In article <ws21-931F14.13563513072007 DeleteThis @newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
Bill Steele <ws21 DeleteThis @cornell.edu> wrote:
>1. You can take a tape and put it in a box and save it for a long time.
>2. You can record and save small portions of a program. (Say, to take a
>horrible example, you wanted to collect all of Andy Rooney's comments on
>one tape.)
Yes, for archiving, something with removable media beats something that has no
removable media.
However, like all VCRs, D-VHS is awful. It's actually worse, because unless
you're using the DVHS-quality tapes, you get even more degradation than normal
from just leaving the tape in a box. Subsequent playback and recordings also
degrade the quality. (There's some ECC with D-VHS, but going to the cheap VHS
tapes you have lying around will overload that pretty quickly.)
Optical media are better for archiving, in the sense that playback doesn't
degrade the content, but there's a huge variance in archival quality for the
media -- some DVD-Rs can degrade in a year or so, while some are "rated" for
50+ years. But, of course, nobody's *had* them that long, so it's only
statistical.
At this point, for archiving video, I honestly have to recommend hard disks to
people. Either use RAID of some sort, or a filesystem (such as ZFS) which has
data integrity built in. Then make new copies periodically, verify them, and
recyle the old drives.
>> Stay informed about: Just bought myself a HDTV vcr (yes high-definition in a VCR) 
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