Review: DVDs and Videos

[jack]

DVD:

No need to rewind
Easy skip ahead
Menus to view different options non-linearly
Subtitles
Small storage space

Video:

Built-in ability to skip stupid intros, piracy ads, menus, etc
Low hassle recording
Cheap
No stupid bonus features

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yeah - a really fancy home media centre setup that is backed to disk will use something like MPEG 4 H.264 to store the video, so you get a lot more video of the same quality for the amount of storage. Whereas DVDs are all MPEG2.

I believe most of the cheaper disk based recorders (e.g. the Sky+ box) just dump the off the air MPEG2 stream to disk. They don't recompress it or anything... and if my bouts of downloading MPEG2 off the air video is anything to go by the bitrate is a lot higher than the bitrate used on DVDs.

As an aside: All the BBCs stuff is (temporarily) on their iPlayer website, and with an appropriate program you can download the MPEG4 video for safe keeping.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

As an aside: All the BBCs stuff is (temporarily) on their iPlayer website, and with an appropriate program you can download the MPEG4 video for safe keeping.

Ooh, now *that* is interesting!

[robhu.livejournal.com]

(how to do this left as an exercise for the reader...)

Actually there are some Python (I think) scripts knocking around that do it. I use a Mac OS X only app that does it.

I'd google for the scripts and stuff - but it's sufficiently complicated to do on non Mac platforms atm (AFAICT) that unless you're really committed it's probably not worth doing. (and you can download everything on UK television through USENET or Bittorrent at much higher quality than what the BBC provides...)