TANKs BLOG : DVDs should pay rent!

Once a year after Xmas i go through my DVD collection and organize. Years ago my media outgrew my media cabinet storage capacity which has 4 pull-out shelves, the top 2 are audio CDs and the bottom 2 are video DVDs. So what i've been doing is for DVD movies, i've been putting the discs in the micro cases and putting the retail packaging in storage in the garage, then i maintain an Excel spreadsheet catalog of the movies. This let me consolidate all my movies into one pull out 19" shelf divided into 3 columns of 50, so i have a capacity of 150 movies on that shelf. The second DVD shelf is/was for box sets like LoTR, Nightmare on Elmstreet, StarWars, Indiana Jones etc.

This was working well until I started collecting TV series which come in box sets and we've collected more movies as well both individual and box sets. So i've had to consolidate further. Now my top DVD shelf is in three columns of 60 giving me a capacity of 180 movies which is about the max with still being able to finger walk through them. Today i went through them all re-arranging them so any series with three or more movies were together in order and I pulled out all the Bonus CD's which will be returned to the retail packaging in storage in the garage. With all that consolidation, i'm up to ~170 individual movies. I've taken my box set of movies from the second DVD shelf and pulled the discs out to consolidate them into the first DVD shelf. This will let me setup the second DVD shelf in three columns like the first shelf is with the micro-cases and give me capacity for 60 more movies plus TV shows capacity for 60 or 120 TV show DVDs depending on how i want to divide up the second shelf.

So i think I now have a handle on what's going on in the media cabinet. But now I have to find room for all these movie and tv box sets in the garage. My shelf of storage for retail packaging is already beyond capacity and a mess never mind adding all these box sets to the mix. So after spending a couple hours organizing the media cabinet, i'm going to need to spend another couple hours organizing the garage storage too :/

Long term i'm not exactly sure what i'm going to do. This stuff takes an ass load of room! I'm thinking about building a media center deck to go in the A/V component rack that can be a full on movie server and maybe a DVR. Since i'm still standard def, i only need to worry about 480i/p so a couple 500gb drives should be tons of storage. I just need to come up with a GOOD way to put a DVD in there and have it decrypted/ripped to the HD and then converted to a single 480p DivX file with limited user input required. Ideally i'd like it 'wife usable' . I'm not sure which OS Windows or Linux will give me the best results. Probably Windows has the best utils to do DVD ripping and DVR stuff but Linux would be free which is another consideration. Anyway with a media server i wouldn't need to have these discs in a media cabinet. I could just bring it home, put it in the media server to have the movie ripped to the HD and then stick the movie back in the case and out into long term storage. It would be GREAT! If anyone has any experience with this stuff, lemme know!

Happy Holidays everyone.

EDIT :

Done a little quick research.   A macmini with the SVIDEO adapter and a couple external HDD's will do the trick nicely at a price tag of ~800 bucks.  Not that i wouldn't drop that kind of money if i needed to but it does seem like a good chunk of change so i thought how can i do it cheaper.  I thought, how can i utilize computers i have now to help get this done so i thought what about the apple TV and stream.  Problem with appleTV is the lowest resolution it supports is 480p which my TV doesn't to P anything at least for another year.   That would have cut $300 or so off the price but it won't work so cool but scratch that idea.  Then it dawned on me, DUH, use an Xbox360 !  The new dash update adds DivX support and a ton of other stuff and supports playing movies off a USB drive as well as stream over the network.  I could pick up an Arcade for $279 or whatever they're going for these days and connect up a couple external HDDs for playback.  I already have a remote since my system came with one so this may be a golden idea, i need to just do some more thorough testing of the capability and then decide.  I can't build a PC for as cheap as a 360 costs so this may be a golden idea plus it'll work in 480i but support up to 1080p when i upgrade next year.  SO i think this is a winning combo, some testing will help me finalize my decision.