The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

I've been experimenting with the right way to move old VHS videos to DVD and this is what I have come up with.

I use a stand-alone DVD recorder connected directly to a VHS deck, rather than recording onto my computer. This frees up my computer for other tasks and gives me a lot of control over the start and end times of the tracks without having to fiddle with the MPEG files after recording.

I record most of the tapes onto a DVD+RW disc, which is re-written every time that I record another movie. Since my Mac's Combo drive doesn't read +R/+RW discs, I use a Pioneer DVR-108 SuperDrive connected via FireWire to read the disc. The built-in driver from Mac OS 10.4 recognizes the drive without hacks or firmware patches.

The video from a DVD recorder is in a special VR format that most DVD players don't like. I use Roxio's Popcorn to convert the disc into a more compatible format, saving it on the computer as a disk image. Since I'm not recompressing the video, Popcorn takes just a couple of minutes to do the conversion. Then I burn the image to a DVD-R disc that will play in most DVD players.

The post-processing to burn a DVD-R adds perhaps 10-minutes to the process, so the time that it takes to do a video-conversion is real-time-playback + 10 minutes. That's not too shabby.

Some videos are special enough that they merit a little redundancy to make sure that they are preserved. When I come across a special video, I record it onto a DVD+R disc (which must be finalized on the DVD recorder in order to be played elsewhere) and keep the DVD+R disc as a backup for the DVD-R that I burn from it.

For now, the final DVDs are stored in cakeboxes. I figure that a box of 50 DVDs takes up about the same space as 3 video tapes. That's a huge benefit. Unfortunately, these DVDs have an expected lifespan of less than 10 years. I don't think that will be a problem since I plan to copy the video to a movie jukebox sometime in the next 4-5 years when cheap consumer hard drives come in multi-terabyte sizes.

As I play them, I discover many tapes that have so degraded that their content isn't worth saving. I'm glad that I didn't wait any longer to get started on this project.