By the current count, we have 304 movies (currently DVD, but soon to include Blu-Ray). Doing a little math, 304 standard DVD cases would take up 3.86 cubic feet of space. Not all our movie cases are standard, however. We have many box sets and 4-6 disc TV series. By my estimate, we would need 10 square feet of wall space to display all of our movies (5 inches deep). It would take a very long time to find a specific movie title. And the movie collection would be anything but portable.
Here is my solution:
This DVD binder holds 200 discs, and takes up only 0.45 square feet of space. 200 DVD cases would take up 2.54 square feet, so we’re compressing it to less than 18% of its original size. And the case is eminently portable, with strong metal handles and a well-protected exterior.
But what about finding movies? Flipping through a book would actually take longer, because of page-turning time, and the fact that some movies have hard-to-read labels on the discs (especially the double-sided ones).
To solve this, I have a copy of Delicious Library on my Mac. This keeps a digital record of all of our movies. Getting them in there was fast, thanks to Delicious Library’s support for barcode recognition. You just point the computer’s camera at the barcode, it “beeps,” and looks up all the movie’s info from Amazon. Alternatively you can just type the title and import the data from Amazon. We bought little round stickers at an office supply store, numbered them, and placed them at the corner of each of the slots, using a standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern for each side of each page. As I entered a movie, taking its disc out of its case, I would simply slide it into the next empty slot, and using an Applescript that I wrote, quickly type in the number of that slot, using the “Location” field in Delicious Library.
We have 3 cases (two being full, one only recently started), and they are numbered sequentially. One is 1-200, the next is 201-400, and the third is 401-600.
We can scan through movies on my computer, on my iPhone (with the handy companion app), or through a physical printout I created. To create or update the printout, I do a CSV export of the library, and then run it through a custom PHP script that formats it nicely and ignores “A, An, The” for alphabetization. I just print out the title, the location, and the duration (in case we’re looking for a shorter movie). The rows are zebra-striped, of course, for easy title-to-location scanning.
When we find the movie we want to see, we scan over to the “Location” field, open the correct case, and flip to the appropriate page.
How are you organizing your movies?
I have nearly 400 movies on DVD and roughly 150 TV season sets on DVD (it’s an addiction). I have 4 racks/shelves that hold these, but I ran out of room a while ago. So, I definitely know what it’s like to want a better organizational system. In another 5 years, I won’t have any wall space left.
I’ll probably end up building a WordPress plugin to organize my stuff. Why the heck would I need anything else?
Honestly, thanks for the link to Delicious Library. I’m off to explore that a bit more.
I have nearly every movie and TV show in my collection. It’s all indexed, categorized and stored with redundancy on the “Internet”.
😛
I ended up ripping all of my movies to hard drives (RAID 1 of course) and have it hooked up to an ancient Mac Mini. With a Blu-Ray drive I even have my HD collection on drive too. Couple this with an AppleTV and the family is in heaven.
I’m successfully running around 250+ movies and over 20 different TV show seasons. The only pain was the conversion and ripping. But time took care of that one.
mnmlsm is my goal. 🙂
Noel, do you store the original VOBs, or do you recompress using a more efficient codec? If so, what?
I typically convert to .m4a files. Highest quality.
I run the conversion constantly on the old Mac Mini that doubles as the server.
The quality is fantastic. And, I can tell the difference between a 128kbps and 320kbps mp3 (and a FLAC file too). So, that should mean something…
All in all, I feel like media is bound to be replaced time and time again… beta, vhs, dvd, HD-DVD, BluRay – I just want data. Serve me up an HD file and call it a day.
Indeed it does. I’m in the same boat with the FLAC/320kbps MP3 attenuation. Glad to know the quality is that high. I may have to give that a look.
Delicious Library is great for Mac! If anybody looking the similar solution for Windows, I discovered this one: http://www.bolidesoft.com/delicious-library.html
I use an Atlantic Pod silo. They’re simply the most compact and easiest way to store and retrieve a movie. The boxes can be thrown out, and liner notes kept elsewhere.