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Could CDRW Disks Replace Videotapes?
NewtonsLaw asks: "I'm in the process of building a TiVo-like PC that uses off-the-shelf technology to implement video timeshift, MPEG recording, MP3 recording, etc along with Net-radio functionality. Over the past two months I've effectively replaced VHS video tapes with CDRW disks. Once a program has been captured on the PC in (S)VCD MPEG format, I can either watch it by playing back the recorded file or dump it onto a CDRW and watch it on my DVD player, before blanking the disk and returning it to the 'empty' pile. What I've noticed is that most of the CDRWs I've tried only last about 30-40 rewrites before they start showing significant data dropouts (almost always at the start of a recording). Since disks in (S)VCD format don't carry the same level of error-checking/correction as disks written in regular data format, such dropouts are more noticeable than they would otherwise be (of course the up-side is that you get to store 805MB on a 700MB CDR/RW without overburn).
What I want to know is -- how many rewrites do most people expect from their CDRW media? I seem to recall seeing a figure of a thousand rewrite cycles being touted by some manufacturers. Is this realistic? Thirty rewrites makes a $2.50 RW disk an economic medium for this purpose but it seems a hell of a long way short of 1,000."
"I've tried CDRW disks from several manufacturers and they're being used in a new Sony CDRW drive which seems to function just fine. I've also encountered a slightly shorter lifetime for CDRW media when used for (S)VCD disks and written by a slightly older HP CDR/RW drive.
And before anyone asks 'Why don't you just play directly from the HD?', I should point out that I have to share the TV gear in this house with the rest of the family so it's just easier to burn their stuff to disk and let them use the DVD player than to fight over access to the TiVo-clone."
If I remember correctly, the CD-RW blanks I have at home (14x compatable) say they are "guaranteed" for 100 re-writes.
Also, what speed are you burning on these CD-RW's at? Maybe you should try lowering the recording speed and seeing if you still get the drop outs.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Even with normal data, the samsung burner, made the CDRWs I used lose data already after 4-5 burns. I think for permanent storage, normal CDr's are good, but I wouldn't trust CDRWs too much with any of my computer data or audio/video.
http://www.inspirelight.net/
Typicly I will reuse my CDRW disks arround 10 -> 15 time, but im storeing my programs, mp3 backups, and web dev work... so once its backed up to my satisfaction... I stop...
:)
Personaly I think that to acheve 30 -40 rewrites to a VCD disk with no real loss in quality beats the shit out of a VCR which you only really get 4-5 rewrites out of before you start noticeing quality issues...
Keep up the good work, and keep us informed as to when we can buy the set top version of your system
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
...From various places. I have a low-end P3550 and a video out-card hooked into my home entertainment system. CDR and CDRW has all but replaced VHS for me.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is an ongoing discussion at Plasma. People with the bucks have been contemplating this for a while. Be sure to read up on the forums for the technical details as well. More info here.
Please note there are solutions that require money. How cheap are you going to be?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
It's the Panasonic DMR-HS2. (Thanks google)
http://www.panasonic.co.jp/products/video/digital/ hs2/
A good place to learn how to convert various media to burnable (S)VCD format can be found at http://www.vcdhelp.com
I've been encoding svcd's of my dvd's for a couple of years now (long story short, macrovision + tv/vcr combo does NOT work) and have come to the conclusion that you can put 60 minutes MAX onto an svcd (multipass vbr, 192 or 160 audio) before the video quality degrades to that of a standard VCD. Still, it's cheaper than video tape and doesn't degrade over time.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Normally that would be humurous, but it's quite possible.
Who said anything about quality? :)
For one-off uses like this, generic CD-Rs should be sufficient. I can usually get a 50-pack for $5 or a 100-pack for $8-$10 -- after rebates -- once or twice a month from CompUSA or Circuit City -- the CC 100 packs are frequently even non-generic, such as Fuji.
As far as generics go, I've only had one disk ever fail on me, and that was during the write process.
High Quality Recording on High-Capacity 4.7GB DVD-RAM Discs Yes
And the media is not cheap..
They should put an ethernet port on it, too.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
It's called the Terapin. They sell 'em at Sam's Club, Costco, among others.
ChopSuey
http://doom9.org
Prices vary a lot, but there's often a sale for $7 per 50 CD-Rs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've had a likko vdr2100 which is a VCD recorder (it can do semi-SVCD too) since feb '02. I have it hooked to the 2nd output on my tivo so I can record stuff to it. sofar I've recorded over 600 VCDs since I purchased it. I hear it is very sensitive to loss in video signal, but tivo ensures theres always 100% signal(even if the input on tivo was choppy the output is always perfectly clear signal strength). I'm not one to hack together a computer to do this which is why I bought the likko, $449 at lik-sang.com I could not find a U.S. reseller at the time of my purchase. It can do CDRW media(and blank them) but I only use CD-R media, never tried CDRW. I catalog my shows in jfile on my visor(easily exportable to another database/spreadsheet). I have burned 1 coaster in the 600 VCDs that I have made. works quite well. I also picked up a portable VCD(discman-sized) player from lik-sang at the same time(also made by likko), works great. Also picked up 2 dreamcast VCD players(requires no mods to the dreamcast, just put in the CD and go). One of them was crap(the VCD-only player), the VCD/MP3 player worked much better(playback is perfect quality, the other player drops a lot of frames). When lik-sang came back recently I ordered 2 more of VCD/MP3 players as well as 2 VGA converters for my 3 dreamcasts.
/. account a few years ago but I guess they nuked it since I didn't use it for 6-8 months at a time which is why I post as AC)
so for me, VCDs have replaced VHS, I used to have nearly 250 VHS tapes but I have not watched a VHS tape in more then 2 years. I have no DVDs and never plan to ever ever buy a DVD player or writer. VCD is a good, solid, open format thats been available since about 1993/1994.
I mentioned the likko can do semi-vcd, the resolution it records in is non-standard and recording time drops from 65 minutes to about 35 minutes per CD, that and the fact that VCD is much more broadly available(e.g. my dreamcasts) makes me record everything in VCD format.
this unit is very solid, I am amazed at how well it works, I highly reccomend it for people like me who want to record vcds in real time w/o the pains of video capture on a computer dealing with converting formats and stuff.
(I had a
cd r's can hold a video tape about the same quaility of a VHS tape. The quality is also slightly lower than the resolution on most TV's. video cd format or VCD is around 250 lines of resolution. The average TV displays 300. VHS tapes are around 250 too.
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
I use them to make MP3 CDs for my car. I start seeing degradation after about 20 rewrites. They're cheap enough for me not to care though...
Ah, but there really is a TiVo clone in the works: FreeVo.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Best Buy sells 100-paks of Memorex for $30, with a $20 rebate. I've successfully gotten all my rebates back in 1.5 months.
That comes to $5 for 50.
I built a similar system myself, basicly a tivo built out of a shuttle SS51G and a all-in-wonder. The problem I've foud is that the CDRW is just too small to replace a VHS. A MPG and standrard VCD quality is about 600 MB per hour, so a CDRW only holds an hour of TV per CD. Thats great for 1 hour long show but it doesn't work too well when you want to store a movie or a longer show. Also I mainly store serries of shows (like star trek) , its far better to have a dvd+r with several episodes of the same show then have to swap through many cds.
There are two misconceptions being propagated in
the comments today-
1. SVCD is just like VCD: low-res MPEG-1.
2. DivX is feasible for a free Tivo-clone.
Here's the truth -
1. SVCD is glorious 480x480 MPEG-2, not 320x240
MPEG-1. You can fit an average of 45 minutes per
disc, enough for a 1-hour TV show without ads.
2. DivX is incredibly CPU-intensive to encode,
and relatively CPU-intensive to decode. divx.com
does not currently offer a Linux version of the
encoder. In addition, good luck going from
NTSC to fullframe, fullmotion DivX on anything
but the fastest PCs.
Here are my notes about how I made one disc:
I wondered if I got some quality degradation by exporting from MA in motion-JPEG format, rather than keeping it in native DV format, and then encoding to MPEG. Ideally some of the JPEG frames would just directly become keyframes in the MPEG output; but in this case I was scaling too, so that's not possible. Anyway most of the output formats in MainActor for Linux have bugs, and MJPEG happened to work well.
analog video "lines" and lines of digital resolution are two different things, alas.
When someone talks about lines of VHS, they're talking about how many discreet changes in amplitude you'll be able to measure on a horizontal line. And when digital video talks about lines, it's normally how many pixels high the video is.
And due to Nyquist, we know the sampling rate required to record a given frequncy is twice the frequency.
So, MPEG-1 NTSC VCD at 352 pixels wide could reproduce a frequency of 176 changes over the horizontal width of the video. So, if VHS is 250 lines, it's actually better on that measure than VCD.
Of course, VHS is plauged by horrible analog noise to the point where I can't watch it, while VCD, although low resolution, shouldn't have any noise at all. There will be some artifacts at VCD data rates, of course.
My video compression blog
I'm surprised you can even get 60 minutes on a disc
SVCD NTSC is 480x480, which is nearly three times the resolution of VCD (352x240). MPEG-2 is somewhat more efficient than MPEG-1, and you can use VBR to reduce the data rate for easy portions of the video. But still, when you're using half as many bits per pixel, MPEG-2 is going to start falling apart pretty quickly.
Still, there are lots of good new codecs on the horizon. The Advanced Simple MPEG-4 used in Divx should be supplanted over the next year by MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264). It'll be an open ISO standard, and the baseline profile shouldn't (cross fingers) have any of the patent and licensing issues that held up MPEG-4 Part 2's codecs so long.
You should be able to get at least a 3x improvement in compression efficiency compared to MPEG-2, so a full-length feature at standard definition on a 700 MB disc should be quite doable.
Of course, you can do this with propritary codecs like Windows Media Video today, but this IS slashdot...
My video compression blog
VHS has a ton of analog noise. This means that you'll need to encode the digital copy at a substantially higher data rate to get the same effective quality, and you'll have a pretty low ceiling on maximum quality.
The difference between even S-VHS and VHS is huge.
So, grabbing off DVD or straight from a high-bitrate PVR would be quite a bit better. And if you have to go through analog, make sure you're capturing via S-Video instead of composite. Otherwise areas of saturated color will get that annoying cross-hatching effect. It's isn't so noticible on TV, but man is it obvious on a computer monitor!
My video compression blog
Try this link.
;-)
I'm planning to update the site with all my latest findings later this week -- including a review of a Haupaugge tuner/capture card that has onboard hardware MPEG1/MPEG2 encoding.
Linux-based options are also being reviewed as I type this
" The SVCD spec does include subtitles. However, the existing linux software to create bin & cue files (vcdimager) doesn't yet deal w/ subtitles."
r -0 .7_UNSTABLE/NEWS.txt
http://www.vcdimager.org/pub/vcdimager/vcdimage
Are you certain?
It should be noted that DVD drives use a different laser color than standard CD drives. This change partly explains the increased density of DVDs, but it also makes it harder for DVD drives to read CD media. To make matters worse, the dye used in all CD-RW media is almost entirely invisible to DVD lasers. In truth, you are lucky to get the DVD player to read your media even the first time, and you can't possibly expect what manufactures rate their media for. I would be willing to bet, however, that if you put the "damaged" CD-RWs into a standard CD-ROM drive, it will read a near bit for bit replica of what you initially burnt.
It should also be noted that by burning all the raw sectors (2384 bytes vs 2048 bytes per sector) of the CD-RW, you are eliminating all the redundant error detecting and correcting information, so you end up with the data instability of audio CDs. Scratches most definately will become visible errors in your video because there is no redundant information to rebuild the perfect copy. Surely, media manufactures don't rate their media for 1000 rewrites of 100% bit for bit perfection throughout the entire CD, but rather, 100% bit for bit perfection after the CRC data is stored and used when read back.
01100110 'f'
01101001 'i'
01110010 'r'
01110011 's'
01110100 't'
00100000 ' '
01110000 'p'
01101111 'o'
01110011 's'
01110100 't'
00001010 'LF'
A burner with Mt. Rainier support (i.e. CD-MRW) might be useful for you. The format keeps a defect map, and can intelligently write around the trouble spots. Sure, you give up some space, but that seems a small price to pay to keep your RW's useful for beyond "a mere" 30-40 burns.
Personally, I'm waiting quite anxiously for the DVD-MRW drives to come out...