We’re in the process of switching from DSL to cable (meaning faster internet and cable tv now that we finally have a tv in the house – thanks adam!). they were sposed to come this past sat to hook it up, but they never showed up so now we have to wait until this thursday. until then we have no internet and no house phone.
it esp sux cause ive been sick since friday and dont feel up to going out ever. luckily on sat morning i found the dvds paul had brought stuck btwn the seat of the couch so i spent all day watching tv (gilmore girls, the oc, and van helsing). it was soooooooooo good to watch some of my shows.
ally-cat 
Paul or Ally,
How do you get the shows on DVD? (other than buying them of course) Would there be any way that is NOT long and complicated or expensive for me to put the shows i’m recording for you guys onto DVDs?
i have no idea how to do that from a vhs. the ones we have now were DLed off the internet and then burned to dvd. i watched 1-3 of gilmore girls and 1-2 of the OC. i have some other eps, but it jumps to eps like 6-9 so im holding back watching those until i get home cause im hoping that someone might have the ones im missing (like eps 3-5 and so on) on a tape somewhere.
Hi Lauren;
You’d need to buy what I call a “converter thingy” to plug into your computer. ADS makes one, which I own/use, called “DVD Xpress” or something like that. Basically it’s a small box, about the size of a Walkman, which has a jack for a USB cable, a jack for S-Video IN and three jacks for the standard VCR video/right audio/left audio and special software on a CD-ROM. What you do then is probably fairly obvious — you plug the USB cable into the computer, hook up the VCR using s-video or the other cables, and then use the included software to capture the video clips. I think (don’t quote me on this), there’s an included feature where you can capture directly onto a DVD-R. It’s all really easy with a Wizard interface and everything… Too easy in some respects 😛
Anyhow, it’s specially made for the kind of thing you’re wanting to do — transfer VHSes onto DVDs. I don’t think they’re extremely expensive; I bought mine, not on sale, for $129 CDN about three months ago. I suspect in a bigger city, you’d probably be able to get one for $79 US or thereabouts. Just make sure it’s the USB 2.0 version (the older ones = slower speed USB = bad bad video quality).
Thanks Reece! So i see it IS doable but i’m thinking it would take FOREVER to transfer the 50 million hours of tv i have recorded onto the computer and then from the computer to my DVD-R. Not to mention I don’t really have any money to go buy the hookup. I really was hoping someone could just tell me that my Tivo is magical and can do anything I ask it to. Actually i’m pretty sure my Tivo is magical anyway–i sure do love it!
And Ally—if you can DL the episodes why don’t you do that and watch them now instead of people recording them and saving them til you get back? There are some really REALLY great shows this season. I love TV!!!!!
Hmmm… if they’re on the Tivo, there may be a way. I should send Christian along to here; he’s the Tivo expert. I was also going to mention you could download many of the episodes, esp. of the more popular shows, from Suprnova.org with bittorrent… But apparently it closed down, and now you need to use some kind of app called Exeem to get at the torrents that used to be there (or something like this). No public beta of eXeem is available either, from what I hear 😦
One site that has torrents for a few shows is http://www2.digitaldistractions.org:8080/torrents.php
Hey! So yeah, there’s a few ways to get videos off your tv, but it takes time.. and you may not want to do it. The way to get the exact videos (more or less) is to “hack your tivo.” This basically means opening it up, taking out the harddrive, sticking it in a PC, and booting off a bootable CD that is designed to do this for you. Nowadays, it doesn’t erase your harddrive, which is good. So then, once you set that all up, you want to enable networking. For all this, there are networking kits. I’d go around http://www.tivocommunity.com/ and find out where they talk about them. Actually, I think those kits come with the necessary setup stuff to get this all working, but you may still have to hack it.. There’s a forum for this info in detail (howtos and such) on the site above. They won’t help you there on ripping the videos, but I know I saw a wiki page that talked about how to do it. It’s not a quick process. These are encoded in a special format, and you have to take the files and re-encode them, optionally stripping out commercials by hand. So it’s not a fast process. I’ve never done it, but I might someday.
The other solution is to get a TV capture card or a stand-alone DVD burner or something and then use (in this order of preference) component video (usually for DVDs — high quality) or S-Video and record it off of that, much like dubbing tapes. Most TiVos probably don’t support component, so you’d have to use S-Video.
I’m at work right now and this textbox is very small, so I’m probably rambling and not being very clear, but I hoped that helped at least a little bit. IM me sometime! I haven’t heard from you in ages.
hey christian!! i talked to mayoor today (im at work) and he said our internet is now back up so i should be able to get online tonight and chat with peeps!