[vdr] Re: other way of storage your recordings

[Andreas Mixich <sp.amix@gmx.net>]

You wrote:

> Those tapedrive/harddrive systems are usually optimized for normal data,
> but not video. I doubt you could do anything usefull as regards to

At least on the VXA-1 website they have tables showing speed/capacity
for different forms of video. In fact, their drives are used for video
by video comapnies and research öabs, at least this is what they
advertise with.

> realtime video with those. They have to use harddisks as cache and store
> the data to tape whenever they feel like it.

Not really. I might not understand your concern however. But the
tape-drive I have (a DDS2 streamer) reads in as much data from disk as I
have ordered it to into a RAM buffer and then writes the data to the
tape while refilling the memory buffer.

> Besides aren't all those devices seen the same way from the driver?

Yes, of course. At least with the standard SCSI tape driver. They
conform to it. Older versions of the Onstream did have their own driver,
since the SCSI interface was off-standards.

However, especially the Onstream Software for Windows allows for
_direct_ access of any file on the tape-drive, just as it would be a
HDD. A little slower of course ;-)

If the cassettes would be cheaper these drives could be, or at least
could become an interesting storage solution to archive movies. I
persoanlly dislike to have a movie spread over 2CDs and so I wait for
DVD recorders to drop in price ot for such tape drives. The tapes have
only one real advantage and that is, that they usually have much more
capacity. Current Home/SoHo drives settle down at about 30GB
uncompressed.


-- 
Bye, Andreas

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