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Bye Bye VHS...
10 March 2005
Face it: VHS is a dying technology. In fact, anything that uses magnetic film for storage is merely waiting for the undertaker. The only reason it hasn’t completely disappeared is that so many of us have it that it has a cultural inertia that extended its life far past its usefulness.
In the local video store, shelves of VHS movie have given way to DVDs. VCRs are selling for under $100 but, despite the number of features they offer, they can’t compete with digital media players.
Remember 8-tracks? Same thing. What was once cutting edge is now yard sale material. Pretty soon to be joined by cassettes, VHS, Zip drives, floppy disks… they were a good idea at the time, but they’re far to fragile, short-lived and susceptible to all sorts of environmental challenges like heat, cold, electro-magnetic devices. A child’s magnet can erase or at least scramble the data on magnetic media. Who can afford that sort of vulnerability with critical data?
Many new laptops don’t come with floppy drives. What can you store on a floppy these days, anyway? Not even a meg-and-a-half of space, not enough space for a graphics-dense Publisher brochure, let alone a Powerpoint presentation.
Magnetic media is being replaced by cheap flash memory, CDs and DVDs. CDs, too, are on their way out, victims of technological Darwinianism that culls the outdated technology from the shelves once the new products (DVDs) hit them.
So what do you do with your library of VHS tapes, all those home movies from your vacation, and those films you bought? What can you do to preserve them before they succumb to heat, light and stray cosmic rays?
Well, you can copy them to DVD. All you need is a couple of inexpensive devices in, or attached to, your computer.
First is a DVD burner. They’re available for under $100 (for a 4X burner) from Tigerdirect.ca and other sources. You can spend more and get a faster burner (8-12X), but it’s not necessary – I tend to burn CDs and DVDs at slower speeds because there is less chance for a mis-burn.
A typical CD-R can store three minutes of DV-format video, 23 minutes of DivX (Home Theatre) or MPEG-4, and up to 116 minutes of MPEG-4 extended play (low quality) format. A DVD can store 20 minutes of DV, 140 minutes of DivX and 722 minutes of MPEG-4 extended play. That’s more than 12 hours of video, albeit at a high-compression, mid-to-low quality playback.
But for best quality compression, a DVD can store 140 minutes of MPEG-4 and 96 minutes of MPEG-2. That’s about six times what a CD-R can store. The higher the compression, of course, the more you can store. The trade-off is in quality, of course, just as it is in a digital camera.
Next you’ll need a device and software to copy video signals from NTSC of the VHS to one of the digital file formals (probably MPEG-2 or MPEG-4) for storing on a DVD.
First note of caution: make sure your DVD can play burned DVDs of the format (plus or minus) your burner produces, otherwise you’ll need a new DVD player!
The capture device is plug-in hardware that ranged from $130 to around $500. It should accept composite (the standard one RCA jack), plus S-video (also called S-VHS) input. These devices not only capture video from your VCR, but they can take it from TV as well (assuming you need to capture a TV signal for posterity).
Output will be partially determined by both the device and the software that accompanies it. Plextor offers hardware encoding that handles DivX and other formats, while most others do the encoding through the software.
Caution number two: make sure you have a lot of hard disk space to capture a video stream, then convert it in software.
This new, inexpensive hardware allows you to keep your old videos – including VHS and beta – on a more modern, less fragile medium. While the quality will never equal commercial DVDs or Hollywood production techniques, they can help preserve your old tapes and home movies for a fraction of the cost of having them sent out for translation.
In the local video store, shelves of VHS movie have given way to DVDs. VCRs are selling for under $100 but, despite the number of features they offer, they can’t compete with digital media players.
Remember 8-tracks? Same thing. What was once cutting edge is now yard sale material. Pretty soon to be joined by cassettes, VHS, Zip drives, floppy disks… they were a good idea at the time, but they’re far to fragile, short-lived and susceptible to all sorts of environmental challenges like heat, cold, electro-magnetic devices. A child’s magnet can erase or at least scramble the data on magnetic media. Who can afford that sort of vulnerability with critical data?
Many new laptops don’t come with floppy drives. What can you store on a floppy these days, anyway? Not even a meg-and-a-half of space, not enough space for a graphics-dense Publisher brochure, let alone a Powerpoint presentation.
Magnetic media is being replaced by cheap flash memory, CDs and DVDs. CDs, too, are on their way out, victims of technological Darwinianism that culls the outdated technology from the shelves once the new products (DVDs) hit them.
So what do you do with your library of VHS tapes, all those home movies from your vacation, and those films you bought? What can you do to preserve them before they succumb to heat, light and stray cosmic rays?
Well, you can copy them to DVD. All you need is a couple of inexpensive devices in, or attached to, your computer.
First is a DVD burner. They’re available for under $100 (for a 4X burner) from Tigerdirect.ca and other sources. You can spend more and get a faster burner (8-12X), but it’s not necessary – I tend to burn CDs and DVDs at slower speeds because there is less chance for a mis-burn.
A typical CD-R can store three minutes of DV-format video, 23 minutes of DivX (Home Theatre) or MPEG-4, and up to 116 minutes of MPEG-4 extended play (low quality) format. A DVD can store 20 minutes of DV, 140 minutes of DivX and 722 minutes of MPEG-4 extended play. That’s more than 12 hours of video, albeit at a high-compression, mid-to-low quality playback.
But for best quality compression, a DVD can store 140 minutes of MPEG-4 and 96 minutes of MPEG-2. That’s about six times what a CD-R can store. The higher the compression, of course, the more you can store. The trade-off is in quality, of course, just as it is in a digital camera.
Next you’ll need a device and software to copy video signals from NTSC of the VHS to one of the digital file formals (probably MPEG-2 or MPEG-4) for storing on a DVD.
First note of caution: make sure your DVD can play burned DVDs of the format (plus or minus) your burner produces, otherwise you’ll need a new DVD player!
The capture device is plug-in hardware that ranged from $130 to around $500. It should accept composite (the standard one RCA jack), plus S-video (also called S-VHS) input. These devices not only capture video from your VCR, but they can take it from TV as well (assuming you need to capture a TV signal for posterity).
Output will be partially determined by both the device and the software that accompanies it. Plextor offers hardware encoding that handles DivX and other formats, while most others do the encoding through the software.
Caution number two: make sure you have a lot of hard disk space to capture a video stream, then convert it in software.
This new, inexpensive hardware allows you to keep your old videos – including VHS and beta – on a more modern, less fragile medium. While the quality will never equal commercial DVDs or Hollywood production techniques, they can help preserve your old tapes and home movies for a fraction of the cost of having them sent out for translation.
