So I've been spending the past few days dubbing a whole bunch of VHS tapes which explains why there hasn't been any episodic Anime posts so far this week. Got over 50 hours of home videos to help dub over to DVDs... Not a lot in comparison to the ten year span they were recorded within to be honest.

Anyway, while I've been doing that, I've also been going through a whole bunch of old Anime shows that my aunt used to record for us in HK. I've decided to upload a few of them since they're pretty much unavailable for purchase now and you can find them on my Youtube Channel such as the full classic movie Fifteen Boys Stranded at Sea. I even came across a whole bunch of Toei Animation's 1970s movies including Little Mermaid that Icie mentioned a few months ago. They're all Chinese Cantonese dubbed with no subtitles though.

Tried to register under "Xcomp" but the handle was taken.

The good thing about using a dedicated DVD recorder is that you don't have to mind all the codec settings such as quantizers, b-frame, i-frame compression rates etc. Just pick a good sounding quality level, hit record and you're away.

However, to keep the quality in real world videos, you're going to need dual layer 8.5GB DVDs to record three hours of video using the MN23 (720x576, 5.79Mbps) on the Sony RDR-HXD870. If you drop the quality setting to MN14 (544x576, 3.19Mbps), you can use single layer 4.7GB DVDs but the lossy MPEG2 compression really shows in scenes where there is plenty of texture.

On the other hand for animation, it seems you can go as low as MN18 (352x288, 0.75Mbps) which allows you to fit 13 hours with the artefacts just barely visible around the outlines of objects.

Those of you familiar with encoding will be wondering why I choose to use a setting that encodes at DVD resolution when VHS tape is only roughly 320x240. The reason is because the settings are preset and it doesn't allow you to increase the bitrate without increasing the resolution at the same time. It would have been much more convenient if I could adjust either setting independently.

Well, back to dubbing.