Burning .tivo to cd

[ebeckhusen]

I know this has probably been answered a zillion times already, but I'm having trouble finding it right now. Anyway, I don't have a dvd burner and would like to move some of my movies & shows to CD instead. I know Sonic is supposed to let you make VCDs, but frankly I can't afford to buy it. Is there any other way for me to do this, hopefully cheaper?

[Dan203]

CDs only hold 700MB of data. Even at Basic quality a one hour TiVo program takes up over 800MB. Now if you downsampled them to VCD native resolution (i.e. 352x240) and bitrate (i.e. 1.15Mbps) you'd still only be able to fit about 80 minutes of video onto a CD. Plus it would take a long time to transcode and the quality is far from spectacular.

To be honest you'd be much better off just investing in a DVD burner. I've seen them on sale for as little as $20 and the disks have come down so much that they're almost as cheap as CDs. Plus there are several freeware apps out there that will help you turn your TiVo files into DVDs with a lot less time and much better quality then going with VCDs.

Dan

[ebeckhusen]

Thanks, I've been considering getting a DVD burner for a while. Now I have an incentive to do so :)

[Dan203]

With prices like these... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827152076 ...there is no reason not to. I paid over $200 for my first 4x DVD+R burner about 5 years ago. That one is 4 times faster and 1/10th the price. Seems like a no brainer to me.

Dan

P.S. I have no affiliation with newegg.com. You could very well find the same drive, or a better one, for a lower price else where. I highly recommend you do a little research on sites such as Froogle or PriceGrabber if you're serious about getting one.