I have an old computer that works, it just won't communicate with the network or the Internet any more. I have a new computer with external drives and internal drives with much of the content from the old computer. Some of the software in the old computer can't be added to the new one (Windows no longer shares Windows Movie Maker, for example, a simple-to-use program that does a lot of heavy lifting). And I have a desire to not take up huge amounts of space with recorded programs (mostly from television) with dedicated file types that play in only one type of player.

A number of years ago Windows killed off it's old Windows Media Center software and some of of my files are from there. I looked at ways to cobble together something that would work and ended up instead buying a new software program called JRiver Media Center, it handled the old WMC files. I buy an update every year or two, but it works pretty well and it played nicely with the Hauppauge receiver that HP put in that 2010 computer. This was my DVR since I didn't have cable or any other type of digital video recorder in place.

I also have a lot of one-off recordings on old VHS tapes, so those need to be converted and it takes a couple of steps.

I'm getting back to working on these projects between the two computers and I thought I'd share information about some of the software (most of it free) that I'm using to do this work, in case someone else has been thinking about it, or for those who have already started and have their own methods they'd like to share. The keyword for most of my work is that the small downloaded programs are open source or free to use.