Can anyone help with my dilemma?

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Katharine
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Katharine »

I've got a couple of space saving ideas. I've got lots of videos tapes which contain programmes I've recorded and want to keep, but they are nothing special to look at. So I put those at the back of a shelf, and then put a row of books in front. Books like paperback FF fit nicely.

My other tip is the storage of my Journals. As they are thinner than books, they tend to flop about a bit if put side by side, and also, unless I stand and count along, it's difficult to know from looking at them side one which one I want to read. So I got a shoebox the same width as the journals, and long enough to fit on my bookshelf depth wise. That means they utilise the space more efficiently, and it's much easier to slide the box forward and just flick through them to find whichever one I want. I've also started a similar box for miscellaneous little books.

Eventually I intend to print off my favourite illustrations from various books, and stick them around the outside of the shoebox, just to make it more of a feature.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

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Nair Snehalatha wrote: No, I have not subscribed to the Journal--- Iwould like to know what the subscription is like. :? :?
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

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Oh,just take the plunge and subscribe-you know you will just love it!! :D :D
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Wolfgang »

Katharine wrote:I've got a couple of space saving ideas. I've got lots of videos tapes which contain programmes I've recorded and want to keep, but they are nothing special to look at. So I put those at the back of a shelf, and then put a row of books in front. Books like paperback FF fit nicely.
Why don't you digitalise those videos, burn them on DVD, keep a backup on your PC and use the space of the tapes for more paperbacks?
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Katharine »

That would be an excellent idea Wolfgang, if I knew how to do it. I know there are shops which do the process for me, but with the number of tapes I've got, it would prove very costly.

Also, I'm not sure if the picture quality would be worth doing it. My husband did transfer some video footage onto DVD of our little girl when she was a baby. It was awful, the picture was grainy, and the sound didn't match the picture, so she hit her baby gym, and the toys on it rattled about half a second after they should have done.

I thought perhaps it was some problem peculiar to our computer/video, but my father copied a TV recording of The Treasure Seekers onto DVD and it had the same problem. The dialogue didn't match the lip movements.

Hopefully technology will improve one day, as I think I must have well over 100 tapes I would like to transfer.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Fiona1986 »

Stef had an episode of the 90s Famous Five series put onto DVD from tape (Smuggler's Top which isn't on the Dutch DVDs for some reason) and it's a decent watch. The quality is no worse than watching an old VHS tape anyway. Not sure how much it cost, so it might be costly if you have lots and lots of videos.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Wolfgang »

Actually my Internet PC has an TV/Radio capture card installed, the card is almost ten years old by now. Until I had a digital satelite receiver I used it to record movies or tapes, now I only use when it's necessary. It saved files in DVD-format, and sound is in synch.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by MJE »

Zar Quon wrote:And not foergetting to label any boxes up with *exactly* what's in them, or you'll never find anything again without a lot of effort.
     Oh, yes, I've been caught by this, and have lots of boxes whose contents I've totally forgotten. The difficulty is finding an accurate description of the contents that is small enough to fit in labels of any reasonable size. Typically I find that categories of books don't fit exactly into a box, but either leave some empty space, or else don't fit so the overflow must partially fill a second box. In both cases, you want to fill the extra space with something else, and very likely only a part of the "something else", so it becomes very difficult to label the boxes accurately.
     It might solve my problems if I could write a novel (or series of novels, even) that sell like Harry Potter, so I could just watch the money roll in, and then I would be able to buy more space to live in and keep books in. I guess that's highly unlikely to happen, yet it is probably still the most likely resolution to occur.
Wolfgang wrote:Why don't you digitalise those videos, burn them on DVD, keep a backup on your PC and use the space of the tapes for more paperbacks?
     Wouldn't there be the problem, though, that doing this would cause the copies to lose some quality compared to the originals? It's my understanding that only digital media can be copied perfectly, with no loss of information, whereas analogue media, when copied or transformed in any way to new media, will always lose some quality, due to laws of physics, so that there will be no way of preventing it, no matter how good equipment you use. So, if I am understanding that correctly, the very best you could hope for would be to use such good equipment that this unavoidable loss might be so small that you can hardly notice it.
     Perhaps fortunately I have never collected videos - all I have in that line is a dozen or so D.V.D.s of some favourite films, but I have never got into the way of collecting such things. But if I had stacks of videos and was contemplating digitizing them, I know that I would probably never completely trust the digitizing process, so I would end up keeping the originals anyway, just in case I one day found faults in the copies and wanted to be able to go back to the originals if I needed to. That would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the exercise from a space-saving point of view, although there are other good reasons for doing so (provided you can achieve an acceptable quality in the copies): namely, you can use the copies for some of your viewing, which will save the originals from wearing out so quickly, which of course causes the loss of quality.

Regards, Michael.
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Katharine
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Katharine »

Michael, I recognise your dilemma about storing things in boxes. I like your suggestion for a solution, however sadly I don't think I'll ever be in a J.K. Rowling situation myself.

The explanation about lack of quality when recording only DVD makes sense, and I can see me doing exactly what you would do, keeping the tapes as a kind of backup in case of problems, so probably not a lot of point me exploring that option.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Fiona1986 »

Surely the loss of quality from VHS to DVD would be no more than the loss of quality you get from repeated use/ageing of VHS tapes?
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Domino »

Michael. I don't think you necessarily lose quality in transferring a video recording to DVD. The problem comes because video tapes are very prone to not playing properly. I transferred most of my video tapes to DVD some years ago, but some of them were not suitable as they produced bars and glitches when played. Of course. you cannot get better quality than the original recording ever.

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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

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THIS is what you need, Katharine!
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Katharine
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by Katharine »

Thanks for the link Nigel, that's going to be seriously investigated. Both our current video recorder and DVD player are a bit temperamental these days, so maybe this could be a solution to several problems.

At nearly £200 it's going to take quite a few week's worth of pocket money, but some things are worth waiting for.
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Re: Can anyone help with my dilemma?

Post by shadow »

As a follow up to my dilemma, almost a year to the day of posting, I decided not to get rid of the books thanks to all your advice. I bought some more boxes and have just about managed to squeeze them all under the bed. No more boxes will now fit under the bed but I have slowed down on my purchases. All I need to do now is sort them out properly and make sure my spreadsheet lists the books contained in each box.

What I really need to do as well is list all the society booklets I have and try to finish the collection.
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