[MEncoder-users] Backup policies

[Francois Visagie]

On Nov 12, 2007 3:01 PM, Ross Clement <rossclement at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> This is a question for people typical of "mencoder-users", rather than a
> question about mencoder directly.
>
> What do people on this list do in terms of backing up video. In my case my
> original video will be in one of three formats:
>
> Mini DV tape (and DV AVIs) - huge files, typically 13G for an hour or so.
> Motion JPEG from my still camera - huge files, I've used it once as a trial
> and got over 3G of moving images.
> Screen capture from PC usage - not so huge files
>
> Problem is, I don't have enough disk space to let everything just lie
> around. I just ran out of space on my 300G usb drive.
>
> I would like to back up all my original video in some form or other. In
> particular the MiniDV and Motion JPEG files are home videos that I would
> like to be able to review into the distant future. But burning tens of DVDs
> per week to avoid post-camera quality loss is really not on.
>
> At present, I generally convert things into either DVD compatible MPEG-2, or
> DivX of some sort. I can back these up much more recently. But it's possible
> for me to use pretty well any format for my backups providing that mplayer
> (VLC et al) can read it.
>
> What formats would people recommend, and what do others do concerning
> backups.

Hi Ross,

A fairly good guideline is to you ask yourself what format you would
mostly want to view your archived material in. Then for convenience's
sake archive in that format (given that you have sufficient space).

Previously (before I got a DVD burner and authoring software) I would
compress home videos with VirtualDub (on Windows) and XviD. I achieved
a 28 - 30 compression ratio from DV AVI source without annoying
quality degradation. This worked very well for archiving videos and
distributing them on CD.

Now I intend keeping hard disk copies of DVDs I make. I have a 300GB
hard disk dedicated for home videos. When that fills up, I'll probably
just get another. I haven't yet played with the lossless
compressability of the MPEG-2 format, but you may want to try that
(ZIP, RAR etc. format). Also you could consider the lossless Lagarith
codec for archival purposes, although of course you wouldn't be able
to use that for material in DVD authored format.

Regards,
Francois