[socialstudy]

I've been recording every new episode of UFC Unleashed and all of the UFC Fight Night programs (Tivo is a wonderful thing). Since the UFC Fight Night and UFC Unleashed programs are free with my cable subscription (ie. they are not Pay Per View events) saving the programs for viewing at a later time or on another device falls under the fair use doctrine as long as I use them for personal viewing. I have a pretty decent library of fights which I can go back and view at any time.

My biggest problem has been the storage and organization of these files. Has anyone else recorded these programs and catalogued their fights? If so, how are you doing it? Storage is not that big of a problem now that I can convert tivo files (huge 2.5GB files for each Unleashed show) into smaller 500MB Divx or Xvid files. Organizing the programs and gettting a catalog of the fights or fighters on each show has proven to be a hard task. At first I just had a text document with the file name of the recorded show and all of the fights on it. I just read an article on a service called MyFabrik that helps people manage their digital media files. The article sounded like the service would suit my needs so I signed up for a free 2GB beta account to see how it worked. After using it for a few weeks it looks like it will work pretty good, the other cool thing is that they also have a physical storage unit made by Maxtor called the Maxtor Fusion that combines an external networked 500GB hard drive with the MyFabrik software. I haven't tried the Maxtor Fusion yet, but I'm hoping to test one out soon.

For now I'm still playing with the online version of the service (you can get your account bumped up to 5GB by referring three friends). What I am doing now is tagging the file with keywords so I can search for all episodes that have a certain fighter. For example I can add the keyword of St.Pierre to all of the episodes of Unleashed that have a fight of his. Now I can do a search in my MyFabrik account for St.Pierre and it will return all of the video files that have St.Pierre associated with it. Awesome! Write back if you have a better system of doing things and let me know how you are doing it and what you are using to get it done. It's cool that the UFC is showing some of the older fights like Sherk vs. Radach and Hughes vs. Sakurai that weren't really available on DVD. I also have some of the Pride and IFL shows on FSN. Now I have a good library of fights to watch when it's raining outside or when I get sick!