Multimedia forum: Best video format for the future (archiving)

the quality, and provide long term storage.

BTW, dual layer media is available with twice the 4.7 gig capacity of single sided.

technology progress. MiniDV will store the large sizes involved in a digital format, and it is robust storage. Playback capability will be around for many years. Short of that, I see only two choices right now;

External hard drives. This is expensive, but can store the sizes that you want. Regular refreshing of the content is a good idea.

Compress it, and put it on, for the moment, DVDs. That is what you have been doing. It has its obvious shortcomings, and will need to be moved along to new media.

is DV. You will need lots of hard drive space.

I am in the exact same boat. I have vast amounts of media content that I have set out to digitize. I also use the ADS A/V Link. Once the video is in DV-AVI I cut up the clips and then set out on a series of compressive tasks... The final result is H.264/AVC (advanced video codec/compression), read about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264).

Here are the steps I use, please ask me more questions if you would like to get more detailed information...

First, I create an Avisynth script. Avisynth is a great piece of software which can process video very effectively. It seems complicated at first because it has no GUI, only script interface... worth learning. The script does the following:
1)tells avisynth to open the video using directshow, include audio in the stream, and play it at 29.xx frames per second

2)deinterlace the fields (dv media is interlaced and playback on a computer screen will appear with lines as the two fields move past each other)

3)apply some level adjustments so the picture looks a bit better

4)change the colorspace from YUV to YV12 which is required by x264 (the opensource codec I use)

5)crop the picture (there is lots of fuzz on all sides of the picture, as I'm sure you've noticed and this gets rid of all of that)... additionally, the pixel ratio is going to be changed from 720x480 to 320x240 in the next step, so you need to crop 18 more pixels from the left and right than top and bottom (for example, if you crop no pixels on the top and bottom, then you need to crop 9 on the right and 9 on the left) This whole cropping and resizing is a bit complicated and has to do with the aspect ratio and making sure that it remains correct.

6)resize to 320x240... i use a filter called spline36


the next steps are taken care of by a great piece of software called MeGUI. You feed this your Avisynth script, give it some compression parameters (such as the bitrate, mine is 2500 bps, and the different types of options that you'll want the x264 codec to use, the more you use the more processing power it takes to compress and decompress the video) and then allow it to compress. The audio is simultaneously compressed to some format (I use Nero's AAC codec) and then the two streams, video and audio, are remultiplexed (muxed) back together into an mp4 container.


It generally achieves 30x compression from the DV-AVI, and looks identical to the original VHS. An hour will be less than a gb, which in my opinion is perfect for on demand storage. Hard drive space is cheap, just stick it on the network/share it/and watch it anywhere.

I hope my personal solution is of some help to you.

I am in the same boat. I have a bunch of 8mm video tape and when my camera died, i played heck fiding a new camera that could play the old tapes. So i am also wary of any tape as an archival format. I bought a DVD+R recorder and copied my tapes directly to the DVD (no computer involved). But now i want to store all of my videos on a hard drive. I can copy the files from the DVD's to my hard drive but it seems to me the better option is to go back to the tapes and hook up my computer to my video camera, but I am not sure what file format is the best to save the files in? I'm not interested in data compression since I'm concerned that it will degrade the quality of my videos (even if only slightly). But I can not find out the best format to save the files in. Is it WMV, AVI, MPEG4, etc? Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the feedback. These are precious (to me) family videos so quality is most important. If I was saving commercial movies I would opt for your second suggestion. Do you know of a way to split an AVI file? At 10GB per hour it sounds like I'm going to need a huge har drive or a lot of DVD's.
Thanks again,
mif3485