higher reliablility than DVHS tapes.


Dis-advantages: It's tape, so there are still tape-related failures (they're a bit fragile). There is a significant up-front cost (DDS4-capable tape drive plus SCSI card).