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Friday,
January 7, 2005

Electronics Away!

For those of you who have been over here for parties and such, you know that we have a Wall O' Video(TM) in the living room, the bulk of which is comprised of tapes from when Lyndon was a member of Cult TV and traded tapes with folks in the US for various shows on either side of the pond.

We're slowly moving over to DVDs, so we've been able to get rid of a lot of the commercial VHS tapes and replace them with DVDs, but the problem still remains of what to do with all the homemade tapes. Now, a lot of these are also available on DVD, so we'll be picking those up as time and cashflow permits, but Lyndon also has a large collection of British shows and specials that aren't yet out on DVD, and may never be (i.e. the big Queen tribute concert at Wembley, the Milky Milky Tour with Punt and Dennis, etc.).

So, he had a brilliant idea. We have a PAL TV and VHS player from when we were in Europe -- if we had a DVR that could accept PAL input, we could play the tapes, record them on the DVR and burn them onto DVDs. The DVDs would then be kept in the living room and the tapes could be boxed and stored in the closet, which would open up a lot of space in the Wall O' Video(TM). The DVR he purchased in Atlanta won't accept PAL input, so he purchased a cheap unit that would (and will probably die in about six weeks, according to various newsgroups he consulted -- but he only bought it to do this one batch conversion job, so he considers that to be an acceptable loss).

As it turns out, the unit also seems to be converting the PAL signal to NTSC (he thinks -- he's not sure if the unit is converting, or if it's due to the fact that he's using a composite cable rather than a SCART cable, so he needs to investigate this further). On one hand, this isn't that desireable because it means there's some loss of picture quality. On the other hand, it means that the DVDs can be played in a regular Region 1 player connected to an NTSC set, which means that friends of ours who are into British humor (and you know who you are -- Lyndon particularly wants you to see THE NEW STATESMAN, Steve) can see some fabulous stuff.

So the evening has been spent taking a wander through our British comedy collection and dubbing it onto DVDs in preparation for tape storage. In that time, I think we managed to make three DVDs. Needless to say, Lyndon hasn't even really scratched the surface yet, and we currently have electronic equipment stacked all the way across the hearth which just screams "Yes, SIT on me! Chew on my wires, shed in my sliding bits, RAVAGE me!" to the cats, so he wants to buy a bigger TV stand and store all the boxes there for the next six weeks while he dubs tapes.

Hee. I'm just happy that I'll get to watch GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME and THE KENNY EVERETT SHOW without having to drag out and set up the British TV. Whee!