Saturday, October 10, 2009

VHS-to-DVD Project Update

As you may recall, in June 2004 we started converting our collection of over 1,500 VHS tapes to DVD. It's long past time for an update.

Despite a lapse of a couple years due to illness, we are back on track and into the home stretch. Just moments ago Don put DVD number 1924 into the recorder to transfer tape G:088. Out of the original tapes, we are down to about 150 (which means we're just about 90% done, which is an encouraging thought.) We're currently transferring stuff that was recorded in mid-1995, 14 years ago.

The most recent tape we transferred contained the following:
    Space Precinct: Two Against the Rock
    The Tic: Tick vs. Dinosaur Neil
    Twilight Zone (classic): Ring-a-Ding Girl
    Saturday Night Live: Best Commercial Parodies
    Whatever Happened to Devo?
    Rugrats: Chuckie's Red Hair/Spike Runs Away
    Babylon 5: Long Dark
    Twilight Zone (classic): Black Leather Jackets
    Masters of Fantasy: Dennis Muren
    The Tomorrow People: Rameses Connection Part 2

Our video catalog has undergone another transformation: it is now in HanDBase format, on the Macs and on Don's iPhone. Having the video database on iPhone is a leap forward in covnenience.

So what comes next? If we keep up our current rate, the conversion project should be completed by June 2010 -- six years after we began. We estimate that by that time we'll be beyond DVD 2200.

Once we're done, we look forward to the next step: ripping all these DVDs into something like iTunes. We're going to have to be patient: storing the equivalent of 2200 DVDs would take something in excess of 10 TB. But eventually we'll see iPods with a capacity of 16 TB; by that time we will be able to carry our entire video collection in our pockets. It's a nifty prospect.





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