I am looking to archive alot of old tapes to dvd (on my computer) or buy an external to piggy back to my vcr. Any ideas how many hours you can get on a standard 4.7 disk or do I have to wait for dual layer media to get cheaper? I am hoping to get 4 hours.

Most DVDRs are designed to hold 120 minutes I think. But it mostly depends on quality.

You can easily take a 3 hour movie - run it through a compressor (dvd shrink, dvd cloner - the list goes on and on) and burn more than that to DVD.

So the first step is to get all your movies into AVI format - then worry about what you're going to squeeze them onto. :tu:

I bought a dual layer also - but haven't tried putting any movies on them yet (like you said - the media is off the charts expensive still) They do say they hold 240 minutes though.

You can fit four hours but you'll lose some quality. Normal DVD movies are usually around 2 hours per 4.7 gb disc. DVDs are just MPEG files with .vob extension instead of .mpg so it would be better to get your shows into MPEG over avi. There will be little conversion from MPEG to DVD but if you went from avi to dvd it would have to do more encoding/quality loss.

Jesse