h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Star Wars documentary and the RoTJ 'Creatures' documentary please.

Hi Jim. I can't believe the unbelievable amount of crap you tape. I only feel free to say this because your taste in taping profoundly relfects my own. How goes it with the archiving? What compression codec are you using? Divx? Do tell. I must say since the birth of my daughter the taping has grown more and more bizarre. Walking With Beasts being interupted by Teletubbies. I quite like the Teletubbies, though. They remind me of grassy meadows and acid. The T***nies, though, E and Special Brew. Nasty...
E-mail me from the address on my personal space and I'll forward my meatspace address so you can send that disc...

And...what do you intend to do with all of your tapes once you've archived them? Could you bring yourself to get rid?

The intention is to sell the tapes eventually - whether I do that in pieces as we go depends on how much we want to reclaim the space.

I'll have to update this page - I've just finished disc 54, so it's going quite well so far.

I'm using a Panasonic stand-alone DVD recorder - it's by far the fastest way of doing this. Using a PC would mean it would take about three times as long to archive each tape (because I'd have to capture, compress, then write). The Panny has the advantage that its finalised discs can be played on most regular DVD players. Going the DivX route wouldn't have allowed that.

You're recording on the fly?

Yes - otherwise it wouold take an age. (Not that it won't anyway).

I wouldn't want to have to tie up a PC doing all this archiving - the actual recording has to go in real-time anyway (obviously) so I might as well go straight to disc. All I really need to do is catch the adverts, and hit stop when the programmes finish (to avoid having a three-or-four hour single title when it should be five or six half hour episodes).

That makes sense.

Jim, what did you think of Final Fantasy (the movie - never played the games)?
The storyline was badly put across, but the visuals! Do you think parts of it were responsible for some of the inspiration behind the big battle at the end of Ep2? (Particulary the twisty rockets and, up to a point, the new breed of droids we saw).

Interested to hear what you think. By the way, if you haven't seen it, see it. It's worth it.

Hey

this is an ancient post I'm now replying to but I'm trying to get hold of a copy of Horizon: The Blind Watchmaker. I see you have it Jim (or at least did in 2002!).

Can I get a copy from you? That would be awesome

many thanks

Ben

"Can I get a copy from you? That would be awesome"

It would also be illegal, sadly. However, maybe in a couple of years, the BBC will have embarked on offering its archive of programmes for download, and Horizon is exactly the kind of programme it's likely to do.

And there are always other avenues for finding old UK tv programmes. In this case, have you tried writing to Richard Dawkins?