TheFu

http://www.videohelp.com/ has many of the answers you seek. AVI isn't a format, it is a container. Almost any type of video and/or audio can be placed inside an AVI container. Same for OGG. 1st, VHS resolution should never be up converted to DVD resolutions. google will help you find all the different common video resolutions. There are hundreds in use, however. http://forum.videohelp.com/topic174200.html Consider SVCD, xVCD or VCD as a format alternative for VHS tape conversion. These are MPG1 and MPG2 encoded. These formats work in almost any recent DVD player. I'd guess over 95% of DVD players will play these formats. If your playback device supports xvid, mpg4, or divx, you can get 2-4 times the video onto a single DVD disk with only minor impact to quality. The downside is that only special DVD players support this format, so you can't just assume a disk will play everywhere. I'd guess less than 10% will play, but if it is just your players, then there's nothing to lose. These divx playback devices aren't really more expensive AND any computer will still be able to play the files. Perform all your editing in MP2 format, then convert to the final playback only format. Avoid WMV, MOV, RM formats unless those are your final target containers. Why - proprietary formats that aren't well supported outside commercial software. For editing MPG2 files, I like VideoRedoPlus. Best $49 I've ever spent since it includes commercial detection (comskip-based) and single frame accuracy of cuts. With AVI files, usually you need to cut at key frames only or risk corrupting the video file. Avoid converting formats. Don't take a DV -->AVI --> DVD since you lose too much detail when you do that. Don't get me wrong, it should work, but the final output will not be as good as a DV-->DVD file. Every CODEC loses something, avoid the loss. For example, if you have AC3 audio, please don't convert it into stereo. Just copy the AC3 or DTS over into the final video file. BTW, a 1GB disk seems a little small. I hope that was a typo and you meant 1TB disk. 1 hour of MPG2 is about 2GB of data, dependent on scene activity and audio quality.

Is this a trick question? `ls -lR > file_list.txt` has worked for years. In fact, I maintain my DVD collection this way by numbering the disks and placing the output of `ls -lR > disk-###.txt`. `find / -ls -print > diskname.txt` might be more what you want since it captures user/group and permissions and filename data on a single line. If you want to perform full file indexing - lots of .docs, pdf, txt, html, etc. files, then take a look at http://swish-e.org/ and htdig. My collection gets indexed in this way, so a search files these text files too. You might take a look at "cops" from 15 years ago. Now I think it is commercial, but the older versions were able to track ownership, groups, permissions, directories and files to see if anything changed. It was used my sysadmins to tell whether their systems were changed by crackers. http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networking/tcpip/ch12_04.htm