6
3
TL;DR: my home videos are taking up too much space and are impractical to backup on Dropbox. Which format do you advice to convert them to?
Long version:
One year ago I bought a new compact camera (Canon SX230HS), so I could make nicer pictures and movies of my daughter. While the quality is a big improvement over my previous camera, the filesize of the resulting files also is a lot bigger, especially the movies. In the previous year I produced as much data as in the 8 years before. This is becoming a problem, because I’d like to backup everything on Dropbox, so I'd like to avoid having to backup several gigabytes a month.
I already configured my Canon to shoot in 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080, but this still results in 150 - 200Mb per minute in H.264.
Because those movies are only intended to be viewed by family and friends and posted on youtube/facebook, I'm thinking about converting them to another format. This will obviously lose some quality but I don't think this is a problem, afterall only 10 years ago people where still using tapes for this kind of recording with a lot less quality.
Which format would be best suitable for this? I was thinking WebM, since it seems the results are of rather good quality and because it is pushed by Google I would expect it to have a good change of survival and be recognized.
I'm a big fan of Open formats, so I would prefer the format to be open. But I'd also like it to be as portable as possible. It should be easily playable on most common devices, such as a tablet. (To my surprise this was not really the case on my Google Nexus 7 tablet. When I tried a webm-converted movie on the tablet it had serious problems playing it. I could only get it to play smoothly on the Nexus with the hardware decoder disabled in MX Player.)
Thank you for any advice!
1You'll probably get good advice on how to shrink your files, but there's no getting around the fact that video streams contain a lot of data. You can compress this data in various ways, but there's a limit to what you can do without destroying quality. Forget about storing them on Dropbox, unless you're willing to spend a lot of money. You should look at NAS devices or USB3 disks, which cost about $150/terabyte. – Isaac Rabinovitch – 2013-02-24T02:04:55.870
1While people will disagree with this comment, h264 is open enough for your purposes. You could transcode to a lower bitrate using Handbrake. As for backups, you're better off with Backblaze or one of the other dozen online backups, as it'll get everything, not just your videos. – emgee – 2013-02-24T02:46:19.453
I'm currently speaking about 30Gb of pictures and movies for 2012. So if I can reduce the video size to about 10% of their original size, I can already backup for a few years on the cheapest Dropbox account. I like Dropbox because it's easy to use on Android and Linux and I already use it. It makes it also very easy to share pictures. Backing up other stuff is not really an issue as most of my other data is already in Git repositories + I have a backup of everything on a NAS. But I want an off-site backup of my pictures as that is something you can never recreate if disaster strikes... – jeroen – 2013-02-24T21:19:29.333