Saving by Backing-Up DVDs

I have been pretty sick the past week along with several of my children. My current temperature is a mild 101.1F (or 34.4C). One of the benefits of my illness is that it allowed me to finish up my scheme for digitizing all of our films.

Our goal was to place our all video tapes and DVDs on our hard drive of our computer.
One of the main reasons is to avoid repurchasing films we already own as tape and to insure that our DVD movies last. We have always had a terrible experience with DVDs and CDs. They always get scratched. No understatement when you have 6 kids. The kids also present a real problem in regard to keeping DVDs, CDs and Tapes organized. Putting all of them on the computer will save us the on-going headache of cleaning up disks that have not been put away. There is also the the added bonus of allowing us to digitize and share some of our family video tapes with others. In particular I had done an interview with my great grand uncle John Hanley several years ago before he passed away. He was in his late 90s but intellectually alert and able to provide many details about his upbringing in Roscommon, Ireland and his later life in Jersey City. After his death I have had several requests from his grand children and great grand children for a copy.

The technical plan was as follows. The first step was to capture our existing videos. This requires a computer video capture card that allows the computer to display and record video on the computer. I acquired a video capture card (Hauppauge 250/350) that snaps right into the computer (PCI bus). The card costs about $125. The card has a antenna connection and a TV/VCR connection that allows for easy installation to the VCR. The antenna connection is provided because the card also acts as a TV receiver. This basically allows the computer to act like a TV. The card supports both sides of the Atlantic - NTSC (North America) and PAL (Europe).

The second piece of the strategy was to duplicate DVDs. In doing a little search of the web I came across several pages which provided directions on how to use two free tools that allow computers to make DVD copies. Note: Always be careful of where you download any software.

Here are the steps involved in making DVD copies.

1) Copy DVDs to the Hard Drive. You can use a program called DVD Decrypter to copy your DVD on to your hard drive. It is simple to use. Note: The program can take some time to go through an entire DVD. This will be dependent on the speed of your machine. Each DVD requires about 10 GB.
2) Shrink the DVD - Most DVD burners can only burn a little over 4.5GB. Many of todays DVDs are bigger. This requires a program that will diminish the size of the DVD to fit the smaller DVD size that average computers can burn. You can use a free program called DVD Shrink. It is a free program. It will automatically shrink down the DVD files to the appropriate size.
3) DVD Burning - Most computers come with this software loaded. If you don't have a program for burning a DVD one of the most recommended is Nero.

Since our plan was around keeping our backups on our computer, I knew that I had to drastically increase the size of my hard drives. Also I wanted to upgrade my hard drive to the new SATA interface from slow IDE. This allowed my hard drives to transfer information much quicker. So with about $300 I bought two 300 GB hard drives and set them up as a 600GB RAID. Everything is installed and working. It is a good feeling when a project works out. My next job is to find a good film editing program to improve some of the home videos.