Q: I have a bunch of 200 + MB files TV episodes. I have them separated by season (only 3 seasons), and would like a backup CD. Im thinking about them in RAC, but Im not sure how to deal with doing that. Would I do a show at a time? Or should I try for a full season (and RAR, which is a few gigs). I would like help.
Thanks
Re:Nah, compressing them doesn't do a whole lot – formats like these have their own compression algos, RAR, ACE and ZIP aren't much more effective. Converting them to DivX won't do a whole lot either, DivX is more effective, but not that much more. What's worse, though, you'll be converting from one lossy compression to another, which results in pretty bad quality.
There are two things you could sensibly do, in my eyes, you could try to overburn one CD – maybe there's a case where 4 eps would fit if the capacity was 50 MB higher or so, which might be reached by overburning. Or you could split the files, so that you have one half of an episode on the one, the other half on another CD. There are tools to split and rejoin files in arbitrary sizes, so you could split one ep into 4 packs à 50 megs and spread those over 4 CDs. Alternatively, you could put all into one huge RAR or ACE archive and tell the program to create multiple partial archives of 700 MB. That would get you the minimum number of CDs overall.
The obvious disadvantage to spreading and especially spreading a large archive is that you'd need multiple or even all CDs to access one episode. Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble, I always "waste" a CD and put only 200 megs on it, or I put some other stuff on it besides the one episode. They're getting so cheap, I don't really care.
Re:well, I tried to put them on CD, and I'm having a 50 mb buffer for each CD (16 CDs). The last CD only has 1 file, 200mb. If I could get the whole CD to fill up, then I could probably get the total down to about 10 CDs.
I've tried to rar and zip them, but I'm only saving 5 mb a file, which is not enough to add that last file on.
I think I'll back them up and then convert them to divx.
thanks
Re:200M is about as small as they'll get with decent quality and I don't even think rar would help much. You could try converting them to DivX, usually get them about half the size of the mpg and keeps pretty good quality.
Most of my DivX videos of TV episodes hang around 200M anyway, although I have a DVD-RW so I put them on DVD-R =)
Re:You could zip them too, or lower the bit rate.
guy
Re:mpg files. I would like to pack as many in as little number of disks. I guess that would be the easiest, though.
thanks
Re:What format are they in now? If it's a usable format (one you can watch from) why not just burn three to a disk?
guy
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