Oh and while I'm writing about watching video files on my TV, I've
been thinking of getting myself a tape drive. Sure, I'll use it to
actually, finally, back up all the important things I have littered
around my handful of machines. Having established a backup routine
at work, I've gotten to thinking.
How bad an idea would it be to use a tape drive to store TV shows?
I've been capturing them with the VCD format, which gives me around
600MB per hour of show. This fills up my drive pretty quickly,
obviously. I know I really should take sometime to revisit things and
try another video codec, since originally I used VCD because I burned
everything to CD for my DVD player, but now I'm streaming files to my
Powerbook over the network which gives me a lot more flexibility in
recording options.
However, not burning to CD leaves me with a hard drive full of video
that I'm hesitant to delete yet have no good reason to need laying around on a
high speed hard drive. But, burning all that to a spindle-worth
of blank CDs without a Lego Mindstorms based CD-changer robot leaves
me shuddering. I recall reading about a DJ-bot
that did this for playing music, and I notice via Slashdot that someone with a
decent woodshop has provided plans
for such a beast for a CD writer. But I can't afford the Legos at
the present moment, and I'll only end up hurting myself working with
power tools.
Then, I remember that high capacity tapes make backing up lots of data
easy at work. I know that the tape trade off is capacity and price
for speed of access. But, if all I need to do is skip from one file
to the next and only need relatively low bandwidth to stream the file
from the tape, this sounds like a great way to archive video.
Depending on the video compression, maybe I could fit a whole season
or two of a show onto a single tape.
Seems like a good idea, though pricey. But maybe the price and cost
of media would offset the pain in the ass of any other method. I probably
should look more into the price and pain of a DVD burner, but the idea
of more disc-like things laying around worries me.
What do you think?
shortname=video_on_tape
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