From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V12 #2 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Tuesday, January 3 2006 Volume 12 : Number 002 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? and some musical musings ["Micha] Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? ["JoAnn Whetsell" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 02:47:28 -0500 From: "Michael Quinn" Subject: Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? and some musical musings I prefer E-Mule for old and/or obscure TV shows actually. BT is great for new/popular stuff but it's really hard to search all the good sites at once so you have to ssign up for each one individually and then go searchnig through each one hoping to find what you're looking for. Emule is slower but has a global search which makes it a lot easier to locate stuff. And remember if a torrent is rare and hardly anyone's seeding it it's going to be slow... To add a littlwe on-topic, content, I personally found this a rather dissapointing year in music. I didn't listen to as much new music as I normally do but I find that I gtow tired of things (like the Kate Bush album for example quickly) and a lot of other stuff just doesn't really impress me. Normally there are so many albums I love during a year that it's hard to make a year-end list. This year it's just the opposite. The only album that pleasantly surprised me was QNTAL's Ozymandias. A few bands that I like put out the type of albums I would expect from them and those were enjoyable but not really groundbreaking. Is it possible to have and listen to too much new music and not take the time to really explore various albums? Back when I had 50 albums I got to know each one very well, I didn't have much choice, now that I have an almost limitless collection of music at my disposal I find I'm genuinely impressed by fewer and fewer albums. I don't know if I expect too much or just expect it to hit me too fast. Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this type of thing. Mike - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nadyne Mielke" To: "That warm and fuzzy [place]" Sent: Monday, January 02, 2006 12:00 AM Subject: Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? > On 01 Jan 2006, at 17:39, JoAnn Whetsell wrote: > >> How difficult is that for very LOW-TECH people? > > The short answer: it's pretty difficult. Everything that you want to do > with a DVD is -possible-, but I wouldn't call it easy. > > It sounds like you've already got a DVD burner in your computer (and if > you don't, then you can't do any of the editing that you wanted to do). > If you've got that and a high-speed Internet connection, I'd try to find > whatever-you're-looking-for on BitTorrent. You mentioned commercials, so > I'm assuming that you've taped something from television and want to > convert it to DVD. You can find a lot of TV content, regardless of how > old, on the various BitTorrent sites. Once you've downloaded everything, > it's a lot easier to burn the DVDs on your computer. > > If you're interested in going that route, I can point you towards some > sites that explain how to get the software that you'll need. If you post > a list of some of the kinds of things that you're looking for, some folks > here might be able to point you towards some things that you want. > > /nm ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 10:34:16 -0500 From: "JoAnn Whetsell" Subject: Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? Thanks; that's a cool idea, and I might try eMule or one of those other search engines for fun. Unfortunately I don't think that will work for what we want to do right now. What we have is a lot of figure skating, rather than tv shows, so I don't think we could get it off the net. There are dozens of tapes of performances we'd like to save, and since it's already here, we'd rather transfer them over to DVD. Also, I didn't mean to suggest that we are electronic dummies. I just wanted to stress that we're not techies and didn't want extremely technical advice. I did get the JVC to record from the tape to the DVD but didn't try editing it on the machine since I'd been told that it's easier to pop the DVD into the computer and edit it there. The machine automatically created each performance as a new title, but when I put it in another player everything was under 1 title and 1 chapter, so you'd have to fast forward through the thing same as on the VCR. It may be that just playing around with the machine, I would have figured out how to properly insert titles and/or chapters. But this particular machine has enough annoying things about it to justify a return, not to mention that the VCR seems to have inexplicably stopped working. If anyone else is considering one of these things, I'd suggest doing A LOT of online research first as salespeople tend to be very unknowledgeable and unhelpful about these machines, at least in my experience. JoAnn ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 14:36:07 -0600 From: Doug Subject: Re: ecto off-topic: DVD recorder advice? > It sounds like you've already got a DVD burner in your computer (and > if you don't, then you can't do any of the editing that you wanted to Actually, you don't need a DVD *burner* to do any editing on your PC...you just need a DVD reader to get the video from the disc onto the hard drive. And if you plan on distributing the edited content via the Internet, or even a thumbdrive or via CD, then you don't need a DVD burner at all. JoAnn: You can probably dub a VHS tape to DVDR using your combo recorder, but you might need to connect cables from the VHS output jacks to the DVD recorder input jacks. My DVD player/VHS combo is this way. Regardless, you probably won't be able to do this if the VHS tapes use Macrovision copyright protection. I'm not aware of any combo units that let you edit on the unit itself. I use my PC, and my favorite software is TMPEG's DVD Author (Google it and you should find it). This software lets you access the footage on your DVDR, clip/edit it to your heart's content, add menus, etc., and then burn it to a DVDR (if that's your goal). You can even merge video from multiple DVDRs into a single new DVDR, provided that all the content will fit onto one disc. - --Doug ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V12 #2 *************************