Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs?

ewanrg asks: "I have about 1/2 Terabyte of storage on my couple of home systems, and it's filling up rapidly with captured Home Videos and shows recorded off my TiVO. I'm thinking that if I want to get through the next season of TV and the Holiday season at home I need to add at least a Terabyte of storage. My first thought was to use DVD-R (since I have a burner). However, if you assume that you use about 4.4 Gigs (in real terms) per DVD-R, then you'd need 230 DV-Rs to hold about a terabyte of data. Inconvenient if you're trying to find which of 10 DVDs you put that episode of Futurama on - particularly if you recorded them as they came (over a few years) rather than wait until you could get them every night on Cartoon Network. I've also looked at the various NAS devices out there, but $8-$20K seems a bit much. What I'd really like would be an inexpensive drive or array I could hook up to my PC which has a S-Video out port. I could then use all sorts of Media Library programs to find a file and play it. Can folks suggest something big and reasonably fast with an affordable prosumer price tag?"

Comments

TiVo - Transcode TySteam to MPEG2 - DiVX5

[delus10n0]

That's the process I'm currently using. I've installed a network card (via 9thtee.com) in my TiVo and installed TiVoWeb on it. I also changed the "best quality" resolution to be 720x480 (instead of the default 480x480) -- I use TyTool to extract the shows onto my PC as TyStreams or MPEG2 files, and then use AVISynth scripts to crop/deinterlace them. After that I load them up into VirtualDub-Mod and cut out commercials, add the audio track, and set up a queue job to encode two passes out to DiVX AVI. I use 1250kbps for "TV Shows" and 2150kbps for "Music Videos" and higher motion stuff. For audio I use LAME --alt-preset 96 which outputs ABR 96kbps files. A 15 minute show ends up around 100megabytes. Not that bad.

Deinterlacing television is a pain, and I think that's why a lot of people go down the MPEG2/SVCD route (it handles interlacing natively.) I've found three solutions for AVISynth that are pretty decent:

1) Using SmoothDeinterlacer (visit www.100fps.com for more info on that)

2) Using DeComb - http://www.neuron2.net/decomb/decombnew.html

3) Using DGBob - http://www.neuron2.net/dgbob/dgbob.html

Anyhow, let me know if anyone needs help. I'm going to write a guide on this soon and put up a website detailing my steps.