Think the next rip I do will be to a dvd standard..just for seeing what happens and what's said.I hate seeign that extra space wasted on my dvd's when I burn them off...that's one of the reasons I put trailers up too because I am sure others feel the way I do about it.

I'm not trying to be critical of your opinion.. I just do nto understand it... Wouldn't more file size to the video stream = less compression = better image?

I just can't understand the grounds of your objections. As far as I can tell it seams to be... well the xtra meg means so little why bother.... is that what you mean?

I was concerned over your comments about it being used for things other than video TBH.

There still are people without dvd writers and whilst they are very cheap in the UK and US, that certainly isn't the case all over the world and I don't want to excluse them.

Also, STR are probably closer to being a "proper" release group than most and I think it would be harmful to our spreading (due to some sites / ftp's non acceptance of these new "standards") were we to change.

I don't think it matters as much on 2CD releases because we do fewer of of them.

I couldn't care less whether anyone agrees with me or understands my POV, but for the time being I am sticking with 700mb releases.

I'm not closed to the idea though, but I'd rather wait and see, it's fine for competant rippers like USB who can make sure that their files aren't oversized, but when oversized rips start flooding through and you then can't fit these new sized rips on DVD without overburning (which on DVD is FAR from reliable or a widespread ability) I think there will be problems.

I hear you...that was one of my concerns as well...the release I'm doing would have been a 2 cd rip anyway so I was just seeing how it would go down with everyone...Not sure if I would put this as my standard yet though..More as an experiment.

I voted 'yes'. I'd be in favor of the 1/6th DVD option myself. An extra 47MB. here or there never hurt.

Bit of thread ressurecting here...

Given how cheap HDs are these days, are many of you still burning to CD/DVD?

Pretty much everything I encode (most not for sharing) I just keep the original resolution, pick a bitrate of about 1200 and just end up with whatever filesize it gives me. Well, excepting my GK problem as mentioned here

Rather a simplistic approach, I know, but the quality looks good enough to me and I'm not really worried if the file is a few mb bigger than it really needs to be. A £70 320gb drive still holds a fair few movies.

But as you can see, I'm still learning, so always open to suggestions!

What happens when you fill the HD??

I've got over 5000 avi's which would mean I need roughly 3TB just to store those movies (!) which would mean an outlay of ~1500 on hard disks just to store what I already have

DVD's are cheaper and easier IMHO. I only need ~700 at a cost of ~£140

(*disclaimer - My maths could be VERY wrong here I'm tired and I've left some leeway for 2CD rips etc )

Firstly, you pull the lever and hotswap in another hdd when one is full. HDD are just bigger, better, stronger removable media that lasts longer and you can read and write from. (read at the bottom and look at the pictures for a run down of a hdd storage solution)

Hdd storage works out a lot cheaper when you work out the fact DVDrs are very short lived media, time, effort and overheads. Your maths also doesn't account for convienance and the most important commodity for me, time and management.

Onto the maths though. You get a lot of wasted space on your dvdrs, you'd need way more than 700, whereas hdd has no overhead since its a mass of space where as with dvdr its split into unnatural and inconvienant quantities with which rips don't fit (AFR is designed to fix this which is why its cool but unfortunately there's always going to be the majority of rips that are 700mb what with the scene and the spread of the AFR concept [I mean you yourself are/were against it for starters ], but once you switch to hdd there's no need to go back to slow, clumbersome dvdr backup).

Think about the maths though (we won't include CRC in this), on 3TB of dvdr, you'd have at least 180GB (6%) of wasted space that your not including, where you have space left and can only fit 6 cds on a disk. Your maths makes out as though its contiguous space, which means your answer is way off, or rather more like FOX news maths since if you cut out all aspects of limitations and reality it works . If you buy dvdr media, it does work out cheaper, just, but it also means they last a tiny fraction of what hdd solutions do.

DVDr is cheaper, but not by nearly that much, and you get a hell of a lot of problems with it. The one that's most annoying for me is the sheer amount of time you waste with it, but there's technical, space and loss issues.

There are a lot of articles that do the sums and take these factors into space that might get you thinking about the true cost of dvdr, waste that you might not think about until you step back, but you get wasted space, coasters, low life expactancy and a waste of time and effort with dvdr. Takes far too long and the benefit just isn't there.

Give me a while and i'll dig up some articles for you (although this was a while back, if you go through digg i know there was a buttload posted). I'd already given up on dvdr as any useful solution a long while back, but since there's been a birrage of articles i've read since that came to the same conclusion. DVDr is neither as cheap or as good a stroage solution when you sit back and think about the inconvenience of cataloguing, storage, and the life expectancy. You get advantages of being able to delete older antequated rips, no wastage of space (10%+). The only plus point of dvdr is that you can pop it in a player and for the time that its readable that might be convienant if you don't have a networked player.

I don't use dvdr storage myself anymore. I evaluated the options and it doesn't work out in dvdrs favor. I'm just burning off my last avis that i'd already setup and organised; its too expensive, inflexible, inconvientant and annoying. Its just not a viable solution anymore. Like cdr, it was at first, but now its just antequated.

I also don't think fixed hdd is a good solution (like these external sealed drive products, do not use these... dvdr is better), nor external unless its a networked hdd array you can switch, I use switchable hdd. The lifespan of an inactive hdd is a long, long time. Its the most convienant and cost effective, archiving is an absolute doddle and finding a rip is really easy. It took me seconds to print out a report of my hdd stored rips and ages to find hdd on dvd media, catlaguing dvdr helps but takes so damn to add the stuff.

Anyway, first i bought four of these:

which were cool, but the racks they stopped selling.

so instead now I use these:

http://anonym.to/?http://www.scan.co.uk ... tID=387508

You just slot the hdd in the front Storage of the hdd is a slight problem, you need a draw for this or sometihng.

I also have another tip. I would recommend installed the EXT3 driver for windows, this will mean your hdd is formated in probably the best filesystem format which never needs defragmenting (inode based iirc), and supports large files just like NTFS.



So anyway, a bit longer than i intended, but your sums are indeed off. DVDr is cheaper in pure monetary value, but more expensive in terms of time, convienance and lasts a mere fraction of the time hdd does. So I'd take the different viewpoint DVDr costs more.


ps. its quite odd this, the advanced file size thread at fh has ended in this same deviation:
http://fileheaven.org/forum/viewtopic.p ... c&start=80

There's another thread somewhere when i first made the switch that sums up the benefits too.

that's about 99% more text than i intended

Short, +1 for hdd, and think beyond fixed hdd solutions, internal drive yes, but switchable

Don't think about a fixed drive, or an external hdd like those crappy usb things. Those are junk.

So basically afs rips are now obsolete.

now a GB limit has to be set instead of disc fraction...

What HDD size are you using (i.e what's the sweet spot between cost and capacity?)

Well i have differing sizes, I bought four 250GB Samsungs for the initial hot swapping a long time back, but just bought 2 400GB drives a few weeks back. I think they were about £60 - £90 (pushing to £90 most likely but i can't remember ). I wouldn't use them for anything other than removable storage though. They will last for storage though since hdd failure is nearly always stress and usage and those particular ones are archiving.

1TB hdd ranges are now coming this fall (hdd is about 20months moore's law), so the prices will drop for all the current 500GB+ ones that are out.

Samsung's drives are very good performance wise, maxtors are usually cheap and do the job, but aren't as quiet. Western Digital are usually quite reliable too. I'd say size wise, your probably looking around 250-400GB atm before the price suddenly hikes.

Like DVDr you got a range of brands, speeds and models, the difference is, cheap hdd as a removable storage won't be useless like cheap dvdr is, but it may break after 3 or 4 years. But then with hdd you can just swap your stuff to a new hdd, and then put the old drive in an older machine or a raid cluster Samsung has 3 year warranties btw.

Its funny about the afs now redundant thing, i suppose a truely media independant thing like 1GB rips would replace that. Honestly though, AFS is good because even if you use hdd for storage its contiguous anyway so they all fit together anyway, but if you want to then burn it off, you've got them so they can fit on a dvdr The rips benefit from the extra space and modernisation and people still stuck on disc based storage get better usage

I've got about 1.3TB over 2 machines, but it's definitely time to get some of those caddies Spud mentioned. Losing my movies I don't mind too much as they'll be fairly easy to replace (as long as all you folks keep up the good work), but having to re-rip about 550 CDs really doesn't bear thinking about.

Question for me is whether to pick a bitrate that balances the size and quality (important to me because I stream wirelessly to a Pinnacle Showcenter) or just go with a target file size. The former seems more sensible then at least I've got consistent quality.
Given the price of DVD media and that it's not a good archival solution, having a few spare mb floating around on what's essentially a disposable disc doesn't seem that much of an issue.

On a slightly different tack, there are two things that I expect fairly soon that may make the storage aspect of the discussion rather moot: Massive online storage at a sensible price with bandwith to make it usable (Amazon's S3 with Jungle Disc is a first step) and the ever touted Video on Demand. If VOD ever takes off and is done properly, e.g. pretty much any movie you want when you want: £2 new releases, £1 back catalogue and a nominal charge for any fiilm you've previously watched, say.

Would we still feel the need to hoard the way we do?

Well, I'm convinced, just about to start the MAMMOTH task of copying 1000's of disks to hard disks

Starting off with 2x320gb drives, will add to them as I fill them.

Out of interest, how many of those trayless caddies are in your machine Spud? Also I assume the drives are only used as needed as opposed to 1 being in the machine at all times?

atm, i have two switchables, the old style and one of the new style in my two main pcs (one of each in each pc).

One word of warning, make sure you've got a decent hot swap chipset or you use linux. Windows likes to use the drive even when its not, so if you just unplug it in runtime, it likes to dump shit on it. Its an issue windows has that pisses me off. So you need a SATA controller that supports hotswapping to get the most out of it. Then you go into device manager, find the hard drive and check the box for "Quick Removal". That means you can just pull it out and not risk windows writing to it.

In linux, you just, well you just type umount and then the drive, doesn't matter if you got hot swap really.

I formatted my drives with EXT3 rather than NTFS as i mentioned earlier. Among its other many points of superiority, EXT3 doesn't need defragmenting.

I assume the nforce4 chipset is OK to hotswap with?

yeah, i have a DFI lanparty and its an nforce4. That's top titty if you got that.

I have

Cool, I'll purchase tomorrow then

if you want screens of the options to check and the link to ext3 windows driver let me know, if you use ntfs you can mount to a folder btw, lots of people haven't noticed that option, but you can say put:
c:\hotswap\ -> hotswap device

With the EXT3, you gotta give it a drive letter, in linux its the usual mounting procedure, mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/hotswap/