Saving my old HDTV recordings

The only problems with getting my TV shows in glorious High-Definition TV and recording them with my home-built media center is that the files they end up in are ungainly huge - we’re talking an average of 5-7 gigabytes per one hour show.

With the standard TV recordings, I’ve been outputting the files I want to keep to DVD (like Battlestar Galactica, for example) and filing them away conveniently, but it’s trickier to get HDTV into a nice, archival format.

So I’ve been looking around a lot at different utilities. There are a million free tools that, when combined, will supposedly get you a nice pretty DIVX or XVID file at the end of it all, but as far as I can tell, none of the thousand individual applets actually work.

So now I’m playing with the 15-day trial of VideoRedo, which claims to do it all in one pass. Pretty sweet, right?

Well, I haven’t gotten the audio working, but the video is converting, which is a big step in the right direction. The other down side? It costs $50. I’ll let you know more about how it works as I keep tinkering with it.

I should also say that BeyondTV, one of the media center applications I use, has a built in “show squeeze” tool that will squeeze ungainly files into a smaller format, but VideoRedo will also autodetect commercials and cut them out for me…so I’d like to get this thing working.

[ EDIT: It appears that there is no easy, external way to convert huge .ts HDTV files to Xvid or Divx in one pass. I don’t mind paying money — the app just doesn’t exist. ]