My current setup:
Digital cable -> Cable converter (via Coax) -> Settop DVD recorder (via S-Video and Composite Audio)
The DVD recorder's cheap but it produces good enough results for me. I suppose I could snail someone the rws I cap off, I'm running out of room and will probably make for pulling up to the computer just an AVI. (I'm a fairly experienced xvid user

I suppose the other possibility would be to send the vobs one-by-one over irc, I don't really want to torrent this in raw format :/ ...I'll be capping with commercials, prolly at my settop's top quality. 4 hours -> 4 DVD-RWs
And while I don't know or care about this movie, preservation is preservation! And I'm damn willing to do just about anything within my ability for preservation.