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Gift giving is a special way to show someone you care about them. Sure, you could always go out and buy a few gift cards to iTunes and call it a day. Now, this is completely fine for some occaisions, but once in a while it’s important to give a gift that’s both unique, personal and can be cherished and shared forever!

There is one phrase that is often said about some people, maybe even someone you know — Often times, one would say, “What do you give to the person that has EVERYTHING?!”

Well, that’s where DVD Your Memories comes in by creating a personalized DVD of their fondest memories which were previously only accessible on video tapes, film and photographs. The options are really limitless; From making a compilation DVD of all the family videos to creating a fully customized video to DVD of a past vacation. We can even combine different media types onto one disc to form a compilation of multiple generations!

Cleaning out that attic and converting your old videos and film to DVD with DVD Your Memories can truly bring the past back to life.

The best part is that if you’re not sure what media they have, or don’t have access to any of their videos, film, photos, slides or audio, you can always give the gift of memories in the form of a DVD Your Memories Gift Card. They can be purchased right in any one of our four locations and can be used for any service or product that we sell.

For more information, check out our gift card page.

Storage units are great for many types of people and families, providing a simple solution for an over-cluttered home or to keep your belongings secured either temporarily or long-term while in the middle of a move. With the boom in popularity of shows like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters, more and more people are being introduced to the world of stored goods and the treasures within. People love the idea of finding something valuable among the belongings of someone else’s left-overs. Storage units are great for this sort of thing, but not so much when it comes to storing precious recorded memories on media like VHS tapes and film.

The main danger that storage units pose to your media comes in the form of heat and moisture build-up. Often times, storage units are not insulated the same as you’d find in an office or home, so they can get pretty hot, especially during the summer months of the year. Small leaks in the roofing can lead to moisture buildup within the unit, which can cause mold and other pollutants to flourish, which can spell the death of magnetic tape, film, and photographs.

Another potential danger of storage units is the fact that if, for some reason, you’re unable to pay your storage rental fee, your goods can be auctioned off to the highest bidder, including your important family media! Needless to say, if this happens, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to track down your collection of priceless video tapes, photos and film.

We always recommend against using storage units for important family media, especially for one of a kind video and audio tapes and photographs. Instead, try to see if a family member can hold on to them for you, or a close friend.

Even one video tape transfer can potentially save decades of memories, and it may be easier and cheaper than you think. Having your media digitized before placing in storage will prevent the risk of losing everything forever! If you absolutely must use use a storage unit for your important family media, we highly suggest obtaining an indoor unit, where the climate can be under better control, and less prone to moisture buildup.

In the world of digital audio, there are many different types of audio files that can be created, all with different attributes. Understanding the differences between common audio formats can not only help you with future audio projects, but also better prepare you to archive and preserve your own audio, if you choose to do so. The first step to realizing what type of audio file you’re working with is to look at the file extension. The file extension is the short series of letters that follow the dot in a file name, such as JingleBells.mp3. This guide will cover some of the most common audio files that you might come across.

Waveform Audio (.WAV)

WAV audio is one of the oldest audio formats, and also one of the most recognizable. Many people instantly recognize .WAV files as sound files when seen on their computer. Microsoft has been using WAV since the early days of Windows as a format for raw and typically uncompressed audio. Most commonly, WAV files are uncompressed in the linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) format, which is also the same format that audio CDs use, which is why WAV files can be very easily used to create a playable audio CD. The main drawbacks of the WAV format are the relatively large file sizes, coupled with it’s inability to be any larger than 4gb in size due to its use of a 32-bit unsigned integer to record the file size header.

Despite it’s age, the WAV file remains one of the most versatile and widely used audio formats today.

MPEG-1 Layer 3 (.MP3)

Presently, the MP3 is arguably the most popular audio format out there. Heck, your grandparents have probably heard of the format. Nearly all downloadable music of today is in the MP3 format due to it’s incredible compression to quality ratios. MP3 files can be compressed to just 10% of the size of a standard WAV file, and sound nearly identical. This is generally the reason MP3 files have such a wide appeal — they pack serious sound quality in a small package, small enough to fit a wide variety of them on your PDA, cell phone or memory card with limited space.

Free Lossless Audio Codec (.FLAC)

The FLAC format is relatively new on the scene, but is rapidly becoming the go-to format for archivists, and audiophiles and enthusiasts due to it’s ability to deliver uncompressed audio in a smaller package than what you’d find in a WAV format. FLAC is really just a codec which allows digital audio to be losslessly compressed in a way that reduces file size, but without any information actually lost. Audio compressed with the FLAC algorithm can usually be reduced to around 50-60% of the original file size while maintaining identical sound quality. The only real drawback to FLAC currently is it’s lack of support in some devices, but this is likely to change as the format gains more popularity.

Ogg Vorbis (.OGG)

Vorbis is a free, open-source software project that produces an audio codec for a lossy audio format. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format, which is why you’ll often see it referred to as Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis was started in 1993, but really started intensive development in 1998, when licensing fees were announced for the MP3 format. The Vorbis format has proven popular among supporters of free software, but aside from that has gained little ground as far as popularity goes. It’s supported by most digital audio players, but users may find support lacking for external devices such as cellular phones or MP3 players.

Memories are powerful. Memories are one of the few things we can possess in this life that can never be taken from us. Our recordings of those moments, however, can be lost. If those recordings are stored in older media formats such as video tapes, they are even greater risk. Older media formats are much more difficult to archive and susceptible to corruption of quality over time. Newer, digital formats, on the other hand, are easy to backup, easy to transfer, and less likely to be lost due to degradation over time.

But how do you easily transfer those recordings from old formats to new? That’s where DVD Your Memories comes in. Using state of the art technology, DVD Your Memories can quickly, easily, and economically transfer audio and video recordings from older storage systems to new digital formats. The new formats are easier to backup and easier to send to loved ones as well, lending themselves to compact storage and allowing for easy electronic transfer. This will allow you to quickly and easily share your special moments with all the people who make those moments special.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, what better way to show that special someone you care than by transferring your old memories to new formats that can be easily watched and easily stored for a lifetime? Nothing shows more how important those cherished times spent together are than by protecting and preserving them. In addition to transferring your media or scanning your photos, you can create a fully customized slideshow movie to give to your special someone. Whether it be of your honeymoon, or photos of your first date, it’s sure to bring a smile to anyone’s face. Protect your memories for a lifetime, contact us and let our media transfer specialists convert your media today!

If you’re looking to get your video tapes converted to a more modern, digital format, you have a couple of choices. We can transfer your video to optical storage devices such as DVD or Blu-ray or we can transfer them as digital video files onto a hard drive. Depending on what you want to achieve out of your video transfer, each choice has some pros and cons.

Transferring Video to DVD or Blu-ray

Transferring videos to DVD is one of the most common transfer requests we receive. The video will come formatted, ready to play on your home DVD or Blu-ray player the minute you bring them home. This is great for people who need little to no editing, and just want to watch their tapes as-is. Many times, no editing is needed, which is why many opt for this type of transfer. The downside to transferring your video straight to DVD is that it’s much more difficult to edit your video if you wanted to. This is due to the fact that when a playable DVD-movie is created, the source video is actually compressed to fit onto the disc. This compression causes quality loss when trying to rip the data from the disc for editing, and then re-encoding the file again to place back onto a new disc.

Transferring Video to Hard Drive

When your video is transferred to your hard drive as digital video files, it’s much easier to edit and manipulate them because you’ll be working with the actual source video files, which are essentially uncompressed. We can provide you with a variety of container files including .MOV .AVI and more. This allows you to create stunning, fully edited sequences with no potential quality loss like you’d experience trying to edit from a DVD. The downside to transferring to hard drive is that you would need to create your own DVD movies once the editing portion has been completed.

So it basically boils down to two points. If you want to watch your footage immediately, and pass out copies to your friends and family, we recommend simply transferring your video to DVD. However, if you want to edit your footage and create your own project, we highly recommend to transfer all of your footage to a hard drive to make it easier to work with.

When dealing with the conversion and transfer of precious family media, many people are apprehensive about shipping their memories across the country. Most are worried about the potential to lose your package in the mail, plus the thought of your media being handled and transferred by someone you’ve never met or spoken to may be a little strange. Although losing items in the mail is an extremely rare occurance, it can happen to any of us.

Faster Turnaround Times
Being local means us being close to where you are. This makes turnaround times for transferring video to DVD and photo scanning much quicker, even same day in some cases! Since we’re focused on the local experience, we eliminate shipping wait times, and can keep our order queues smaller for each of our stores. Many national companies are stuck with a 4-5 week waiting period, simply because they are processing much more volume in one single facility.

Meet Your Technician
Another benefit of taking your family media to your local DVD Your Memories, is that on your appointment day, you will be able to sit and meet with the technician who will be working on your order. This provides an easy line of communication from client to technician to make sure the job gets done to your exact specifications. Another added plus is that our techs do so many different jobs similar to yours, they might even give you a brilliant idea for your media project, something you may have not even known was possible!

Safety of Your Media
When shipping your media off to the unknown, anything can happen! Items could be damaged, sent to the wrong address, or simply lost forever. Shipper’s insurance coverage is nice, but it can’t do anything to recover your lost memories or damaged media. Keeping your media local means that you’ll know where your media is at all times. At DVD Your Memories, we process ALL orders in-house so you can be sure that your media will never leave our office, until you’re ready to pick up.

Are you looking to keep your media transfers local? Contact us today and experience first-hand what makes us the number one family media transfer company!

As human beings, it’s common for us to want to to pass down something to our children for them to remember us by. Before photography and video cameras, we had no real way to see how things were in the past, apart from drawings and paintings, and most of what was known about family history and legacy was passed down to us as word of mouth stories of the past. This gave us no real way to interact with or see ancestors who were no longer around. When photography was first invented, it gave people a literal window to the past. We could now see what our great grandparents looked like, and view the details of the home they lived in, and the other people they shared their lives with. It gave us a way to pass down our memories to our children and family of the future.

Now that we’re in the “Digital Age”, there are many options available to share your memories. Memories that were once limited to clumsy forms of media like VHS tapes and slides can now be stored as bits of data that can be placed on a DVD, a computer, or cloud storage. This is data that can be accessed from nearly anywhere in the world, from a multitude of devices and peripherals! With popular media sharing networks like Facebook and Picasa, you can share your albums with family and friends from all over the world in a matter of seconds.

Old photos, slides and negatives often contain some of our fondest memories. However, with these older formats, it can be difficult to share these images with the people we care about. It’s important to remember that analog media not only deteriorates and degrades over time, but is also susceptible to perishing in fires, floods and other natural disasters. Digitizing these images is now more important than ever! With our high quality slide scanning and photo scanning services, you can load your entire collection of images as ready-to-share digital files loaded on your very own DVD or thumb-drive. Once digitized, you can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing your images will be safe for a lifetime!

Home videos and film are a great way to spend a night with the family, but can be a pain to load up the old VCR with clunky video tapes and 20 year old adapters, and even worse to try to dig up and figure out how to work the old 8mm film projector. It’s unfortunate, but the fact is that film and video tapes were never intended to last forever. In fact, each year that goes by, your film and video tapes may even be fading and losing their clarity. By utilizing our film transfer and video to DVD services, you can secure the future of your film and videos and ensure that you can sure these memories with your family of the future. Custom edited DVDs of your old film and videos make wonderful gifts, sure to surprise anyone!

Music is not only a great reminder of the good ol’ times, many people keep audio collections of their favorite albums or artists to remind them of the feelings and thoughts we had when that song was popular. Audio transfer also works great in combination of an edited film or video transfer project to combine video of the past with the audio of that era. What better way to preserve your memories than to preserve the music of your past?

At DVD Your Memories, we specialize in providing ways for people to easily convert their older media to a more reliable digital format. Instead of a big box of video tapes, photos or film, you’ll have organized digital photos or video files loaded on a DVD or hard drive. We treasure your memories as much as you do and provide services necessary to keeping these memories alive for generations to come.

If you or your family member has old media stored away, bring them into any DVD Your Memories location for the best in digital media transfer services.