Archiving Video

[zed]

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but does anyone have any suggestions on archiving videos you've recorded (using GB-PVR, of course)? My disks are approaching full and I'd like to save the video files off to DVD. I don't care about making them into real playable DVD's, just some way to store them on DVDs in a more compact format. What would be a good format to convert them to? WMA? Divx? MPEG4? What would be a good tool (freeware preferred)? I can tolerate some loss of quality but would like to have something better than VHS quality. Most of them were recorded at the High Quality setting and are about 2G/30min. Any suggestions or pointers to more info would be appreciated...

[Athlon1000]

A cool plugin would be this:

Say you got an external harddrive (USB2/FW) at what ever size you like. You plug it in to your GB-PVR box, chooses "Archive data" in the main menu, gets presented a menu with your GB-PVR data folders specified in the config, marks the folders to archieve and click OK and the backup process starts. Don't know if it's doable but it would kick ass =)

This way you don't need to re-encode the video files since a 200GB external HDD isn't that expensive these days. And when the backup process finishes you can disconnect the external drive and put it under your bed for safe storing =)

You just setup the drive mapping in the plugin config and specifies wheter existing data should be overwritten or left alone.

[colin]

zed,

at the bitrate you are recording at you could transcode the captures to a smaller mpg file size without loosing too much in quality. Alternatives, whilst still maintaining mpg format, would be to re-encode using something quenc (freeware encoder) combined with something avisynth with a couple of well chosen filters will reduce the file size nicely and maintain mpg format.

That way if you do store to DVD you could create playable DVD's or as Athlon1000 sugests, using an external storage device.

Go to forum.doom9.org and have a look at the quenc thread under "Other Mpeg 1/2 encoder". Nic has done a great job on quenc,

cheers,
Colin.

[reven]

encode them in xvid, its much better than divx and you can get hdtv quality at 350megs per 42ish mins. every tv show online (high quality versions) are recording in xvid with a file size roughly or 350megs. there wont be much if any quality loss. might take a couple of hours per hour thou, depending on your cpu. anything over 2.6ghz should be able to encoding around 25fps. the amd cpus are slower at this.