Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Yes, I do lose some quality--for one thing, I can't use an HDMI connection with my cable box to record; it will only work with a composite or component connection. But the trade-off of quality for being able to keep something permanently is worth it to me.
Mostly I record old movies and old TV shows. For the TV shows especially, the quality wasn't great to start with, but it's good enough. A lot of this stuff isn't available commercially.
|
And that is the important thing, that it works for you. We have about 80 channels of OTA broadcasting in my area, if you count the sub-channels (8-1, 8-2, 8-3, etc.). A lot of that is garbage, but a lot is the old TV series and movies. Just to name a few station affiliations, we get COZI, Quest, Justice, MeTV, AntennaTV, GetTV, Grit, ION, and others. The bad part is that they are not all the same decent quality of broadcasting. Some of the channels are blurred and basically unwatchable, while others have done a really good job of upconverting the old 480i where it looks decent, but never great. In my case, the point of source (TV reception via antenna) is already lackluster so recording it would just degrade it farther. I get Hulu and they stream a lot of old TV shows from the USA and Britain, and they manage to upconvert them really well, but my local TV stations don't seem to do that very well.
BTW, DVDs will eventually degrade enough to be unusable. They tend to have a shelf life of around a decade, or so I've read. I have only had a few bite the dust, but sooner or later my still large library of old DVDs and Blu-ray discs will deteriorate and no longer be usable. That is kind of sad to think about. My computer CDs were really bad about deteriorating and I lost a lot of stored data from the 1990s. I think almost all of those old CDs stopped being usable years ago.