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

babylon 5

[Satai]

I'm going to take the conventional approach and buy the DVDs this fall, as they will also include TONS of interviews and JMS commentary on both Signs and Portents and Chrysalis. The following seasons should, well, follow shortly after the first...

Great quality, only one D--A conversion

[derinax]

I've gotten quality that rivals ExtractStream from the TiVo by recording S-Video onto Mini-DV tapes through either a Sony DV Watchman or a Canon digital video camera.

Once on MiniDV, you can go firewire into your machine. From there, it goes onto DVD via mi iMac.

Easy, no weird cropping (like you have to do with ExtractStream), and the quality is top.

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.

Two solutions, I've tried both..

[delus10n0]

First and easiest solution is to just make a "media box" with an All-In-Wonder in it to record your shows to MPEG2. Then I used TMPEGEnc and other tools to make them into SVCD (or sometimes DiVX.) An hour long episode could be edited down to 40 minutes or so (with all the commercials out), and it would be pretty decent quality on a single 700meg CD as SVCD.

The second and more difficult solution is to get a Tivo, install TurboNet on it (a 100mbps NIC), and try to extract the streams off of the Tivo. I have had a lot of problems with this method, as most "long" shows (over an hour) won't extract properly, or give me other errors. The nice thing about this method though is that it's interlaced, and already in the proper resolution for TV. Plus, the hardware MPEG2 encoder of the TiVO is by far a million times better than the software one of the All-In-Wonder.

For more information on TiVO hacks, visit http://www.9thtee.com/ -- and for more information on video stuff in general I'd try http://www.vcdhelp.com and http://www.doom9.org