Hey, here's an idea I had that's working. Every so often, one has to.
The Archive of American Television has recorded hundreds and hundreds of hours of videotaped interviews with important folks from the history of TV. You could sit at your computer the rest of your life practically and watch these videos — all wonderful stuff — but who has the time for that? I don't…so here's what I did…
Step one: I captured most of the ones that interested me to a little folder on my computer. By now, you probably know how to do this…there are about ninety ways. If you're using Mozilla Firefox as your brower, there are several plug-ins that'll do the trick, saving them as FLV files.
Step two: I extracted the audio from them into a separate MP3 file. There are plenty of utilties out there that'll do this, at least for the PC. I used a free one called FLV Extract, which I downloaded from here.
Step three: Then I put some onto my iPhone to listen to like podcasts in my car or when travelling. On the planes to and from Indiana, I heard my pal Lee Goldberg interview Dick Van Dyke. You don't lose that much on these by losing the visual and if I'd waited 'til I had time to watch it, I'd never have gotten around to it.
Most of these interviews are fascinating. There are a few where they just got to the people too late in their lives — the one with Howie Morris is sad because of how much he could no longer remember, though I'm glad they did it. If you're a professional writer (of TV or otherwise) or want to be one, I suggest experiencing the Larry Gelbart conversation in its entirety. It's really a trove of great, important material and moving it to my iPhone for listening is about the only way I'll have a chance to mine enough of it.