Dilemma: Home Videos Trapped in Closets, Shoeboxes and Drawers

Solution: Transfer Your Memories to DVD (Before They Self-Destruct)

Grandma and grandpa’s 50th anniversary party. Julia’s preschool graduation. Jake’s winning basket. Spring vacation in Hawaii. Every family has their own cherished memories, and with 76 percent of U.S. households owning digital cameras or camcorders, there’s a good chance many of those special moments are being captured – and trapped. “We take a lot of videos and digital photos, and up until now all of our videos were in a shoebox collecting dust in the closet,” said Donna McMaster, a camcorder owner and mother of three.

Shoeboxes, closets, drawers – all are being used to store piles of old tapes – from VHS to Hi8 to MiniDV. “It’s too much of a hassle to watch home movies, between hooking up the camera and the cables and finding the right tape, just forget it,” McMaster said. Moreover, the issue isn’t just with viewing home videos. There’s also the looming risk of losing them forever.

• As videotape ages, the magnetic coating preserving the content becomes brittle, putting video footage at risk of becoming unplayable.


• While VHS footage can last upward of 20 years, in as little as five, deterioration in image and sound quality can become noticeable and irreversible.

Now factor in 2009’s impending transition to all digital broadcasting and the fact that more U.S. households have DVD players than VCRs. For many families, the obvious solution is to transfer home videos to a digital video format, and the universal digital format is DVD.

• A write-once (DVD-R or DVD+R) disc is able to keep contents safe for more than 30 years with proper storage.


• Recorded DVDs can be easily played back and shared on a range of devices, including most home and portable DVD players, computers with built-in DVD drives and more.