Mini-DV tapes - how you loathe them.

Sure, these matchbox-sized storage devices offer the best video quality. They are prone to failure, like when they get gunky over time.

What do you do if you have a truckload of them?

To offload just an hour of video to the computer will take one hour of playback and one hour of video would gobble up almost 15GB of hard disk.

There is an easier way. Get a hard disk recorder - today's equivalent of yesteryear's videocassette recorder.

One with a 160GB hard disk and a DVD burner would cost less than $500. Make sure it has a Firewire port so it can talk to your mini-DV camcorder, as well as a high-definition multimedia interface so it can talk to your high-definition flatscreen.

Get a Firewire cable with four-pin connectors at both ends.

Hook the cable to the DV IN/OUT of the camcorder and the other end to the DV IN port of the hard disk recorder.

Choose DV Input as your video source. Insert a blank DVD, hit Play on the camcorder and Record on the recorder.

The recorder will stop once the tape comes to an end. Find the finalise function in the recorder menu and finalise the disk. Finalising - 'closing' a disk so no more data can be added - makes the disk playable on all players. You are done.

You can also choose to record a batch of tapes to the hard disk first before burning them to DVDs. An hour of video would take less than 10 minutes to burn on a disk.

Until then, please store your tapes properly. Buy a dry cabinet - a humidity-controlled storage - and stash your tapes in them.

Of course, you can get it done commercially - at easily more than $20 per hour of tape. You decide.

By Tan Chong Yaw