Expanding my Digital Library

EDITOR'S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS A TECH ENTRY.

  As I  blogged about a couple of months ago our Samsung DVD recorder broke and the company did not want to offer any assistance. And so we went without a DVD player. That is until this week. 

  I liked the ability to burn shows from our DVR to DVD and then rip the shows to my iTunes library for posterity. It was great that I could archive some of my favorite 90210 episodes and watch on my computer, iPod or iPhone whenever.

  So this week I went to Best Buy and purchased a new Toshiba upgradable DVD player. (As a side note: I read many reviews about the pros and cons of going Blu-Ray vs Upgrade DVD players. The conclusion with some tech writers was the DVD had more bang for the buck but Blu-Ray was better just not by much. My thought is that in two years it won't matter Hi-Def video will be all on servers and hard drives.)

  (Back to the story) So after hooking up the new DVD player to the home system I pondered whether I made the right choice by not going the DVD recorder route again. And so I started researching how I could record the shows off our DVR to iTunes. What I found out was there was a way to hook up my laptop to the Bright House cable box and pull off the saved shows.

  The only thing I had to actually purchase was the MPEG-2 component for Quicktime for $20. The other two pieces of software I needed to accomplish my goal were free off the internet.

  I used a Firewire cable to transfer the video from the cable box to my Macintosh laptop. Once the video is saved to the laptop I then use another software to convert the file to another format that iTunes can recognize and won't take up a lot of space on my iPhone. Then I can pull it into iMovie and edit out the commercials before archiving it to iTunes.

  I know that many readers are looking at this and thinking, "Man Chris has a lot of free time." Probably true but I'm just looking to the future. And in my future is apparently 90210.