Video Asylum

Posted by DavidLD (A) on October 25, 2011 at 03:59:14

In Reply to: RE: Streaming vs.DVD posted by on October 24, 2011 at 21:43:46

I've been building a library of classic movies by making copiesd from Turner Classic Movies as they play on the channel, often at odd hours using my Toshiba DVR (only $100 on Amazon). I have discovered that the 6-hour setting appears to give a quality that I cannot distinguish from the 2-hour setting, certainly comparable to a standard definition commercial DVD. So I generally am able to put three 2-hour movies on a single DVD. I have been using the DVR -R disks, that run about 25 cents each in 50-disk paks on sale. They work well. I love the movie format I've created. A typical movie is a gig or so. I copy them to a flash drive or a hard drive on a computer. I use my little Asus netbook as a movie player when I am traveling. The netbook has no optical drive on it, so this would impossible to do with a commercial DVD movie. (there are airline rules prohibiting the use of an external drive on a laptop during flight, I have no clue as to why.) Anyhow a portable external DVD drive would be messy to try to use in travel. Finally, I have found some little cases at the Dollar Tree ($1 ea) designed to hold 25 CD's or DVDs. Since I typically put 3 movies on each DVD that means just one of these little case (hardly bigger than a plastic box for one commercial DVD) holds as many as 75 movies!. When I look at all the shelf space I have allocated to the 300 commercial DVDs I own, I can understand why commercial DVDs don't sell as well as they used to. That coupled with the fact that everything has copy protect on it limiting the ability of indiviuals to display the movies on a device such as a netbook or tablet. I suppose my next step is to remove the copy protection from all of these and put them all on an external hard drive that I can plug into any device, and then display them in my projection home theater that way rather than from the DVDs I make or commercial DVDs I own. But this is going to be a lot of work. The little thing I have worked up using TCM and my Tosh DVR with three movies 1 gig for each movie as opposed to typically 4 or 5 gigs for a commercial DVD is just a lot easier to manage. Next up: I'm going to see if I can get some of my movies to run on an inexpensive (under $100) 7" Android tablet. Stay tuned.

D