What size hard drive do I need to record 60 hours of video?

[aks93]

thanks

 

[vss1980]

Depends on how you plan to be storing the video. Full-size video without compression can take up silly amounts of hard-drive space (something like 30 MBytes/sec).

More than likely you will be using some sort of real-time compression to compress the video as it plays and is stored on the hard-drive.

I remember reading somewhere that the maximum bit-rate of MPEG2 video is 11 Mbit/sec, but in most cases for films on DVD it usually uses an average of around 8 Mbit/sec (around 1 MByte/sec).
In which case to store 60 hours of video at DVD quality (720x576) will take something like 216 GB.

MPEG1 (Video CD) uses around 170 KBytes/sec but is obviously lower in quality and only supports a max frame size of 352x288 (but still does a decent enough job).
In this case 60 hours will take up around 37 GB.

Although unlikely at the moment, MPEG4 (ie. DivX) can store almost DVD quality at the same data rate as MPEG1 however there aren't any capture cards or real-time VCR programs that come to mind that actually use it yet.

 

[aks93]

wow vss1980 - thanks!

 

[oLLie]

<< Although unlikely at the moment, MPEG4 (ie. DivX) can store almost DVD quality at the same data rate as MPEG1 however there aren't any capture cards or real-time VCR programs that come to mind that actually use it yet. >>



Depending on how fast your computer is, real-time mpeg4 should be possible through VDub or some other capturing program.

 

[vss1980]

Yeah, VDub supports compatible capture cards so that would actually work for MPEG4 capture but for computer VCR I was thinking more along the lines of a program like Cyberlink PowerVCR which supports proper TV channel selection and recording scheduling and that would have some sort of support for MPEG4 - I dont really know of any but this isn't exactly my kind of field.