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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Transcoding

Transcoding is a term used in the media referring to the conversion of sound and/or video images from one format to another. Last year the Gorse Fox used a service from http://www.convertmyvideo.co.uk/ to transfer some old Video8 tapes to DVD. The service was superb and GF resolved top work his way through his back-catalogue of family videos to convert them all… and promptly forgot!

This week, whilst looking for something entirely unconnected with video he came across the two tapes that were converted last year. This acted as a stimulus and the Gorse Fox has just dispatched two more tapes for transcoding.

Why bother? you may ask. Well the problem is that tape does degrade over time and it would be a shame if some of these masterpieces were lost… but more to the point GF no longer has a device capable of playing them – so converting them to a DVD format will prevent further degradation and also ensure that they can be watched or perhaps edited.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You might be interested in Handbrake (open source multi-platform video conversion/ripper software) when your DVD arrives and you feel the need to digitise it further for editing purposes. :-) Highly recommended.