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Creating your own massive DVD collection.

You’ve probably figured out that a collection as extensive as mine has some sort of system. Well, you are correct and here it is all laid out for you…

The way this works is by renting from Netflix and creating a backup before returning the video. There are a few tools you’ll need in order to accomplish this. Mind you - there may be better, cheaper or simply other ways to do any of this. This is simply what I do for your reference.

I use the DVD drive in my laptop to read and rip the movies and utilize an external DVD burner to burn them. The external burner I have is the Pioneer 8X DVD-R burner from Americal. They do make 16X burners now, but the price of the media is still too expensive. This is all fine and dandy, but it won’t work unless you have a few key softwares to rip the movie. There’s two things that must be done in order to create the backup copy. First - an original DVD media can hold more data than a DVD-R, so the movie must be “ripped”. This compresses the video at the expense of quality so that it can fit into the space available on the DVD-R. I use DVD Shrink for this. This program I feel is the best compromise between rip speed and quality retention. Running on my 2.8GHz Pentium 4, it takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes to rip a DVD. Usually the compression ratio is around 50%. You may notice this most on really long movies or if you watch them on high definition TV’s or projection systems. But - on a small screen TV or laptop, this quality reductin is unnoticable. If you really care - there are other ripping software suites that retain more quality, but then take hours to rip a movie. The second necessary software function is removal of the copyright barrier that prevents DVD Shrink from doing it’s job. I use SlySoft’s AnyDVD for this. This is a little application that lives in your system tray and simply removes any copyright from any region any time a DVD is inserted into your DVD tray. It works great and runs in the background without any input from you. Sometimes in newer films, like “The Grudge”, DVD Shrink will still have problems. In this case, use DVD Decrypter to fix the problem. Scuba Pete has an excellent step by step tutorial on using DVD Shrink with DVD Decrypter.

So now you have all the tools to rip your own movies.

The rest of this information is simply my sources and system for storing all of my DVD’s. At a collection of over 500 movies, the storage and raw materials become an investment that merits a little thought to keep it all from getting out of control.

Some movies I borrow from friends, some are gifts, but most I rent through Netflix. Netflix is great because you can choose anywhere from 2 movies at a time for $15 a month to 8 movies at a time for $50 a month. I started out doing the 8 per ‘cause the more you get per time, the cheaper the actual rental per disk is. Now - I get 5 per time at $30 a month because it’s easier for me to afford. Bottom line is, this is the most expensive part, so the more you get at a time, the cheaper each unit cost is. It takes about 4 working days to do a rental turnaround and at 5 per time, this results in about 23 movies a month.

I started my collection buying those black plastic DVD cases from Ebay and printing out full size, back and front labels with photo paper. This worked great at first, but soon, I was finding it hard to find room for all of those cases. And it was hard to find high-quality DVD cover scans on the net for some of the more obscure movies.

I solved all of this by switching to disk soxs and only printing the front DVD covers. I buy the DiscSox DVD-Single Sleeves 25 Packs for $18.95. And store all of the movies in a couple of their cases. It’s a lot easier to store two of these cases under the coffee table than it is finding enough shelf space to house all of the black plastic cases that would have been necessary. (I calculated that once and figured out that 1000 movies would require a minimum of 8 by 4 feet of wall space.) Not only that, but those black cases break so damn easily and wear out. The disk soxs don’t wear out and are only an eighth of an inch thick with two disks inside.

I create the covers by downloading the high resolution scans from CDCovers.cc. It’s one of the few sites that haven’t been shut down for copyright infringement and has thousands of covers. But there are some obscure movies that aren’t in his collection and I download these from Amazon. Another advantage of only printing cover fronts now becomes clear as Amazon only has images of the fronts available. I use photoshop to sharpen, crop and resize each image to 7.25 inches by 5 inches at 300 dpi. I can fit two of those images into a word document template I’ve made and print them out two at a time. Save yourself some time and see if the cover you’re looking for is here. I store them all online in one of my photo albums. I buy Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper and print the covers on my HP 5740 inkjet. By only printing fronts, I can get two covers on one page, thus getting 100 covers per 50 pack of paper. I find that printing draft quality results in just as good a cover as printing photo quality and stretches the ink a lot further. I can print about 25 to 30 sheets of photo paper before the ink cartridge goes dry and it needs replacing. The #95 cartridge goes for about $25 and prints about 50 covers.

And here’s an important note - DON’T STICK LABELS TO THE DISK ITSELF! The weight of the label unbalances the DVD and the performance will be horrible. It’s okay to use a sharpie or marker to write on the disk or if you’re really fancy use a printer that can print right on the disk itself. But do not stick anything on the disk surface.

I use Ant Movie Catalog to archive and keep track of all of my movies. The great thing about this is it automagically downloads the relevant information from the IMDb site. I do grab the synopsis for each movie from the Netflix site however, as their summaries are shorter and are better written in my opinion. The Ant software also spits out an SQL file which then automatically updates my online list. I’ve created a completely custom php-Nuke module that reads this SQL file and displays the list in the manner I desire. The whole thing nearly runs itself and is incredibly easy to update.

I burn the media on 8X DVD-R’s that I get from Meritline.com. These end up to be around 30 cents a disk. I’ve fooled around alot trying different quality disks and have found that these cheapies are just as good as more expensive ones. I can burn through 100 disks and have no duds at all. Many movies are double sided for the wide screen version and the full screen version. I always burn both. You may decide that this isn’t necessary. For me, it simply eliminates the possiblilty of burning the wrong side or elsewise mucking it up. Also - the Clone-DVD2 software allows you to select which tracks on the disk you’d like to copy. This allows you to eliminate the “Coming Soon” crap and the unnecessary Spanish or subtitle tracks. Again, to avoid mistakes, I always just burn it all (all check boxes checked.) The decrease in space is completely negligible in comparison to the space the main feature takes.

Which means that an investment of $4332 over a period of 3.5 years will result in a movie collection of 1000 DVD’s.

And yes - I have watched most of them. :)