Archiving HD and SD video

[nlt499]

What is the best way any of you have found to archive HD or SD video? The requirements are that little to no quality is lost and all atributes are maintained (ie: HD sound maintains 5.1 audio). I'd like to be able to burn these off onto DVD media as data files.

I know step 1 is to cut out the commeicals and VideoRedo seems to be the best software for that. What about the rest of it?
I've heard a lot of people just say they keep it in original mpeg2 format since hard drives are so cheap now. That's not really an option, if I want to archive a season of 24 in HD that would be ~240gig (maybe less without the commercials), I couldn't keep that around for very long on my hard drive.
Is H.264 the best archiving option? WMV HD or DivxHD? I've heard Divx HD gets rid of the 5.1 audio so that wouldn't be viable.
What do you guys do?

P.S.
I want to thank all of you for answering the questions I've posted on here and for the wealth of knowledge available on this forum. I've just finished building my HTPC rig upgraded with HD capabilities and it works great. I'm running a P4 2.4(HyperThread) processor on an 865 chipset. My video card is a nVidia 6600GT and I'm running a sapphire Theatrix for SD capture and a HDHomerun for QAM HD capture. The HDHR is awesome. I'm running Media Center for front end and BTV4.6.1 for TV. Unfortunately I only have Media Center 2002, I think i need to upgrade it since i can't play the .TS files through the Media center interface. I obviously still have some tweeking to do here and there but this thing is great. Thanks again.

[obperryo]

Originally Posted by nlt499

What is the best way any of you have found to archive HD or SD video? The requirements are that little to no quality is lost and all atributes are maintained (ie: HD sound maintains 5.1 audio). I'd like to be able to burn these off onto DVD media as data files.

I know step 1 is to cut out the commeicals and VideoRedo seems to be the best software for that. What about the rest of it?
I've heard a lot of people just say they keep it in original mpeg2 format since hard drives are so cheap now. That's not really an option, if I want to archive a season of 24 in HD that would be ~240gig (maybe less without the commercials), I couldn't keep that around for very long on my hard drive.
Is H.264 the best archiving option? WMV HD or DivxHD? I've heard Divx HD gets rid of the 5.1 audio so that wouldn't be viable.
What do you guys do?

P.S.
I want to thank all of you for answering the questions I've posted on here and for the wealth of knowledge available on this forum. I've just finished building my HTPC rig upgraded with HD capabilities and it works great. I'm running a P4 2.4(HyperThread) processor on an 865 chipset. My video card is a nVidia 6600GT and I'm running a sapphire Theatrix for SD capture and a HDHomerun for QAM HD capture. The HDHR is awesome. I'm running Media Center for front end and BTV4.6.1 for TV. Unfortunately I only have Media Center 2002, I think i need to upgrade it since i can't play the .TS files through the Media center interface. I obviously still have some tweeking to do here and there but this thing is great. Thanks again.

Copy the recorded .tp file to another computer.
Clean it up with videoRedo keeping AC3, I then save as a .ts file.
http://www.svcd2dvd.com/HDTV2DVD/ (free version bunrs a VIDEO_TS folder and will compress if DVDShrink is installed.)
http://www.svcd2dvd.com (advanced pay verson $40)

The free version works great if you don't care about menu's and chapters! It makes your VIDEO_TS folder then you burn it to DVD.
I did this with SharkTale last week and it came out great!... Good DVD quality.

Update: Tonight I burned 12 shows with a resolution of 720x480, edited to remove comercials with videoRedo resulting in 20 to 25 minutes each, totaling 4.5hrs. This video is a cartoon show called Kim Possible of which my son filled up the hard drive with, thus moving them to dvd. Yea, I know, if you got kids, your can hear that song now. Total video was 18.3G. Using a trial version of the svcd2dvd (w/dvdShrink to compress and Nero to burn, both used by svcd2dvd) I fit it to a dual layer disk at 7.9G with a menu. This is a cartoon which usually looks a little better than normal movies, but the video looked great on my 57" wide screen, especially for an analog recording. I am amazed!

.

[nlt499]

Obperryo, thanks for the response.

Anyone else? What have you guys found to be the best way to archive recordings while maintaining the video and audio quality.

[bits]

IMO leave it as is minus the commercials. Add more HDDs and when I do want to keep something but do not want it taking up HDD space I burn it to DVD provided the file fits or can be logically and easily split. Dual layer DVDs are still too expensive IMO.

In certain situations with ts files I will convert to SD using HDTVtoDVD but I really try not to do this.

If I do burn to DVD I use TMPGenc DVD Author+Imgburn. But just burning as a data file will work provided you do not want to use it in a set top DVD player.

DVD storage can become a problem so I label them using a Sharpy and store them in the clear plastic sleeves and put them into boxes used for index cards. You can store a lot of DVDs in a relatively small amount of space.

Finally I have learned to be selective in what I keep, whether it is on the HDD or on DVD. Most of what you save you will never look at again...even if you really think you will...chances are real good you won't.

One other thought in regards to adding HDDs. I ran out of room and connections in my main PC for additional HDDs and starting adding USB drives. This works fairly well but can get clunky and may not be the best solution when streaming high bit rate HD video. About 3 months ago I put together a Linux based server made from an old Dell 2GHz and 512DRAM. Actually you could use something a lot older and less powerfull but that was what I had access to. There are numerous free and cost effective Linux solutions available. The first one I tried was NASLite2 USB. The Linux OS boots and runs from a USB jump drive and the DRAM. I populated the Dell case with 4 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives (purchased a PCI SATA controller card) and it works quite nicely. All of the drives are accessable to all of my windows machines and NMPs. Recently I went with Linspire/Freespire which can run from a CD or be installed to HDD. I did this because I wanted to run server software and NASLite does not have that capability. Freespire is free as is PC-BSD, Ubuntu, KnoppMyth and Knoppix.

Just a thought....