Burning recordings

[SiteWolf]

Ok...one reason I'm interested in Beyond TV in the first place is to be able to both archive shows I record to disk and so that my recordings are portable. For example, I have a lake cabin and don't have cable/dish out there.....so I'd like to be able to take some stuff with me for those times I feel like kicking back to my favorite show.

Being new to all this I'm running into some 'issues'.

1.) Even reducing the quality to 'Fair' and using mpeg-2 a one hour show is almost a gig (~970megs)....with commercials which I know there's progs out there to take out, but I haven't tried 'em...nor do I expect commercials take up enough space to get a 1 gig file down enough to fit on a disk.....and this still assumes I'm burning an mpg and playing it on a DVD player that plays mpgs. I guess if I just broke down and bought a DVD burner, I'd have fewer 'issues'.

2.) At the moment, tho, I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong...or maybe nothing. I recorded yesterday's Monk marathon for example....so have mpgs for each one hour episode. Everything looks fine when I play them in Beyond TV. But...if I try and view them thru Media Player I get audio only- no video. Am I just missing a codec?

[Eric3a]

VCDs (ie putting mpegs on CDs) work but the amount of useful data is around 500 Megs, so I found these rather useless.
If you want to play back using a stand alone DVD then a DVD burner has to be the answer.

Personally I use my laptop for playback. Just got an external HD for it and use that disk for recompressed wmvs.

As for your windows media player I think you're missing a DVD decoder.
Eric

[Josch]

I got a DVD burner for my latest setup and I am so happy I went that way. Then to go a step further, I got this:

http://www.abtelectronics.com/script...lag=1087673720

little portable DVD player / .mp3 / .jpg player/ viewer. I love this setup, because I don't want to have to whip out my laptop everytime I want to see a show. I much rather have something that can be gotten out, turned on, and played without even pulling over to the side of the road. This little unit even plays DVD data format in addition to CDR, so I loaded my entire mp3 collection onto 1 single DVD+R 4.7gb disc, and I STILL didn't even fill the whole thing up. For the cheap price of DVD burners now (single layer 4.7gb are way cheaper now ever since 8.5 gb dual layer burners came out), you can't afford NOT to have one. You can also burn your backup images of your computer's OS onto DVD and protect all your files somewhere else in case you ever have harddrive failure, or your house burns down. Too many reasons to just take the step. Ever since I got my DVD burner, I haven't even burned a single CDR and that was a couple months ago.

Since I got my DVD burner, I always record everything in the best quality, and you can buy double sided DVD+R discs or just get a dual layer DVD burner to fit a full length movie onto one DVD, or you can use DVD skrink (a program) to make a movie fit onto a 4.7 gb disc. I usually only record hour long shows most the time, so my material usually always fits uncompressed onto a single sided DVD+R just fine. DVD+Rs will play on any home DVD player, or in my laptop, etc. I have also used it already and been converting all my DV camera AVI files to Mpeg2 format and have since authored and burned DVD that just contains all my family events from the camera. I've made several copies of those DVDs and already given them to family members who live far away. too many reasons