[Web4lib] streaming video

[David Pattern]

Hi Eric

> From: "Eric Gustafson" <gustafsone at lanecc.edu>
> Subject: [Web4lib] streaming video
> 
> I'm looking into the possibility of converting some of our 
> vhs and dvd titles into a streaming format.  

Fair use aside, my understanding is that converting a DVD which uses CSS
(Content Scrambling System) - and that's probably the majority of your
DVDs - is prohibited in the US under the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act.

Under fair use, you may be able to convert a portion of a DVD for
education purposes, but again you would need to circumvent the CSS which
is (all together now!) prohibited under the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act.

As VHS isn't encrypted, fair use should be applicable.

Having said all that, if the set up is going to be one PC outputting to
many monitors, then you might as well just rip the DVD to the hard drive
(as hard drive space is cheap) and use a software DVD player to play it.
Converting a DVD to another format (e.g. Windows Media) is a slow and
painful process, even with a high end PC.

To convert VHS, I'd recommend getting a TV tuner card that supports
MPEG2 hardware encoding - simply hook the output of the VCR into the
input of the tuner card and record it to the PCs hard drive.  Again, the
software DVD player should have no problems playing the saved version.

If the TV tuner card also has a suitable output connector (e.g.
composite, s-video, or RF) then that could be feed into the monitors.

regards
Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
Computing & Library Services
University of Huddersfield


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