While watching Christmas specials from the 1960s on GetTV, it struck me that, while they would originally have been videotaped, the versions bring shown looked to be from a really bad film transfer process. I assumed it was some favor of kinescope (the process that allowed live black and white shows to be recorded on film for later rebroadcast in the 1950s, before videotape).

I knew videotape was still quite pricey even in the 1960s and was reused often, which is why so much TV from that era (particularly game shows, soap operas, and talk shows) just doesn’t exist anymore. But when I dived into the interwebz looking for stuff on “color kinescope” I was surprised to discover how common it had been to preserve videotaped shows this way, even in the 1960s and beyond.

None of this probably matters much to most of you, but after an hour or so passed, it occurred to me that this is why I never seem to get anything much done on Sunday afternoons.

Along with my habit of never finishing and old movie or TV show because I’m too busy trying to decipher where the location shots were done and finding contemporary views on Google Street View, this is probably why I will die alone and unloved. And I’m pretty much OK with that.

So as the video project winds down for the holiday (and because I’m almost done), I’m finding that the stuff from 2010 to the present is taking much longer and requiring much more hand holding than the older stuff. And why is that?

1. High definition video takes a lot longer to encode than standard definition. That one’s a gimme and it’s made worse by the fact that I really need to buy a new computer. Apple hardware lasts a long time but this one is really past its prime.
2. Pre-2010. most of my stuff was identical formats at identical pixel dimensions. That’s really easy to batch and doesn’t really have to be hands-on at all.
3. Post-2010, though, I use many different devices, all spewing forth different resolutions, codecs, audio formats, and wrappers. I merge all my video into one file per day and combining all this stuff has been challenging. I have a program that can edit and merge many types of MP4 files without re-encoding, so there’s no loss of quality and it’s much faster. But it doesn’t work for all of them.
4. Some MOV files are pretty much MP4 files wrapped up with a different file extension. Change the extension and they’re fine. Not all, though.
5. It’s especially cumbersome to mix DV files at VGA resolution with more compressed HD video files that have different dimensions. Mind-numbingly so.

The process is basically just as confusing and annoying as watching cable or broadcast TV on different devices for the past five years or so. But soon I’ll have nice MP4 access copies of all my home video (I’ve shot a LOT of video over the years) and I’ll be able to plug a hard drive into the Roku and watch them with ease on the TV in the living room.  but I’ve had. Assuming I ever want to see them again after this.

I could also stream them wirelessly but Ive had…um…mixed results with this.