Archiving Content from a PVR?

ayden asks: "Now that the universe has conspired to keep me unemployed for the foreseeable future, I'm taking the time to fill in the gaps in my Babylon 5 collection thanks to the SCI-FI channel. I'm frustrated the linear nature video tape and the problems associated with recording directly from broadcast to tape. It occurs to me that there has to be a better way. I've thought about using my ATI All In Wonder Radeon to record the program directly to my hard drive and editing the resulting file to remove commercials. Should I then record the file to video tape? Or would it be better to make a Video CD I could play back on my DVD player? Are there other options should I consider? How are people archiving shows from their Personal Video Recorders? What techniques are people using to accomplish these tasks?"

Comments

Alternative...

[bowronch]

For archiving my favorite shows or at least some of them, I just download the AVI's or MPG's from Direct Connect... Its much easier that way... Let somebody else do the hard work... I got the The Osbournes, Scrubs and Sopranos Season 3 this way...

I would think that Babylon 5 episodes are probably easy to come by on Direct Connect or Gnutella...

TiVo

[4of12]

We wanted to archive a few shows, too.

What's worked pretty well is just to buy a low end TiVo with a 20 GB drive. Then, stuff two 100 GB drives in the thing and reboot. No, it's not that easy, but detailed instructions on the procedure for doing this are available. I think there's even a CD with a specially built Linux distro that includes all the necessary tools for mucking with the special MFS filesystem they use on the Linux PPC that constitutes a TiVo.

I've thought it would be nice, though, if there were a way to connect the IDE interface of the TiVo to some uber-RAID of terabyte or so. My queries about this returned some disappointing information that IDE drives were somehow limited to no more than 128 GB, ruling out that possible solution.

The Ethernet connection to NAS sounds pretty good in a lot ways (I don't want loads of disks whirring in my media cabinet), but from what I last heard it sounded kind of iffy from the standpoint that TiVo's automated system upgrades could stomp on your local tweaks to use such an Ethernet card (I think 9thtee sells them.)

I suppose once could always go "off grid" with the TiVo and not use it to call up for the programming guide and automated software updates, but having the programming information is kind of useful. I was willing to fork over the bucks for the lifetime subscription for the guide. I don't mind supporting TiVo monetarily since they've been generally pretty mellow about hacking on their hardware.

Re:TiVo

[Anonymous Coward]

somehow limited to no more than 128 GB

ummm... I dont think you understand how RAID works. Here's a simplified intro: (note the simplified part, this is not a complete technical explanation)

You have 8 disks, all the same size, and all connected to a hardware RAID controller. When the OS reads/writes the disk, access is made via the RAID controller, not to the individual disks. In general, for an 8-disk array, one bit for each byte resides on each disk. This allows your storage to increase to 8*disk_size_of_one_disk, and I/O speed is increased by a factor of approximately 8. To the OS, all 8 disks look like one drive, because the RAID controller fools the OS into thinking it's the drive.

One major problem is risk of disk failure. You can add 8 more disks (16 total), again all the same size, which mirror the main disks continually. Should a failure occur, the second array takes over as the primary array, allowing time for the faulty disk to be installed and mirrored. This maintains good uptime for the server should a disk bite the dust.

Again, this isnt the complete description, if you want that go to google. This was just to give you a quick explanation on how RAID works.

Re:Why?

[Louis_Wu]

Is there anything on tv which is worth archiving? You are not going to watch Babylon 5 twice, or are you?

No, of course not. Twice is not nearly enough.

First there was watching it as it came out. That took five years. (Well, more, if you count the wait between the pilot movie and the beginning of the first season.) Then I watched them again, as I taped them on Sci-Fi. It was during this round that I started recording episode numbers and titles, to make certain that I got all of the episodes. Then I watched each episode again, looking for good quotes to copy down. (I collect quotes. One of these days I'll organize them.) I haven't watched the entire series since the quote copy round of seasons, but I have watched individual episodes; usually I rememeber a quote, look it up in my records, start reading the surrounding quotes, remember why I like that episode so much, and then pull out the tape and watch it again.

Let's see, that's at least three times I watched each episode. Twice, no, that's not nearly enough.