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

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.