[GoOrioles33]

I am a football writer/blogger. I record a ton of games all year long so I can reference them when needed for writing about the NFL draft or players that are changing teams.

From 1995-2010 I filled up record numbers of VHS tapes. In 2011 I moved to using DVDs. This year I finally broke down and got DirecTV HD. I've been with DTV since 1999, but kept resisting HD due to recording complications.

I have 2 HD DVRs in my living room. I need to be able to record 10 to 15 games per week, per DVR. They'll fill up in 2 weeks basically. So I need to be able to transfer the games somewhere.

I've read about the eSATA external hard drives. Sounds like this could be a good solution.

I also considered copying some of the games to my computer. Would that be practical? What kind of hardware would I need?

Any other solutions that are out there?

Thanks for any help.

I love the HD picture, but also miss the days of buying a VCR and hooking it up in 5 minutes and being ready to go. Simpler times.

 

[Beerstalker]

If you need to archive them for a long time you are probably better off continuing to record to DVD. Otherwise you are going to have to deal with switching out external hard drives all the time and tracking which hard drive has what games on it, which DVR it goes to etc. And if you ever have to replace one of your DVRs all the games recorded off it will no longer be watchable.

You could also consider getting a video capture card for your computer and recording the games on it over component video. This may make it easier to archive/track and you won't have to worry about a DVR dying. However programming the comptuer to work with the DirecTV DVR to automate the recording process can be a bit tricky.

 

[GoOrioles33]

I didn't think you could record HD to DVDs?

I have 3 DVD recorders. Will they work with HD and burn good DVDs?

 

[The Merg]

I didn't think you could record HD to DVDs?

I have 3 DVD recorders. Will they work with HD and burn good DVDs?

It depends on what the input ports are on the DVD recorders.

As mentioned, while you can use external drives to increase your recording capacity, anytime you want to swap out drives you would need to reboot the DVR, plus you have to keep track of which external was from which DVR.

- Merg

 

[Beerstalker]

I didn't think you could record HD to DVDs?

I have 3 DVD recorders. Will they work with HD and burn good DVDs?

Assuming these are North American DVD recorders you can't, but you most likely will be able to record the HD game as a widescreen SD-DVD. If you hook up the DVD recorder to the S-video output on your DVR you can record the game, but might have to deal with the nag about changing the resolution. If you buy a component to S-video or Composit converter you can get rid of the nag about changing resolutions if it bothers you that much.

I assumed that since you got away with archiving stuff in SD before it would still be ok now. If you need to archive in HD now then you will have to deal with swapping out hard drives, or try the computer capture card solution I mentioned earlier.