RE: Video ripping question?

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

>
>any decent capture card should be able to do this,. I would recommend
the
>pinnacle cards only because ive used them for years and like them.  The
>problem your going to have is diskspace. for a similar quality than
your
>tapes your going to be looking at between 4 to 6 megabytes a second.
>(depending on codecs FPS etc) which would equate to somewhere around
20gb
>per hour, add up all your tapes and times by that and your probably
pretty
>close to needing a terabyte or two,.  Best way may be to wait till the
>DVD-ROM drives come down a little.
>regards,
>
>

Hmmm... I had been concerned about file sizes, but I had to admit I hadn't
anticipated the kind of numbers you're talking about here, which would
obviously make the whole excercise impossible!

Surely there are decent compression codecs available that can yield VHS
quality results in a manageable file size? - TIVO boxes claim up to 40
hours
in "low quality" mode on a 30GB disk - their definition of
"low quality"
being being akin to VHS in LP mode, which presumably should equate to about
20 hours on 30GB in VHS in SP quality?

20 hours video on 30GB of disk, I could handle!! - DVD's hold (I believe)
up
to about 3 hours on a single-side-single-layer disk, do they not? (4.7GB
per
recording layer is DVD capacity, right?), so that would make DVD equate to
"about" 3 hours in 4.7GB - roughly in keeping with the TIVO ratio
mentioned
above...

Plus, I've just been reading about the DivX codec (not the failed
DVD-rental
idea, but the "hacked" Microsoft MPEG4 codec - see
www.projectmayo.com).
This is apparently able to compress a 5GB DVD down to 600MB in surprisingly
good quality..

Bearing in mind that there's so much more data in a DVD anyway
(multi-channel sound for example), that just isn't there in my source VHS
material, >surely< even greater, (or at least equivalent) rates ought
to be
possible?  (or is the converse true?.... hmmm)

Still confused.

Paul G.


PS. If all the above just goes to show how little I know about video
compression, well.... that would be true!!!



_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.