If they want to toss me in the pokey for making CDs out of my 33s, cassettes, and 8tracks, so be it. Go for it. I'm going to be making DVDs out of my VHS tapes shortly. Just got the DVD burner.
How many hours of video can a DVD hold?
Depends on the video's format and compression.
Figure that a standard DVD-R holds about 4.7 GB data (+/- formatting). If I go the "data disc" route, then I can stash 2 to 4 movies per disc. More if I use DivX [*]. If I go the "DVD" route (format 'em to play the discs in a DVD Player hooked to my TV) then a movie might take two discs, because it has to be uncompressed quite a bit.
...A recent copy of one of the Matrix movies I saw was in DivX format. The quality was decent - better than VHS. The file was only 1.1 GB.
[*] DivX. The format I love to hate. DivX is an enhanced MPEG-4 video with MP3 audio. It's a fav format of the p2p crowd because of its small file size. And, of course, to make 'em even smaller, they squeeze more so the picture quality suffers badly. Many are like VHS recordings made on your worst over-used tape. The worst problem: Each generation of DivX codecs has a slower playback frame rate (code bloat) and looses more and more capability to play older DivX versions (broken unsupported code). There are also difficulties playing DivX files on Macs if they were created on PCs. :\
Will the resolution be as good as the original movie?
Define "original movie". Most of my stuff is EP speed, taped of da TV. I expect that visually the digital copy will be at least as good as the tape. But then some of my tapes are old - so *shrug*
I'm just learnin all this stuff, so... FWIW... a few numbers:
Full-motion movie-theater video is a true 24 frames-per-second.
Studio quality HDTV is 270 Mbps, uncompressed.
Broadcast quality HDTV is 20 Mbps, compressed.
US NTSC = 720x480 pixels at 15 KHz; 525 lines at 60 Hz.
VHS, as I understand it, is about half of NTSC.
MPEG-1 = 352x240 pixels at 30 fps, ~1.5 Mbps.
MPEG-2 = 352x240 pixels at 30 fps through 1920x1080 at 60 fps, ~8.0 Mbps.
MPEG-2 is essentially MPEG-1 witha few modifications, and done at a lower compression level so as to make for a higher quality picture.
VCD NTSC = up to 1150 kbit/sec MPEG-1, 352x240, 29.97 fps.
SVCD NTSC = up to 2524 kbit/sec MPEG-2, 480x480, 29.97 fps.
DVD Video is MPEG-2, stored a 24 fps. 720x480 pixels displayed at 29.97 fps, on NTSC, avg 3.5 Mbps. 720x576 pixels displayed at 25 fps, on PAL.
- Dan.
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