Archiving Video Tapes on DVD-R

Ever since 1992, when I started my (now defunct) CD-R service bureau, people have been asking me if they can save their VHS tapes on CDs. Then the answer was no, not without a lot of expense and trouble, but now there is a viable way to archive videotapes on optical disc.

Background

Why, you ask, was it so difficult to do this a decade ago? When CD-ROM was young, in spite of attempts to make it a cross-platform storage medium, able to work on many different operating systems, programmatic differences between systems were enormous, especially for handling multimedia content. Now we have multimedia delivery programs like Macromedia's Director, Adobe's Acrobat, Real Network's RealPlayer, and Apple's QuickTime, that make cross-platform issues if not go away, at least appear transparent to users in many cases. But play-back is just one aspect of content storage and delivery.

Before content can be played back through a computer's optical disc reader (or Web browser, for that matter), the content must be prepared. In the instance of multimedia, or audio/video, content, that frequently means it must be converted from analog to digital formats. This is true of moving images (and audio) stored on VHS tapes, or any pre-Digital Video tape formatted video tapes.

Until recently, successful digitizing (or "capture and compression") required expensive equipment and a high degree of expertise. Talented compressionists are still highly regarded as experts because of their knowledge of codecs (COmpression-DECompression algorithms) and techniques needed to optimize high-end, Hollywood-quality video and audio. Now, though, manufacturers have created equipment and software that incorporate significant amounts of this knowledge so that even untrained people using ordinary PCs can digitize their home movies and be happy with the results. One example of this kind of easy-to-use device, DV Studio's Apollo Expert Archiver, can be found in our CD-Webstore Web site. [Link opens in a new window.] With this add-in Windows-compatible PCI card, a VTR (Video Tape Recorder/Reader, for any format as long as it has an S-Video interface on the device) and a DVD recorder, anyone can convert a video tape into a DVD-Video disc in a simple, one-step process.

Why DVD?

When the DVD format was created a few years ago, one of the driving motivations was to make an optical disc format that could accommodate large video files. Since video data, even compressed, requires enormous disc "real estate", a standard 650MB CD-ROM could only hold a few minutes of broadcast-quality video. DVDs hold 6 or 7 times the amount of data that can be stored on CD-ROM, and the MPEG-2 format that is the compression standard for DVD makes files fit into a smaller number of bytes than previously-used codecs. Also, DVD was designed to be compatible with a broader range of more capable operating systems than ISO-9660 CD-ROM could work for. There really have been a lot of advances in computing in the past 10 years, and DVD takes advantage of many of them.

DVD-Video Content on CD-R?

It is a little known fact that if you have video content to store on optical disc, but don't have a DVD recorder, you can still make a video disc to play in a DVD player. As long as the content is digitized and compressed using MPEG-2, you can record and play it back on CD-R media instead of DVD-R. The main difference is that you will only be able to record about 15 or 20 minutes worth of high-quality video on this medium, instead of up to 2 or 3 hours worth as is possible with DVD-R media. In both cases, however, it requires a late-model DVD player (or DVD-ROM reader in a computer) to read these discs. That's because decompressing the MPEG-2 data is accomplished by the DVD reader, although some software decompression may also do the job. In general, though, hardware (drive-based) decompression is more desirable to avoid dropping frames due to the too-slow processing available in the software solutions.

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