Matt Manzi is the superintendent of The Orchards Golf Club where the 2004 U.S. Women's Open was contested over the weekend. My brother Scott Aiello is one of Matt's best friends, an assistant superintendent of a course himself, and spent the better part of a week working for Matt as part of the course maintenance crew.

On Wednesday, Scott called me and asked me to TiVo all of the live coverage of the Open that was shown on ESPN and NBC. I was glad to do it, but I was in for trouble because the Open coverage overlapped the beginning of the Tour de France. Luckily, OLN's wall-to-wall coverage allowed me to record the Tour stages live on Saturday and Sunday before the Open coverage began in the afternoon on NBC.

With that issue behind me, the remaining problems were:

1. TiVo Series I recording capacity, and
2. permanent recording capability of my home theater.

My TiVo is one of the museum pieces that only has 20-hour recording capacity. The Women's U.S. Open coverage was 14 hours in total. This meant that I needed to stay vigilant and copy the daily coverage off to a VHS tape each night.

My best VCR has stereo and S-Video capability, and it makes beautiful recordings when the recording heads are functioning properly. Although I've cleaned it regularly, the video has produced recently looks like I'm recording broadcast TV captured with set-top rabbit ears. My second VCR, which was hooked up to my wife's TV when she was in medical school, is producing a better picture, but it only records sound in mono. Tough life, right?

What I wanted, and what I will probably get soon is a DVD recorder. This would allow me to burn a digital copies of programs that I have on my TiVo. I want this for the durability of the media and the image and sound quality. No matter what format a DVD recorder uses, the DVDs that they produce have a shelf life equal to or better than VHS recorders.

If you are looking for a DVD recorder that's a good value right now, I'd recommend checking out the Akai DVDRW120 Progressive-Scan DVD Player/Recorder. It's currently rated number 13 on Amazon.com's Early Adopter Audio/Video List. When a DVD recorder gets this high on the Early Adopter list, it usually means that the deal hunters like it.

Another reason I want a DVD recorder like the Akai DVDRW120 is that I want to burn DVD copies of the videos I've shot with my Mini DV Camcorder. For a long time, I've wanted a complete video editing system, built around an Apple iMac. But for about 1/7th the price, I can burn the unedited video to DVD. That would be worth it for a lot of my video.