Saturday, March 9, 2019

Introduction

I've been crazy about movies for what feels like a really long time. The first movie I can remember seeing in a theatre was Star Wars, A New Hope - way back in 1977. In the eighties I remember going to the drive in and seeing Fletch, Red Dawn and Purple Rain. At one point in the 80's I saw a 3D movie with a medieval theme. The glasses were made of thin cardboard with even thinner red and green saran-wrap like lenses.

At home we watched a number of movies on our betamax VCR. I can remember movies like They Call Me Bruce, Better Off Dead, and One Crazy Summer. In the early nineties I bought my own VHS VCR and that's when the collecting seriously began. Before I started collecting DVDs and Blu-ray discs I amassed over 500 VHS tapes. This isn't a particularly large collection when you consider many people collect in the thousands, or in some cases tens of thousands, but it was sizable enough that it took me a couple of days to bring all the tapes to donate to a local movie store (the store was a small independent movie seller that I'm happy to say is still in business).

I cannot remember the exact day I started collecting DVD or Blu-ray discs, but since that time I've managed to collect more than 1,000 movies between the two media. That number is probably quite a bit higher if you include the television shows I also started collecting.

This amount of media requires a lot of storage space. I don't live in a house. The  apartment I live in is a relatively average size two bedroom apartment, and there's not much storage space. I prefer fewer things out on display. To accomplish this I recycle the plastic DVD and Blu-ray containers, and store the discs in large disc holders that hold around 320 discs each. I put the disc inserts in a shoe box.

Before storing media I copy the media from disc to file. The file then gets stored on our media server and the discs are stored in the binders. Any time I want to watch a movie I simply sit in front of one of the televisions in the house and browse the movie collection. The software I use to organize the collection is the free and open source KODI. KODI is awesome for scraping movie meta-data (actors, dates, genre, images) and organizing media in an interesting way.

I buy movies from many sources, but the common denominator is I generally buy them in person. Unfortunately I've found that buying movies online doesn't always turn out well - vendors send bad discs, or sometimes miss including a disc (for one show I got 2 of disc 1 and no disc 2), or miss-label a disc as being a DVD when in fact it's just a key to a digital download.

I'm of the view that you should be able to own your physical media. Services like Youtube, Netflix, and Hulu have their place, but I will never believe they are a suitable replacement for physical media. There are a litany of reasons why physical media is better, but a few include:
  • Extras, programs, music, games.
  • Available in other languages.
  • You can touch the media, it won't disappear if a company goes under.
  • It often comes with more information (inserts) about the movie than a digital download. 
  • It's physical.
Raw Movie is a blog for people that are as nuts about movies as I am. I'm of the view that I'll try to watch most movies at least once. There are a few movies I haven't finished because I either felt they were just too awful or too gory, but that number is pretty small. So if you're like me, or just want to read somebody rambling on about movies - Welcome to Raw Movie!