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isaacschemmI stopped by Free Geek Twin
Cities recently and picked up (among other things) a
Blu-ray player. It's the first time I've had one, and I was
pleasantly surprised that it was perfectly happy to play
standard audio and video files right off whatever media you put
in. It's incredibly useful with the USB port on the front, but
it can also read files off a CD or DVD if you happen to have one
(not that uncommon; I've certainly put podcasts on a CD-RW
before - a lot of car radios will play them!)
I also have a DVR that records shows from U.S. over-the-air
digital TV (ATSC 1.0) to a USB device, and the Blu-ray player
will play these raw transport stream files perfectly as well.
This gave me an idea: what if you wanted to permanently save
something you recorded off the antenna, in its original quality,
onto permanent physical media?
Of course, this is a very specific use case, one that I don't
even have a need for - it's definitely another case of me putting the
cart before the snail, if you will. But the fun part is
solving for a specific situation, and making something really
unique and cool in the process. Here were my requirements:
- The content must be a half-hour TV show from U.S. broadcast television, with commercials removed.
- It must be placed onto write-once / read-only DVD media.
- The media must contain a copy of the content, in its original quality, that can be played on a PC (or another device with a USB slot and the appropriate codecs).
- The media must also contain a copy of the content that can be played on a DVD player, with good quality audio, but the video quality of this copy is not important. We're talking about sitcom reruns here - you might as well be watching them on a potato.
- Finally, the DVD used must be one of those 8-centimeter
ones.
- Because they're cute.
Obviously, it's pretty unusual to dedicate most of the space of
a video DVD to data that isn't actually part of the DVD video
content.
But the important thing here is: your hard copy has
the original media (not re-encoded in any way), in case you want
to transfer it to another format; and it can be played on
a standard consumer device still found in many households, as long
as you're only half paying attention. Because although video data
takes up most of the bandwidth of any recording, it's almost
always the audio that's conveying the most important information,
so that's what you want to focus on.
