Oh, yeah, I love DVD’s. I don’t have what you’d call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time. ~ David Fincher

One of my pet peeves for years has been the mess that CD’s and DVD’s create when out in general use.  I’m glad you don’t have to rewind them like the tapes of old, but they are still ungainly, too easy to break or scratch, and just a pain to organize.

I’ve tried many methods over the years.  For my CD’s, I had one of those 300 CD carousel players, but even that wasn’t fun – the tiny screen was too small to read to see which disc you were on, and besides, in order to get the info into the player you had to connect a keyboard and enter all the data through their terrible menus. I ended up creating a 300 row spreadsheet that I printed out and put in those clear plastic sleeves, and kept it as a reference when I wanted to find a CD.  Yeah, it sucked.

Then came iTunes and TIVO.  Tivo let me play my iTunes playlists ON the home theater across the network.  Cool!  I digitized all my music (at too low a bitrate, 160kbps), and BAM!  No more CD’s.  But as my DVD collection grew from 10 to 20 to 100, I began to have the same problems – piles of DVD’s, scratches, an ungainly mess.

Then came iTunes and AppleTV.  I realized that I wanted to rip all my CD’s again at a higher bitrate, but iTunes made it easy to rip, and AppleTV replaced my Tivo functionality.  It was awesome.  But iTunes didn’t give me a way to digitize my movies.

Then I had kids.  Kids that wanted to watch the same videos repeatedly.  But they wanted to play with them.  And soon they were scratched and skippy.  So I decided to break the law.

Using DVDFab and HandBrake, I began ripping and encoding my DVD’s (legally purchased) and putting them into iTunes. 

Now I play them over my network, and can call them up at whim.  I threw out all the jewel cases, purchased some “cake box spindles” on ebay (that’s what you need to search for), and archived them all. Today’s picture is the result of sorting and storing them.  Ahh.