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.
