Can I use my CD burner to burn (non-commercial, no copyright protection or issues) video files to CDs for storage purposes? I know or at least I assume the files wouldn’t be playable from the CDs but can I back them up to CD? These would be both “free-standing” as it were files and public domain stuff downloaded as podcasts through iTunes.
You can use a CD-R as storage space for any type of file. They usually only have 600-800MB of space though, so if these are big files you’d probably do better with burning DVDs. There are some concerns about the life of CDs, some seem to crap out after 5 or 10 years. I’m sure some other doper will have better info on that.
I don’t have a DVD burner so that’s not an option. I imagine that 5-10 years will be more than sufficient for keeping these things so it sounds like burning the stuff to CD will work. The files are relatively small (150 MB or so each), I just have a bunch of them that are overwhelming my hard drive space. Thanks.
You can back up video files to CD with no problems. You can play them back on a computer. but you may have pauses if your computer or CD drive isn’t fast enough. You can also burn your video files to VCDs, which can be played in most regular DVD players. Nero, and a couple of other apps - some free, can do this. Nero can also do the format changing if the video files aren’t in the correct encoding format for VCDs. IIRC you can put ~60 minutes on a VCD1, or ~20 minutes on a VCD2 format disk.
VCDs are just regular CDs with a special file system written on them.
Last time I checked harddisks were almost cheaper per GB and much more conveniant compared to optical storage (CD/DVD). So why not buy a extra HD?
I bought one of these recently for $205 with a 250 Gig Seagate HD. It’s like the world’s biggest MP3 player. I can just plug it in to any PC or TV and play the hundreds of files on it.