Having now achieved several successes with recording Hi-Def television, it seems that my choice of TV recorder has become Windows Media Center.

This has the added bonus of being able to have all recorded programmes on my PC rather than having to transfer them from my DVD recorder.

What is also useful is the ability to edit channel lists as the picture above shows my BBC list. Channel logos added using My Channel Logos.

The only drawback is that I have to leave my PC on for timed recordings as I have the bug that won't let the PC wake-up after being in sleep-mode.

I had bemoaned the picture quality recorded from WMC before but it seems that my new Sony television doesn't have a problem with these recordings. I can, therefore, start to use the useful features of a program I had ignored for quite a long time.

I'm now toying with using two old TV Dongles to create a dual tuner recorder on my old Dell laptop.

Tagged: Video Collection / Computer

Having now been able to record several different programmes from various HD channels (well, BBC One HD and BBC HD to be exact) I hadn't taken any notice of the file sizes until I wanted to store them.

When I looked into it, what I discovered came as a big surprise: I can fit two hours of off-air HD video onto a DVD-R! As a data disc, of course, but my Blu-ray player doesn't have any problem with this.

I suppose I shouldn't be shocked, after all they are sources from a broadcasted signal, but to have a HD picture for the aproximate file size of a MPEG-DVD is quite amazing to someone who started out with the humble VCD!

Here's to loads more captures...

Tagged: Video Collection / Computer

This week saw the sad passing of Elizabeth Sladen who played Sarah-Jane Smith in Doctor Who.

She was one of the first companions that I can remember and the companion, along with Harry Sullivan, who was there on my first Vintage TV night, in 1984, when I watched my first VHS tape featuring Revenge Of The Cybermen.

Tagged: Video Collection / Doctor Who

This month, Waking The Dead broadcast its last ever case. I am quite sorry to see it go as it has been one of my favourite cop shows as it did deliver some excellent and chilling stuff over the years.

A clip of Waking The Dead, from an off-air VHS capture, was also the first VHS to digital video conversion that I ever carried out. I don't have the clip anymore, only the screen cap (above), but the wonder of that first capture was still encouragement enough to start my VHS to DVD-R/television recording hobby that preserved many of my off-air tapes.

Tagged: Video Collection / Broadcast TV

No sooner do I give up on commercial VHS tapes (here) than I come accross several tapes in one go in a Charity Shop: a complete set of (four) Fawlty Towers tapes for £1.50 and three tapes from Last Of The Summer Wine for £1, featuring the original characters: Compo, Clegg and Blamire.

I have seen tapes of Fawlty Towers in charity shops many times but never a full set; also finding tapes of the original Summer Wine has an added poinancy, this month, as the series is coming to an end, after thirty-seven years, at the end of August.

Of course all of these titles are available on DVD but then a stack of classic BBC Video releases for £2.50 is hard to resist and is still a bargain when one has the equipment to make very good transfers to DVD-R.

Tagged: Video Collection / VHS

This month, the latest Doctor Who DVD release, Revenge Of The Cybermen, dropped onto my doormat. This is of great significance to me as Revenge was the very first commercial VHS that I bought in 1984, twenty-six years ago (as described here).

I haven't seen this story since watching that first video cassette and part of me doesn't want to watch it again because I have this warm fuzzy memory of that first, almost ceremonial, occasion of playing my first purchased video tape.

Will a new viewing spoil that memory? Will I find it poor, now that I have seen so many more and better vintage Doctor Who stories?

Or will I still have that affection for the Doctor Who adventure that started off my video collection all those years ago?

Tagged: Video Collection / Commercial Release / Doctor Who

It has been a year since I bought my last commercial VHS tape. It was from ebay and it was the mini-series "Births, Marriages And Deaths" from 1999. I now feel that it is highly unlikely that I will find any other commercial VHS tapes that would be worth getting; the supply in Charity shops is diminishing and ebay is full of the usual suspects at, quite frankly, silly prices. In addition, everything appears to have been released on DVD now anyway.

I shouldn't complain as I have had a good run over the last few years but it does seem to be the end of an era (but who knows what may turn up).

However, there are still a number of off-air tapes that are making their way to me so the supply of material to capture and convert hasn't dried up yet.

Tagged: Video Collection / VHS

It is ten years since buying my first PC which subsequently led me into capturing and converting my VHS tapes into digital video. For most of that time there were only a few options of what digital video I could convert to. In the early days it was VideoCDs (VCDs) only; I only had the ability to convert to VCD because the assorted paraphanalia to convert to DVD was just too expensive. There was Super VideoCD (SVCD) but situations dictated that... well, see further on.

As with all new technology, the prices for DVD burners and discs became affordable and upgrades to my PCs occured and DVD recorders were added to the mix. From this point onwards, DVD-R has been the archiving choice for my VHS conversions and off-air captures and continues to be so.

What has also been happening, alongside the development of the home computer, is that more and more video types are being released to the public (the ones I have dabbled with are listed here) and it is a concern that I have stayed with the right one. Thankfully I believe that I have.

One regret, from the early days, is that I didn't persue the SVCD route. Any convertions to DVD-R from SVCD would have been much better quality than converting from VCD (e.g. my copies of the TV series Strange suffers because I converted VCD copies to DVD-R). There were two reasons that I didn't persue the better format:

Firstly, SVCD, although giving a superior picture quality to VCDs, could only hold about forty-five minutes of video which wouldn't be enough for an average of one hour for an episode of a programme.

Secondly, My then DVD player, a Toshiba SD-220E, didn't like SVCDs and wouldn't play the soundtrack in sync. with the video. I did find a fix for this but I had already made the decision not to use SVCDs.

However, most decisions are made to cater for the equipment one has. As my Video Types page shows, I have tried various types but I haven't really adopted any of them to any great extent because I haven't needed to. I view the vast majority of my DVDs on a television. I may occasionally use my PC or laptop but generally I haven't adopted any other video-playing medium (a short-lived affair with an old PDA came the closest) to warrant any large scale conversion to a different video type.

Until now: I've got an iPhone.

I am now dabbling into the realms of converting videos from DVD to mp4 h.264 so that I can load any videos onto my iPhone. It is early days but the iPhone is such a good video player. I have converted the series Cambridge Spies to take on holiday this month to give the iPhone its first proper try out.

Ultimately, DVD+/-R is still my format of choice as any other conversions will use my DVDs as their source.

Tagged: Video Collection / Computer

My all time favourite Police series is the BBC's Rockliffe's Babies from 1987-1988. I was lucky enough to have recorded all the episodes onto VHS but, due to the hap-hazard way I recorded them, I managed to loose the last three episodes of the second series. Thankfully, I had converted them all to VCD when I first got my Dazzle DVD Creator, before the tapes got lost:

Not brilliant but something exists. Of the episodes I have remaining, they have now been converted to DVD+/-R using much better equipment and giving me a much better picture quality:

But what of the lost episodes? Well, I managed to get some copies from when they were shown on Satellite/Cable. Nice quality but for two things; at the mercy of the person who encoded the original capture (a bit fussy, I know, but I would love to have a complete set looking like the picture above) and the curse of modern broadcasting: logos and banners:

At least I have something. Still, there is the possibility of a DVD release one day... ...please!

Tagged: Video Collection / Broadcast TV

Once upon a time we were all happy to keep our off-air recordings on VHS tapes. I say happy; that's all we had; off-air to VHS in the hope that the tape wouldn't crunch up in the VCR, snap, crease or end up full of drop-outs. This was the case, for me, from 1984 right up until I started converting tapes to DVD+/-R in 2003. That is nearly twenty years service that VHS has provided for me.

DVD+/-R, which I viewed as a step-up from VHS, has lasted ever since and (as my video collections shows) I have amassed a considerable amount of programmes in that time.

There are the scares that DVD+/-Rs can be unplayable in a few years from the date of burning, but I believe that if a reliable make of disc is used then the scares can be minimised and DVD+/-Rs can last a long time; but there are no guarantees. It was the same with VHS tapes.

However, with the ever increasing pace of technology there are more and more ways of keeping video and in more and more formats (I have used a few myself).

Furthermore, I am seeing more and more comments on the net where collectors are using external hard-drives to store programmes. This is achievable now that the prices of 1TB (and higher) drives are affordable; all net comments also stress that two are needed to back up to in case one drive fails. One may be cheap but two or more not so.

So, let's say I am faced with the prospect that my DVD+/-R collection is about to fail (it could happen, some of my older DVD+/-Rs are on Infility media and newer discs are Sony). Do I simply copy any older discs to newer ones or rip them to a hard-drive? Certainly, they will both take time but if I go with the hard-drive option I have to decide what format I want to use.

On a hard drive I could just keep them as DVD files (or Mpeg2) as they are but, if I wanted to maximise space, it would make sense to convert the videos to Mpeg4 (h.264), Xvid or DivX to be able to store more programmes per drive. But this will take an awful lot of time and converting from one format to another would cause a certain amount of down-grade in picture quality from my current DVD+/-Rs. Not ideal.

Then there's the viewing medium. With my current media set-up, I would have to either invest in some support equipment to view hard-drive content on my current Sony 32" LCD television (e.g. a media centre PC using the LCD as a monitor), or watch my programmes on my PC's monitor/laptop which would be a waste of my 32" LCD. There are alternatives; an iPod touch or a similar media player, such as Archos, could be used instead but these are portable/small screens and, again, a bit of a waste of my LCD television.

To conclude, I've either got the option to leave my DVD+/-Rs as they are, for the time being, or go for an option that is time consuming to arrange and/or expensive. It also must be remembered that, currently, there isn't anything out there that's 100% safe from failure.

So ultimately it's still no safer. Not that much has changed from the VHS days...

Tagged: Video Collection

In my Why Do I Record All This Telly? page I said that it was difficult to walk past a Charity Shop without popping in and having a look at the video shelves. That article was written in 2006 (and probably needs up-dating now) and this practice hasn't been as prominent as used to be.

The main problem has been that the supply of rare and interesting VHS tapes seems to have dried up. If I want to collect tapes of Only Fools And Horses, The Fast Show or Absolutely Fabulous, (or any other high profile series) then the tapes are plentiful. But these types of programmes are all out in full-series DVD box sets.

On a cold Saturday in January, while having a few minutes to kill, I called into a large independant charity shop (by that I mean a single outlet rather than a chain such as Oxfam) and I found a huge wall of VHS tapes. It took me a good ten minutes to view the whole lot.

There were some old BBC sport releases, lots of James Bond films, many run of the mill hollywood fare and the afore-mentioned Only Fools And Horses etc. However, within all this there were two finds: Yorkshire TV's Harry's Game for 50 pence and a box set of the whole of the Red Dwarf Re-Mastered series for £3 (not to be confused with the proper original un-touched Red Dwarf series).

At the time of finding tapes I am not always aware that the programme has been released on DVD or not. In the case of the Red Dwarf Re-Mastered box set, I did know that they hadn't been because they were so unpopular but as for the Harry's Game tape I would have to wait until I got home to look this up on-line.

As it happened it has been but this still goes to show that interesting releases are still out there.

However...

Note to self: never rely on my own memory (so how will I remember my note?)... Anyway, on a recent visit to WH Smith I was surprised to find a DVD box set of the Red Dwarf Re-Mastered set.

So it seems that both of my finds have enjoyed DVD releases. However on a more recent foray into the Charity Shops I found a 1990 BBC Video release of Joyce Grenfel Entertains (below). This has been re-packaged for DVD release as the Joyce Grenfel: The BBC Collection but for the collector would be a different release. So, indeed, they are still out there...

Tagged: Video Collection / VHS

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