The DMCA is almost entirely redundant. As far as I can tell, in principle it/is/ entirely redundant--that is, it aims to stop copyright violations. The places where it adds new restrictions are in places where fair use would apply. For example, it is illegal for me to decrypt a DVD without licensed software. This doesn't stop people who are going to sell the DVD en masse. They're still going to decrypt the DVD, copy it, sell it, etc. However, that the distribution of such tools is illegal means that I can't easily get my hands on them (in theory). So people intent upon breaking the law will be doing what they've always done, and people wishing to exercise their fair use rights will be unable to. And people who want to help you illegally exercise your rights will find themselves in jail.
As for the new CA law, it adds something slightly new just like the DMCA does. Whereas before, it was only illegal to record a movie if the theater manager asked you to stop, now it's just plain illegal to. Of course, in both of these cases, you're likely to have issues with copyright infringement in addition to the penalties for operating the camera, but this bill appears to just remove the middle-manager.
But really, the problem in this case is that the law isn't specific enough to keep up with technology. That's probably exactly what the authors wanted, though. If a bill is fairly vague, that makes the slippery slope that much easier. What once was true only for traffic citations (ever hear that if a police officer wants to give you a ticket, he can find something that you're doing that's illegal?) is slowly becoming true for other aspects of life. If a cop (or in the case of citizen's arrests, any person) decides that they don't like you for whatever reason, they can pull you out of the theater, grab your phone, notice that it's turned on, and haul you to jail. At that point, you could be fined $2,500, have your phone confiscated, and be put in jail for a year. For having a phone. Some will probably say that this is farfetched, and hopefully it is, but tell that to my girlfriend who was ticketed for using a left-turn lane to--*gasp*--make a left turn.
I hate reading laws, so forgive me if this is covered in it, but if you are talking about a cellphone or PDA with a camera, then "operating" it once again could be taken in many different contexts. The PDA is a recording device, and by reading text on it, I'm operating the PDA. Asshats could get you arrested, and while the charges might not stick, you could be without your PDA indefinitely, as it would be confiscated for evidence and doesn't have to be given back in a timely fashion. There are plenty of articles on Slashdot about this, if you find it too hard to believe..
One thing I do when I go to a movie is to read on my PDA before it starts. Some PDAs come with cameras, and many nowadays come with microphones, even if they don't have a way to record video (does the law specify video recording? The article says "recording devices" but then says that the law is aimed at camcorders. "Recording devices" is just vague enough to cause concern, in my opinion, even though it's damned unlikely that a camera-equipped cell phone or PDA is going to be able to get the whole movie, and certainly not with any quality.
(although the MPAA, et. al. are not mentioned).
Wow, do the SUBMITTERS not read the story anymore? I quote from it: The effort is aimed mainly at camcorders, which account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is seeking to enact similar laws in other states and is backing an effort to make the illegal taping of a film a federal felony.
Heh.
And a final note, I've/never/ seen a recorded film for sale over the Internet. I suspect this is more spin, because even though all copyright infringement is against the law, people sometimes think differently about selling vs giving away for free.
DVD Shrink doesn't allow you to keep the structure of the DVD while removing titles. Thus if you want, you can pick and choose the titles to keep (using reauthor mode) but they will play sequentially on the new disc. You won't have a menu, and to get to the later titles you either have to jump to title (if your DVD player supports that--they don't all) or skip through all the chapters.
Recode, on the other hand, allows you to remove specific titles from your disc. So you can remove features that you don't want while maintaining the overall structure of the disc. Some people prefer this to just sequentially playing the titles.
Also, as an aside, sometimes DVD Shrink doesn't remove user protections correctly. And as a final note, the extra step you take to decrypt the DVD to your hard disk first before using Recode is useful when using Shrink, too. It cuts down on the wear-and-tear of the DVD drive, as long as you can rip-and-copy faster than Shrink can work on the data. Of course, it takes an additional step and a bit of time, but I like to take care of my equipment. And with that extra step, it's fairly rare that I prefer to use Shrink over Recode. Espcially when Ahead releases Recode 2, which will include the Deep Analysis option that Shrink 3.0beta5 has.
Nero Recode is a better option than DVD Shrink. It includes/almost/ all the same features, but one additional one that is quite important: you can remove certain titlesets, replacing them with a blank screen or a message stating that "This title has been removed."
Of course, to cover their own asses, Recode can't be used on DVDs that are CSS encrypted. So you'll have to figure out how to decrypt them yourself.
It's not a digital control. Implementing chapters is something that must be done intentionally. Lynch chose not to implement chapters. Lynch didn't "turn off chapters" as though all DVDs must, by definition , have chapters. You can do what you want with the DVD. It's just that one particular common component of the DVD (chapter breaks) is intentionally missing.
If you happen to want to record 6 hours worth of stuff, it delays you that long. This happens to me every so often when I want to archive stuff. Wanting to watch two hours of TV is more likely, so that delays me that long. This might or might not push me past my bedtime, leaving me to watch it the next day. I don't know why you throw in the "no such thing as live TV" bit. It's really unimportant in the scope of this discussion. What matters is being able to record and watch mostly at the same time as it's broadcast, not recorded.
But there's an ease of use coupled with the ability to record, watch, and fast forward all at the same time that makes TiVo and similar units an order of magnitude more dangerous than VCRs. Most of my friends with TiVos actually wait until about 10 minutes into their television show (20 for full hour shows) to watch, so that they can FF through the commercials. Traditional VCRs can't do that, because they're limited to either recording or playing back, but not both at the same time.
Also, not having to change out tapes means I'm more likely to record more shows. I already do this on my computer. I almost never watch TV anymore. If there's something I'm interested in, I cap it, edit out the commercials, and then watch it while doing my nightly email/websurfing. Not because I want to steal TV programming, but because those commercials take up precious bits on my CD/DVD. Also, it's easy to set up a batch of encodes and walk away.
Now a valid argument in place of yours is that people tend to tune out commercials if they even stay in front of the telly during them. But TiVo si a formalization of this process, which is what scares advertisers. Wasn't it some Turner executive that said that technically it was ok to go to the bathroom during commercials, but that having commercial-skip was pushing it too far?
Is the limitation on online play within the Nintendo Gamecube Broadband Adapter? Or is that just a glorified network card that depends upon the game to use?
As pigheaded as they can be about some things, I doubt they would do anything that stupid.
Like going after the original Game Genie, a device that takes nothing away from games, but extends and expands them? Of course, that was years ago, Nintendo has probably learned their lessons. And on all those GBA mods they tried to C&D.
You might want to use a scanning FAQ. There are a lot of one-time scans in the game that are very, very easy to miss. Even people using a faq have been known to miss some;)
I like that Safedisc scheme that was posted awhile back, where the software slowly begins malfunctioning. I think it has an excellent place in shareware. After the trial period is over, the product begins crashing. Support is only available for registered users.
Seems to me that this shouldn't be a problem for you. MS Activation only kicks in, what, two weeks after the initial installation? And you have a full working system until that time? In this world of license agreements and product activation, you don't need those machines going out with your work product key. Your users should be giving you their product keys for activation when they bring in their machine for the rebuild, or you should send their machine back out blank. Most of these people probably had install CDs with additional software that they might want, anyway, and remember that according to Microsoft, a license for the OEM version of their product isn't the same as the store bought version. What you do violates their agreements just as much as, say, downloading the corporate version to use in your testing when all you have purchased is the off-the-shelf version.
But PocketNes doesn't do full scaling. In unscaled mode, there is a lot cut off, but even in scaled mode some of the top and bottom is cut off. See the original link for details. When the guy says that text will be nigh unreadable, he's referring to scaling where the entire resolution is shrunk down to fit within the GBA's screen.
Ok, there's the cool factor of this, but not only would these be unwieldy (even with the smaller Famicom carts, you aren't going to carry these around in your pocket) but also resolution problems. The NES had a resolution of 256x240 while the GBA has 240x160 (http://www.pocketnes.org/faq.html. That means that right from the starta conversion has to be done and/or cropping. In fact, elsewhere on the PocketNES site, the emulator's author explains that scaling down to that resolution actually makes nearly all game text unreadable.
Straight ports are the way to go, although many of my favorite games probably will never see play on a GBA simply because they're too old and weren't released by Nintendo, who seems to be one of the few (if not the only) developers to release their classic games on the handheld.
This is a disturbing trend, to be sure. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles requires a GBA for each player unless you are in 1 player mode (which I've heard sucks). The Four Swords (Zelda spinoff?) for the Gamecube is similar. Zelda: The Four Swords (A Link to the Past) requires a second gameboy and a second copy of the game in order to unlock any of the new features. Now the cheapskate in me has a problem paying for content I'm certainly not going to use (very few of my friends have GBAs). But even when it/is/ content I am going to use, I probably won't be able to re-use it later. I still play old Green-And-Black Gameboy games to this day. Many of them were quite fun. And Nintendo is relying on nostalgia like this in their GBA line of games (ever notice how many games they put out that are just ports of older games?) But in 5 years, when I break out the old GBA to play some games, it's going to be even harder to find someone to help unlock this content.
This could have all been easily solved by having a passthrough on the e-reader, but I suppose that would have hindered the marketing department. At least you can save the levels, so if you have the e-reader and can borrow someone's GBA, you can save the new levels to the cartridge.
But actually, with a pricetag of roughly us$700, the higher the cost of a barebones PS2, the better. Why? Well when you add up the total cost of a PS2, hard drive, PVR, etc. to see whether the PSX is going to be worth it, the higher the cost of the respective components, the better deal the PSX seems to be. It would behoove Sony to hold out on the price drop until the PSX has been out a few months, just for those people in the middle range that would buy a PSX if the PS2 still costs $180, but just get a PS2+Tivo if the PS2 costs $99.
While this isn't directly addressed in the article, their attitude towards it is certainly shown:
The idea intrigues Alistair Kelman, an independent lawyer who specialises in copyright: "Fade is entirely in keeping with the spirit and great traditions of copyright." He points out that books tend to deteriorate with use and this prevents the secondhand market from competing with the market for new books. Why not the same for software?
Ok, that may not be Macrovision's ideas, but it's a good explanation. Other industries learned long ago that you can't build a product that's going to last--if you do, you'll go out of business.
It stops casual copying. That's certainly not what's killing the industry, but it does sell a few extra copies when people are either afraid or ignorant of the fact that you can get cracks online. If these schemes weren't on the discs, then when one of my friends bought a game, about 10 copies would be made and distributed so we could play online together. Cracks at least deter this to some extent.
Reading over the article, I have a few unanswered questions that almost make me want to pick up the CD just to see for myself:
1) Does the software ask your permission to install the device driver that mungs your ripped tracks? Note that there are two pieces of software on the CD: one that uses a device driver to prevent a CD ripper from getting a copy of the track onto the computer, and another that controls the DRM on the WMA files. The author didn't use the latter because it required accepting a EULA, but the former he obviously was able to test. Thus I suspect that it doesn't ask you, however it's possible that it does but doesn't require acceptance of a EULA. I doubt that, however.
2) Are the tracks rippable in Linux? Obviously the WMA wouldn't be, as they require software to handle the DRM. But without the drivers, the tracks on the CD appear to be rippable in Windows, and thus I assume, also in Linux or any other OS that doesn't run Windows code.
3) If (2) is true, then how long until Linux is considered to be circumvention software?
4) Does the EULA include a provision preventing you from bypassing the device driver?
Or a filter that can take, as parameters, the coordinates of the bad spot (including temporal.
Of course the primary problem here is this: What do you replace the spots with? I mean, you don't likely have the original frame. No matter what, you're going to be guessing, either based upon previous frames or using a blur, and it's still going to look bad most likely.
Oh, and any WDM capture device can cap to DivX, as long as your processor is up to the task. Of course, it's best to capture to a lossless format and do your encoding from there as you can then use multiple passes to ensure that you hit a target filesize. Even then, it's nowhere near the "hundreds of gigs" the original poster mentioned. There are plenty of compressed (lossless) codecs to choose from, and while the compression may not be great, it makes a huge difference. According to my calculations, roughly 23-31 gigs per hour of full frame (720x480*24fps) video. I hesitate to suggest that the original poster might be living in the stone age, but I saw a 80gig hard drive at Best Buy for $60 the other day. That should easily hold over 2 hours of lossless, 720x480 video. Now your only problem is going to be capturing it--the hard drive probably isnt' going to be fast enough!
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it's both typed out /and/ used as an acronym in the very next sentence :)
Preaching to the choir, buddy :)
/is/ entirely redundant--that is, it aims to stop copyright violations. The places where it adds new restrictions are in places where fair use would apply.
The DMCA is almost entirely redundant. As far as I can tell, in principle it
For example, it is illegal for me to decrypt a DVD without licensed software. This doesn't stop people who are going to sell the DVD en masse. They're still going to decrypt the DVD, copy it, sell it, etc. However, that the distribution of such tools is illegal means that I can't easily get my hands on them (in theory). So people intent upon breaking the law will be doing what they've always done, and people wishing to exercise their fair use rights will be unable to. And people who want to help you illegally exercise your rights will find themselves in jail.
As for the new CA law, it adds something slightly new just like the DMCA does. Whereas before, it was only illegal to record a movie if the theater manager asked you to stop, now it's just plain illegal to. Of course, in both of these cases, you're likely to have issues with copyright infringement in addition to the penalties for operating the camera, but this bill appears to just remove the middle-manager.
But really, the problem in this case is that the law isn't specific enough to keep up with technology. That's probably exactly what the authors wanted, though. If a bill is fairly vague, that makes the slippery slope that much easier. What once was true only for traffic citations (ever hear that if a police officer wants to give you a ticket, he can find something that you're doing that's illegal?) is slowly becoming true for other aspects of life. If a cop (or in the case of citizen's arrests, any person) decides that they don't like you for whatever reason, they can pull you out of the theater, grab your phone, notice that it's turned on, and haul you to jail. At that point, you could be fined $2,500, have your phone confiscated, and be put in jail for a year. For having a phone. Some will probably say that this is farfetched, and hopefully it is, but tell that to my girlfriend who was ticketed for using a left-turn lane to--*gasp*--make a left turn.
I hate reading laws, so forgive me if this is covered in it, but if you are talking about a cellphone or PDA with a camera, then "operating" it once again could be taken in many different contexts. The PDA is a recording device, and by reading text on it, I'm operating the PDA. Asshats could get you arrested, and while the charges might not stick, you could be without your PDA indefinitely, as it would be confiscated for evidence and doesn't have to be given back in a timely fashion. There are plenty of articles on Slashdot about this, if you find it too hard to believe..
One thing I do when I go to a movie is to read on my PDA before it starts. Some PDAs come with cameras, and many nowadays come with microphones, even if they don't have a way to record video (does the law specify video recording? The article says "recording devices" but then says that the law is aimed at camcorders. "Recording devices" is just vague enough to cause concern, in my opinion, even though it's damned unlikely that a camera-equipped cell phone or PDA is going to be able to get the whole movie, and certainly not with any quality.
/never/ seen a recorded film for sale over the Internet. I suspect this is more spin, because even though all copyright infringement is against the law, people sometimes think differently about selling vs giving away for free.
(although the MPAA, et. al. are not mentioned).
Wow, do the SUBMITTERS not read the story anymore? I quote from it:
The effort is aimed mainly at camcorders, which account for 92 percent of all illegal copies of films that appear for sale over the Internet and are sold on street corners, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is seeking to enact similar laws in other states and is backing an effort to make the illegal taping of a film a federal felony.
Heh.
And a final note, I've
Even more reason to get ext2/3 drivers ported (and ported well) to Windows.
DVD Shrink doesn't allow you to keep the structure of the DVD while removing titles. Thus if you want, you can pick and choose the titles to keep (using reauthor mode) but they will play sequentially on the new disc. You won't have a menu, and to get to the later titles you either have to jump to title (if your DVD player supports that--they don't all) or skip through all the chapters.
Recode, on the other hand, allows you to remove specific titles from your disc. So you can remove features that you don't want while maintaining the overall structure of the disc. Some people prefer this to just sequentially playing the titles.
Also, as an aside, sometimes DVD Shrink doesn't remove user protections correctly. And as a final note, the extra step you take to decrypt the DVD to your hard disk first before using Recode is useful when using Shrink, too. It cuts down on the wear-and-tear of the DVD drive, as long as you can rip-and-copy faster than Shrink can work on the data. Of course, it takes an additional step and a bit of time, but I like to take care of my equipment. And with that extra step, it's fairly rare that I prefer to use Shrink over Recode. Espcially when Ahead releases Recode 2, which will include the Deep Analysis option that Shrink 3.0beta5 has.
Nero Recode is a better option than DVD Shrink. It includes /almost/ all the same features, but one additional one that is quite important: you can remove certain titlesets, replacing them with a blank screen or a message stating that "This title has been removed."
Of course, to cover their own asses, Recode can't be used on DVDs that are CSS encrypted. So you'll have to figure out how to decrypt them yourself.
It's not a digital control. Implementing chapters is something that must be done intentionally. Lynch chose not to implement chapters. Lynch didn't "turn off chapters" as though all DVDs must, by definition , have chapters. You can do what you want with the DVD. It's just that one particular common component of the DVD (chapter breaks) is intentionally missing.
And if only a handful of people were doing it in the 80s, and now everyone can do it ...
Nevermind.
If you happen to want to record 6 hours worth of stuff, it delays you that long. This happens to me every so often when I want to archive stuff. Wanting to watch two hours of TV is more likely, so that delays me that long. This might or might not push me past my bedtime, leaving me to watch it the next day.
I don't know why you throw in the "no such thing as live TV" bit. It's really unimportant in the scope of this discussion. What matters is being able to record and watch mostly at the same time as it's broadcast, not recorded.
But there's an ease of use coupled with the ability to record, watch, and fast forward all at the same time that makes TiVo and similar units an order of magnitude more dangerous than VCRs. Most of my friends with TiVos actually wait until about 10 minutes into their television show (20 for full hour shows) to watch, so that they can FF through the commercials. Traditional VCRs can't do that, because they're limited to either recording or playing back, but not both at the same time.
Also, not having to change out tapes means I'm more likely to record more shows. I already do this on my computer. I almost never watch TV anymore. If there's something I'm interested in, I cap it, edit out the commercials, and then watch it while doing my nightly email/websurfing. Not because I want to steal TV programming, but because those commercials take up precious bits on my CD/DVD. Also, it's easy to set up a batch of encodes and walk away.
Now a valid argument in place of yours is that people tend to tune out commercials if they even stay in front of the telly during them. But TiVo si a formalization of this process, which is what scares advertisers. Wasn't it some Turner executive that said that technically it was ok to go to the bathroom during commercials, but that having commercial-skip was pushing it too far?
Is the limitation on online play within the Nintendo Gamecube Broadband Adapter? Or is that just a glorified network card that depends upon the game to use?
As pigheaded as they can be about some things, I doubt they would do anything that stupid.
Like going after the original Game Genie, a device that takes nothing away from games, but extends and expands them? Of course, that was years ago, Nintendo has probably learned their lessons. And on all those GBA mods they tried to C&D.
You might want to use a scanning FAQ. There are a lot of one-time scans in the game that are very, very easy to miss. Even people using a faq have been known to miss some ;)
I like that Safedisc scheme that was posted awhile back, where the software slowly begins malfunctioning. I think it has an excellent place in shareware. After the trial period is over, the product begins crashing. Support is only available for registered users.
Seems to me that this shouldn't be a problem for you. MS Activation only kicks in, what, two weeks after the initial installation? And you have a full working system until that time? In this world of license agreements and product activation, you don't need those machines going out with your work product key. Your users should be giving you their product keys for activation when they bring in their machine for the rebuild, or you should send their machine back out blank. Most of these people probably had install CDs with additional software that they might want, anyway, and remember that according to Microsoft, a license for the OEM version of their product isn't the same as the store bought version. What you do violates their agreements just as much as, say, downloading the corporate version to use in your testing when all you have purchased is the off-the-shelf version.
But PocketNes doesn't do full scaling. In unscaled mode, there is a lot cut off, but even in scaled mode some of the top and bottom is cut off. See the original link for details. When the guy says that text will be nigh unreadable, he's referring to scaling where the entire resolution is shrunk down to fit within the GBA's screen.
Ok, there's the cool factor of this, but not only would these be unwieldy (even with the smaller Famicom carts, you aren't going to carry these around in your pocket) but also resolution problems. The NES had a resolution of 256x240 while the GBA has 240x160 (http://www.pocketnes.org/faq.html. That means that right from the starta conversion has to be done and/or cropping. In fact, elsewhere on the PocketNES site, the emulator's author explains that scaling down to that resolution actually makes nearly all game text unreadable.
Straight ports are the way to go, although many of my favorite games probably will never see play on a GBA simply because they're too old and weren't released by Nintendo, who seems to be one of the few (if not the only) developers to release their classic games on the handheld.
This is a disturbing trend, to be sure. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles requires a GBA for each player unless you are in 1 player mode (which I've heard sucks). The Four Swords (Zelda spinoff?) for the Gamecube is similar. Zelda: The Four Swords (A Link to the Past) requires a second gameboy and a second copy of the game in order to unlock any of the new features. /is/ content I am going to use, I probably won't be able to re-use it later. I still play old Green-And-Black Gameboy games to this day. Many of them were quite fun. And Nintendo is relying on nostalgia like this in their GBA line of games (ever notice how many games they put out that are just ports of older games?) But in 5 years, when I break out the old GBA to play some games, it's going to be even harder to find someone to help unlock this content.
Now the cheapskate in me has a problem paying for content I'm certainly not going to use (very few of my friends have GBAs). But even when it
This could have all been easily solved by having a passthrough on the e-reader, but I suppose that would have hindered the marketing department. At least you can save the levels, so if you have the e-reader and can borrow someone's GBA, you can save the new levels to the cartridge.
But actually, with a pricetag of roughly us$700, the higher the cost of a barebones PS2, the better. Why? Well when you add up the total cost of a PS2, hard drive, PVR, etc. to see whether the PSX is going to be worth it, the higher the cost of the respective components, the better deal the PSX seems to be. It would behoove Sony to hold out on the price drop until the PSX has been out a few months, just for those people in the middle range that would buy a PSX if the PS2 still costs $180, but just get a PS2+Tivo if the PS2 costs $99.
Where'd you get an XBox for $80 minus the cost of the mod?
Or was that total cost actually Enron math?
While this isn't directly addressed in the article, their attitude towards it is certainly shown:
The idea intrigues Alistair Kelman, an independent lawyer who specialises in copyright: "Fade is entirely in keeping with the spirit and great traditions of copyright." He points out that books tend to deteriorate with use and this prevents the secondhand market from competing with the market for new books. Why not the same for software?
Ok, that may not be Macrovision's ideas, but it's a good explanation. Other industries learned long ago that you can't build a product that's going to last--if you do, you'll go out of business.
Cracks at least deter this to some extent.
Er, that should be, copy protection at least deters this to some extent.
It stops casual copying. That's certainly not what's killing the industry, but it does sell a few extra copies when people are either afraid or ignorant of the fact that you can get cracks online. If these schemes weren't on the discs, then when one of my friends bought a game, about 10 copies would be made and distributed so we could play online together. Cracks at least deter this to some extent.
Reading over the article, I have a few unanswered questions that almost make me want to pick up the CD just to see for myself:
1) Does the software ask your permission to install the device driver that mungs your ripped tracks? Note that there are two pieces of software on the CD: one that uses a device driver to prevent a CD ripper from getting a copy of the track onto the computer, and another that controls the DRM on the WMA files. The author didn't use the latter because it required accepting a EULA, but the former he obviously was able to test. Thus I suspect that it doesn't ask you, however it's possible that it does but doesn't require acceptance of a EULA. I doubt that, however.
2) Are the tracks rippable in Linux? Obviously the WMA wouldn't be, as they require software to handle the DRM. But without the drivers, the tracks on the CD appear to be rippable in Windows, and thus I assume, also in Linux or any other OS that doesn't run Windows code.
3) If (2) is true, then how long until Linux is considered to be circumvention software?
4) Does the EULA include a provision preventing you from bypassing the device driver?
Or a filter that can take, as parameters, the coordinates of the bad spot (including temporal.
Of course the primary problem here is this: What do you replace the spots with? I mean, you don't likely have the original frame. No matter what, you're going to be guessing, either based upon previous frames or using a blur, and it's still going to look bad most likely.
Oh, and any WDM capture device can cap to DivX, as long as your processor is up to the task. Of course, it's best to capture to a lossless format and do your encoding from there as you can then use multiple passes to ensure that you hit a target filesize. Even then, it's nowhere near the "hundreds of gigs" the original poster mentioned. There are plenty of compressed (lossless) codecs to choose from, and while the compression may not be great, it makes a huge difference. According to my calculations, roughly 23-31 gigs per hour of full frame (720x480*24fps) video. I hesitate to suggest that the original poster might be living in the stone age, but I saw a 80gig hard drive at Best Buy for $60 the other day. That should easily hold over 2 hours of lossless, 720x480 video. Now your only problem is going to be capturing it--the hard drive probably isnt' going to be fast enough!