Hi, guys. I'm back for more advice! I found a site that had episodes of a tv show that's not available commercially on dvd, and the episodes are downloadable. I'd like to keep the episodes for posterity. My husband believes that you can download a one-hour tv show onto a writable cd. Is this true, or do you need to use a dvd to store video? My husband's computer will write to a cd, and it will play a pre-recorded dvd movie, but we don't know if it will write to a dvd. And what about a thumb drive. He bought me one to store my fanfiction on, many years ago, that was on sale at Walgreen's. I plugged it into my computer, and it was full of advertising! I stored my stories on it, but I could never retrieve them from the thumb drive. So, can I store each episode separately, on one cd? Can I assume that his laptop, which is about 3 years old, can copy to dvd, and buy some blank dvds? Or should I break down and try the whole thumb-drive thing again, hoping for better luck? What would you do? I'd sure be grateful for the advice of someone more tech-savvy...

If you download to a cd it won't play like a dvd. I'd suggest just buying a blank dvd rom disc to download things on. The reason for this is because CD's when put in dvd machines and computers, just play the track, they do not show them.

I would not really suggest the thumb drive, since thoughs are more for files, and movies and shows take up a lot of space.

If you go under My Computer, it may say something like DVD-R/CD-RW for your disc drive. If you just see DVD, it's likely that your drive can only read them. I wouldn't suggest trying to save TV shows to CD. I'm really not sure that you would have enough room. I know CDs can store about 80 minutes of music, but video files are considerably larger than simple music files. When selling memory cards to people for their video cameras, I tell them to live by the rule that 1 GB of memory will give you about 30 minutes of video.

If you really just want a way to store them without taking up too much space on your computer, you might want to consider an external hard drive. They basically work just like a thumb drive, but they can hold much more information. A 500 GB can be pretty cheap these days, but I've seen them range up to 2 TB in stores. It's very easy to save files to it and be able access them again.

I'm not sure what problem you had with your thumb drive. I've never had any issue with them being pre-loaded with advertisements or with being able to get the information back off of them. But they have dropped a lot in price these days, so getting a small one (8 or 16 GB) just to try it out again shouldn't cost you any more than about $10 or $15.

Thanks, guys, for your valuable expertise. I really appreciate your guidance, and will make use of it at the office supply store tomorrow! Karma to both of you.