When she's not popping them in her aged VCR for yet another viewing, Ruth Ann Rieland keeps all the treasured home videos of her children and grandchildren, along with her photo albums, in a closet by the front door.

		For a videotape, use it or lose it If you can't afford to get all your videotapes transferred to DVD now, good maintenance is essential until you can. In fact, you literally need to give them a good workout once a year, according to Bryan Rudolph of Video Doc Productions: 1. Place tapes in your VCR and press STOP first to prevent the tape from going into automatic play mode. 2. Press Fast Forward (FF). Let the tape go to the end and then rewind. This will physically move your videotapes and prevent them from any potential signal loss that results from a tightly wound tape sitting in storage for a long period of time. 3. Do this at least once a year on all videotapes that you want to keep for future use. -- Mackenzie Carpenter

"That way, if there's a fire, I think, 'Fire, pictures, door. Fire, pictures, door,' " said the Bethel Park grandmother of two who admits to being "fairly obsessed. I take tons of videos of my grandchildren, and I just love watching them over and over again."

But now a new threat faces her stash of memories -- not fire or water, but the passage of time. Those video cameras everyone had so much fun brandishing at graduations and family picnics in the 1980s and 1990s had, it turns out, a built-in expiration date

Today, their videotapes are deteriorating, either because of heat or humidity or poor storage techniques, but mostly because, over time, the magnetic particles on video tape become loose, scrambling the electronic signal that creates the picture.

So Mrs. Rieland is gradually converting her old VHS tapes to digital form as DVDs, which take up a lot less space in her front hall closet. But because she's hopeless with technology, she's had to find someone else to do it.

Enter Bryan Rudolph, owner of Video Doc in Bethel Park. He originally started out making wedding videos in the 1990s and has since expanded into corporate training and college sports recruitment DVDs. He also does photo and negative scanning and other services. But one of the busiest parts of his business is rescuing old home videos from the dustbin of history -- whether VHS, VHS-C, 8 mm, Betamax, Hi-8, digital 8 mm, mini-DV tapes or foreign videotape formats.

Most videotapes have a shelf life of only between 10 to 20 years, and some begin deteriorating after five, he says. DVDs, on the other hand, are expected to last between 50 and 100 years.

"It's been a pretty steady business for the past couple of years because this affects so many people," he said. "Even if you don't have videos, your parents probably have them, and they're probably crumbling as we speak."

For $25 plus tax -- there's a cheaper bulk rate for five or more tapes -- Mr. Rudolph will turn videos into a two-hour DVD. But there's a catch: While DVDs can't deteriorate, they can scratch, ruining the disc, which is why he recommends that customers make two copies.

"There's an additional expense," he said, "but if it's your child's first birthday, how can you put a $20 value on that? I've had people with a scratched DVD that's ruined forever, and they're devastated they didn't get a copy."

Mr. Rudolph's prices are comparable with other local video services. Pittsburgh Digital Video in Shadyside charges $25 for the first DVD, and $15 for each additional DVD, with extra charges for picture enhancement, such as color correction for faded tapes.

Christine Amabile, owner of "See 'N See" productions in New Castle, charges $20 a DVD, although she uses a more basic technology than other services, some of which can quickly download analog video into a digital computer. She noted that older VHS tapes are harder to work with than the smaller "Hi-8" tapes of the 1990s, "whose pictures are crisper and look better on DVD."

Online mail-order conversion services are less expensive, although if you don't like the results, you can't easily march up to the front door and complain to the owner if they're hundreds of miles away.

Still, an Internet search turned up nearly two dozen companies that transfer videos to DVDs. Some, like VideoSilo.com, charge by the videotape -- $7.95 for VHS and Hi-8 tapes, more for VHS-C. But shop around: At thephotoarchivalco.com, there's a flat rate of $7.50 for most types of videotapes, and for every 12 videos sent in, customers will earn a free videotape conversion to DVD.

Or, you can try to do it yourself if you have a computer with enough hard drive space and a camcorder or VCR that can play your old videotapes.

Jim Cummings, a computer consultant based in Heidelberg, says the process is actually not that difficult: "It's essentially about getting the video into your computer, and then into a program that allows you to burn DVDs," he said.

Software programs, such as Pinnacle, are available to do that, and many come with a USB video cable that you plug into your camcorder and then into the computer.

After "capturing" the video in a computer file, you then burn it onto a DVD, he said. Older computers don't have DVD burners, but you can buy an external burner for between $75 and $80.

For more detailed instructions, check out a how-to article by Kimberly Powell, a professional genealogist and Internet consultant at genealogy.about.com. Dave Johnson, of PC World, wrote another good column on the subject at: www.pcworld.com.

Finally, there are online storage sites that, for a fee, will back up your DVDs and photos in cyberspace. StashSpace.com will upload home videos onto its "redundant storage array" and make them available online to family and friends, to Web sites like MySpace.com, or available for download onto a video iPod.

But online storage can be pricey for families with hours and hours of unedited video: StashSpace.com prices starts at $5 per hour of video per year, while AT&T Online vault charges $5.95 per month per PC for the first two gigabytes' worth of storage in an off-site data center.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Rudolph is skeptical about such services.

"I still don't trust the Internet," he said. "Your videos could end up on YouTube, for all you know."

Mrs. Rieland says that even though she can't afford to transfer all her videos at once, she's making some headway in that pile of memories in her front hall closet.

Something of a technophobe, she is reluctant to try the newer digital video technology and is still using the same JVC camera she's had for years, "but each time I record the grandkids, I run over to Bryan's and have a DVD made.

"It's $27 a shot, but I don't mind the cost," she says. "I'd feel much worse if I didn't have them to remember all those Christmas mornings and birthdays."