Techno housekeeping

[Richard]

Dear Colleagues,

 

I headed down to my apartment's storage unit in the bowels of my high-rise building and realized to my embarrassment that my locker space is almost full of porn dvd and vhs tapes. This is silly because I am devoting space to something I am not using. At one point, I thought that at least I should transfer the old vhs tapes to dvd and cut down on the volume that way. Now, however, at work, people store huge amounts of documents on fairly small solid state drives and that got me thinking.

 

The ability to transfer what might be (gulp) hundreds of tapes and dvds to a single system that I could search and connect to my television is very attractive to me. I am not interested in pulling a fast one with copyright. Once I did the transfer, I would dispose of the tapes and most of the dvds, freeing up lots of space in my storage space and my home.

 

Given the nature of the materials, I don't feel comfortable taking this to the local techno geek at Best Buy or asking one of the IT people at work.

 

Can anyone point me to the transfering porn for dummies guide or offer me some advice of what I would need to do? I have a VHS/DVD player that can transfer tapes to dvds, but admit I never made a transfer. I also have a computer of course. What else do I need in terms of equipment? Is the transfer moment by moment or can the copying process be sped up? Sorry, these questions reveal the depths of my ignorance of these matters.

 

Many thanks for any advice you can offfer.

[tealady]

i hope some one can help

i have the same problem

i use a MAC

T

[+ honcho]

I don't know of any VHS machines that play tapes in faster than real time, so that for them, you'll have to play through

all of the tapes for any system you use.

 

If Richard is satisfied with the quality of the transfer from tape to DVD, and his computer has a DVD reader

then he might not have to buy any other hardware (other than a large supply of Blank DVD+-R's) (or a smaller

supply of rewriteables if his player accepts those).

 

I am a mac user. I have two firewire camcorders that will let me hook either of them up to VHS or Beta player

and then pass the video directly into my mac. one's a sony, and one's a panasonic.

 

I'll have to tag this post and come back later to post the model numbers.

 

Otherwise, converters can be bought from the $200 to $4000 price range depending on how picky you

are about the conversion quality.

 

Firewire video (actually mini-dv video) consumes about 15 gigabytes an hour. You'll likely want to compress

that before putting it onto a hard drive.

 

A good program to have for the mac is Toast. You can create DVD's without committing them to plastic

and save the images directly to disk, and the mount them back as if they were DVD's.

 

You can also use it to *read* real DVD's and save the images.

 

Toast is made by the same company that does EZ-DVD creator; I don't know what the capabilities of the windows

version is, but I imagine it's not hard to find programs in the $100 range that will be equally useful.

 

I'll post more when I get home late tonight.

[Richard]

This is very helpful. I am grateful for the guidance.

 

I am willing to go through the vhs tapes to see which would be worth copying to dvd format. Assuming the quality of the dvd is not garbage when I am done, what I am really hoping for is an easy way to copy all those converted dvds and the dvds I bought to an external hard drive.

 

So, if I put the dvd into the dvd reader of my latop and the laptop is attached to the external drive, how complicated would it be to copy the dvd to the hard drive? I looked around a bit online and what sounds like giant capacity hard drives are not that expensive at all, say $140 on Amazon for a Seagate 3 TB. My goal would be to have my whole library all copied onto the external drive and then connected to my tv via one of its USB ports, as the cable box, and dvd player are.

 

To reduce clutter, I am willing to sink a few dollars for the hardware and software as long as it's more or less idiot-proof (me) and reliable.

 

Thanks so much.

 

Richard

[instudiocity]

For DVD to Hard Drive, I use MacTheRipper. It rips the DVD file to a video file on my computer. Then I use Toast to reduce the file size to an Quicktime movie and I'm done.

[gallahadesquire]

I don't know if Sony still makes them, but they used to make a VHS-DVD transfer machine. As noted above, however, it does it in real time. But you can stick a tape and DVD in the morning, finish the disk, take the tape and disk out. Rise and Repeat.

[+ honcho]

Hi Richard,

 

What instudiocity saying was that he doesn't need any additional hardware to copy the DVD's to a hardrive , just software and he

mentioned programs for the apple mac.

 

If you have a windows PC, I'm sure the are other programs, but I'm not as qualified to say which.

 

If the job that the VHS player/DVD burner combo does isn't sharp enough for your taste it could get expensive.

 

The're the pinaccle "dazzle" which will go directly between a vhs player and your computer for $80,

 

A plextor ConvertX PX-M402U for $160 retail,

 

bhphotovideo has some variants of the matrox MX02 that will do a low-end professional job , but for around $1000

 

 

I said I would look up the kind of camcorders I have (which would act like the plextor or pinnacle device -

One's a panasonic PV-GS250, and other is a sony TRV-25 (which were both pretty common in their day).

 

I noticed bhphotovideo had a used panasonic PV-GS320 which probably would have the same capabilities

(as well as being a dandy camcorder) for $320.

[rguer]

If you copy a DVD to a hard drive, does it preserve video "angles" and secondary audio, or does it throw them away? What programs know how to play back angles?

 

What about copy protection? When is that a concern with DVDs?

[+ honcho]

It depends on *how* you copy it. I think, on the mac, if you use Toast and image copy, it's going to do a bit-for-bit

copy of the DVD, so that it should preserve all the extras.

 

I'm not sure how the apple DVD player app deals with regions, etc. though.