Video Recorder
 

Alright ...

I've got a huge amount of old VHS/Hi8 tapes I'd like to backup.

I was interested in DVD recorders when they came out, but realized DVD-Rs are far to be a safe source of backups. I'd like to go the hard disk way instead.

I thought of recording everything to DVD format to then rip it to plain AVI afterwards, but that would take way too long.

Nowadays, DVD recorders with HDs are more and more common, and they apparently do record analog video sources directly to HD. However, no matter how hard I look at it, there is no way I can find out in what format.

I would need something that basically directly records to a format I can easily transfer and view later on any PC. Like, you know ... AVI.

Do you guys know for sure of any model that would let me do that ?

If not, any alternative ?

DVD format basically. MPEG2.

Actual MPG2 files though or directly to all that VOB/SUB stuff ?

And can you actually export those MPG2 files without burning them to video DVD ? Like, by plugging another HD to some USB port ?

I've no idea. I burn them to DVD, and they come in VOB/SUB etc. stuff.

Other than burning, I'm not sure if you can export the files. I have not seen an HD recorder with such a functionality.

Which is the whole point ... ;_;

I guess you can try burning it to a rewritable DVD, and rip it from there on your PC to whatever format you desire (using, say, meGUI). This is admittedly a sub-par solution, as you are twice transcoding (analog to digital, compressed to MPEG2, re-compressed to AVI...)

^__^;

Thanks though ~

I've been looking into those obscure brand's multimedia HD recorders, but there seems to still be a lot of problems with them for now ... o well

I don't see the problem encapsulating MPEG2 material inside a AVI, of course if you don't hit any of the AVI limitations.

I wouldn't advice to use AVI however, since it has much more overhead than MKV. Consider AVI deprecated, Matroska is the way to go if you wanna use the files on a computer. When wanting to playback the file on a standalone that's of course another story...

I would argue that using optical discs for backup is much safer than leaving them on magnetic tape as long as you don't use cheap media or store them in an area constantly bombarded by direct sunlight or prone to big temperature swings.

If you really want to store the information on a hard drive, you should look into fault tolerant raid solutions, otherwise if your drive were to fail it could be difficult or impossible to recover the data.

I would say you should think about just burning them to DVDs using a regular set top DVD recorder and then you could either rip .iso's of the discs to your hard drive for storage (could require a fair amount of space depending on quantity of tapes) otherwise you can convert them to .avi or another format (lot of time).

If you are really paranoid about the DVD's degrading or something then you could buy one of the more reputable brands of media and make multiple copies (using your PC after making the initial recording), storing them in more than one place.

If the storage form is open to discussion I would encourage to setup a small dedicated file server with a RAID1 setup. With SMART setup and RAID volume desync detection and everything. Pretty neat because you get email from the machine when it detects a failing drive
Filesystem should be extendable so you can just insert new (bigger) drives, sync them and remove the old ones. Of course this doesn't protect you from software or user errors. However it's currently my type of backup system for music files and at least for now it's working very reliable. Should also work great for video files. :)