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127 points Brajeshwar | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.445s | source
1. don-code ◴[] No.42481147[source]
I DVR the nightly news with NextPVR, more as a convenience in case I'm doing something when it's on, want to pause/rewind, want to watch it the next morning instead, etc.

Come 2020, I was convinced that the world was going to end. So I simply... turned off the retention rule. One hour of news is around 5GB, but that's a very-high-bitrate MPEG-2 stream with an extra audio channel in Spanish. So I instead wrote a cron job to take that week's news, drop the stuff I don't care about, and H.264 the entire set of them down to 4.7GB, then burn them to a DVD for offline storage, since there's not much value to keeping them online.

By 2022, it was obvious the world was not, in fact, ending, but I never stopped this practice because of how simple it was, and how unobtrusive to store they are. I just make sure a fresh DVD is in the NAS every week, and put the DVDs on a spindle - they collectively take up about as much room as a toaster. I could make that even smaller and simpler if I opted for a portable hard drive.

Occasionally I'll manually toss something interesting in, like the presidential debates, or special coverage of some newsworthy event.

In 20 years, when it comes time to re-burn the earliest of them, maybe I'll make a value judgment on whether that's worth it, but for now it feels like I'd be losing something for not much of a good reason.

replies(1): >>42483292 #
2. accrual ◴[] No.42483292[source]
Reminded me of the story of Marion Marguerite Stokes who recorded TV news from 1977 to her passing in 2012.

https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/22/a-dream-to-preserve-tv-n...