Best Way To Store A Large DVD And Blu-Ray Collection (1 Viewer)

[Mark Mayes]

At this point with over 2,000 dvds/blu-rays, I abandoned the cases and used paper clips to attach the discs to the paper cover artwork. Then I bought roll out carpenter benches at IKEA and put them in alphabetically.

 

[bigshot]

I have close to 6,000-8,000 DVDs in DJ cases from Supermedia store.

 

[RoyM]

We bought a house and converted the 6' X 15' utility closet into the video vault using 8 of the shelving units from when Borders went out of business. That's best way to store and adore a collection.

Just curious, about how many disks can you fit into that space? Personally, I've found the most convenient combination of storing DVDs with all their original packaging to be heavy duty plastic five-tiered utility racks (ie - "gorilla racks") that can be found at Home Depot, etc. I keep all the disks vertically stored inside legal size bankers boxes. Each rack can hold ten boxes, and each box holds roughly 100 to 120 disks in their original cases. I have four full racks at the moment, for my approximately 4000 title collection (TV box sets are stored separately in traditional bookcase type storage). It's not the most elegant or aesthetically pleasing way to store, but after trying various other methods, it definitely seems the most practical for a very large collection. And it has the benefit of being inexpensive (racks are about $50 each and boxes are 4 for $30) and easily expandable - just add a new rack and boxes as your collection grows. It is also very portable, as the racks are easily dismantled and are lightweight to move, and since the disks are already in boxes, no need to take them down and put them back up on traditional shelves.

 

[Corey3rd]

Just curious, about how many disks can you fit into that space? Personally, I've found the most convenient combination of storing DVDs with all their original packaging to be heavy duty plastic five-tiered utility racks (ie - "gorilla racks") that can be found at Home Depot, etc. I keep all the disks vertically stored inside legal size bankers boxes. Each rack can hold ten boxes, and each box holds roughly 100 to 120 disks in their original cases. I have four full racks at the moment, for my approximately 4000 title collection (TV box sets are stored separately in traditional bookcase type storage). It's not the most elegant or aesthetically pleasing way to store, but after trying various other methods, it definitely seems the most practical for a very large collection. And it has the benefit of being inexpensive (racks are about $50 each and boxes are 4 for $30) and easily expandable - just add a new rack and boxes as your collection grows. It is also very portable, as the racks are easily dismantled and are lightweight to move, and since the disks are already in boxes, no need to take them down and put them back up on traditional shelves.

It can hold about 4,000 DVDs in the single cases. Each bookcase has 8 shelves. It's like browsing the video section of Borders (since I bought the entire corner section). The key is being able to lock the door to keep out little hands. Because it's pretty much its own room, I can put lobby cards above the shelves so it's not just a bunch of bookcases.

 

[bigshot]

These are cheap and great. I lined the whole bottom of the bar in my theater with these. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70115521/

 

[Rhett_Y]

Me.. I took a two fold approach. Software: http://www.collectorz.com/movie/ In the notes section I have what case and number listed i.e. 2-131 (case two slot 131) And one of these http://www.meritline.com/1000-discs-aluminum-diamond-black-cd-case---p-36083.aspx The software also has an APP (iOS) that allows me or the wife to browse the collection via our iPads/iPhones. We find what we want and then go into our closet and pull the movie. I have done the same with my music as I use the same software company and just purchased two of the cases. They are out of site and out of mind. I put the cases in cardboard boxes and stored them in the garage. If I want to sell the movie I just look up the disk in my software and it tells me where it is and what box in the garage the case is. I have also started ripping movies I have watched more than once prior to cataloging them. So I can access via apple tv if I want or get the disk. The only movies I have left in their cases are the special edition ones that have pretty cool cases and a few seasons of a couple tv series.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I don't know. We (still) strongly prefer to be able to easily browse for our movie choices on shelves, etc. rather than via software -- though maybe we'll eventually get there w/ the software browsing as mobile device usage become more and more prevalent for us. Actually, that reminds me... I should finally try installing DVD Profiler's mobile app on our devices... Meanwhile, I still need to figure out what works best for us. Feel like typical American BD cases present a good enough balance between compactness and ease of browsing. Can't really see myself investing all that much to slim down for most cases; if anything, I'd rather prune my collection periodically to be more selective and keep it more manageable (and just store away and/or eventually unload all the marginal and/or obscure titles instead). Don't really mind that Criterions have thicker cases, but I might consider replacing the typically thicker cases of UK releases to save a little space. Since I do organize my shelves across a few loose categories, it was natural enough to separate out the kids' titles, which have plenty of thick cases (mainly because of Disney) -- I generally have my kids take care of such titles themselves (under my guidance w/ shelf space and containers allotted to them). Yeah, categories are not perfectly well-defined for obvious reasons, but I keep them fairly broad/loose, and they work well enough for us so far. _Man_

 

[Raul Marquez]

With my collection now over 5,400 titles and with no more shelf space I opted for the following: Using Handbrake (Mac OS X) I started digitalizing my collection. I know..... it's a very SLOW process. I then used another program called MetaX which downloads the film's poster and metadata attaching it to the movie file. (It may sound complicated, but it's really simple, only time consuming) I bought from Amazon these storage cases for CD's which hold 900 discs each on individual sleeves (2 discs per sleeve). These cases are really good., very well made, and relatively cheap (less than $40 each). I took out the paper items from the cases and sent these cases to the Salvation Army (I guess you could sell them, but I wasn't going to go into that hassle). The inserts and other paper items I placed on plastic file boxes using alphabetic dividers. Now, here's what's REALLY good about my set up: Using iTunes and my Apple TV I can see all my films including artwork listed alphabetically on my TV screen. You can also easily set up playlists by film genre. Selecting a title and having it play takes less than 15 seconds. I spent more time just walking to my storage area (shelves) selecting a film, going over to my player, starting the disc.... Also, Handbrake allows you to decide which resolution you want to rip the film in. With my current system each film on the average takes up around 800 MB. Not a perfect system, but relatively cheap, simple to use and now I can watch my films on any set which has an Apple TV connected to it. Also, since I'm keeping all the materials which came with the film, if ever I decide to repackage it, I only have to pick up an empty case from the many I keep and that's it. Raul

 

[Nebiroth]

Ummm...surely to get a DVD title into 800Mb you're making some serious compromises somewhere; I would suggest that your stuff is being heavily compressed, since a single sided single layer disc will hold 4.7Gb and a single sided dual layer (which the vast majority of discs are) 8.54Gb (they use the higher capacity dual layer ones just to avoid over-compression for the most part). Admittedly you can save some space by dumping things like extras, language tracks and all the rest but still IMHO it;s impossible to get an 8Gb DVd into 800Mb without giving up on something. Even so, your large collection would require about 5Tb of drive space, which isn't bad; but most people who go down the Home Theatre PC route who have large collections end up building dedicated storage servers with 20+ 2Tb drives (not least because if you're holding that much data your really do need to be building a RAID array for a variety of reasons) because that's how much you need without making serious compromises on video quality And of course, a BluRay rip requires around 30Gb even if you play around with it in Handbrake MetaX is one of a number of taggers. For Windows you can get a couple of programs that add as front-ends to WIndows Media Centre and WMC itself, as well as the front ends (which are a lot nicer) will do just what you're doing in iTunes Unfortunately the tagger and data digger automated systems very often foul up, espescially on more unusual stuff such as TV series because they're generally reliant on a user base to create the meta-data. I tried it with someof my titles and ended up with a mess because there was very little consistenty between different seasons of the same shows, in terms of what people had used for the "cover art"

 

[bigshot]

If you're saving as an Mpeg 4 video instead of an Mpeg 2 DVD, you can get the same quality is a smaller space. For a 4 gig DVD compressed into a 1 gig Mpeg 4 video, transcoding would create more problems than the format itself.

 

[Carlo_M]

I'm by no means a purist, I'll let the results speak for themselves. That said, I haven't seen a reduction of DVD/BD by Handbrake or other program that I haven't been able to readily discern the quality difference in playback. That to me is a dealbreaker with regards to shrinking my collection and storing it digitally. A few years back I handbraked a few DVDs for a laptop which had 1440x900 resolution and was okay with watching them on that device, but never on a 1080p HDTV, where the picture quality just suffered tremendously in comparison to the DVD source (let's not even talk about comparing it with BD/HD sources). That's in contrast to my shrinking all of my music to 320kbps AAC. I did a blind listening test for myself and couldn't readily discern the difference between the original WAV files, ALAC, and AAC at 320 and 256 bit rates (but could at 192 and 128 kbps). So out of an abundance of caution I ripped my entire CD collection at 320kbps but I could have done it at 256 and been happy. This listening test was done originally done through Macbook Pro and recently replicated on a latest gen iPod Classic and iPhone 5, volume matched via AAC Gain, listening through Westone UM3X IEMs, at normal listening levels (approx. 80-85db at peak). I'm sure with really good equipment and loudspeakers, and playing at reference volumes, one could hear differences between WAV and AAC, but at normal listening volumes through an iDevice and IEMs I could not, which gave me piece of mind to shrink my collection and stash my discs in archival cases and put them away in storage.

 

[bigshot]

Double post

 

[bigshot]

The problem is, when you start with a DVD and compress it to MPEG-4, you're using a master that is already heavily compressed. The artifacts double. A truer comparison would be an uncompressed video file exported to both MPEG-2 (DVD format) vs MPEG-4.

 

[Bradskey]

I buy enough DVDs that I long ago started a process of digitizing them to MP4 and storing on a large NAS drive. I browse and play them on my TV using a custom software app of my own creation. I've done conversion with Nero Recode and primarily Handbrake the past couple years. With h.264 technology you can achieve undiscernable compression with massive space savings. DVD MPEG2 compression generally ranges from 5-8 MBps, converted to h.264 in as little as 1.5-2Mbps looks virtually identical to the original DVD and saves gobs of storage, and for some content you can push it down to around 1.3Mbps and still have perfectly acceptable video. Blurays often waste excessive bitrate and can be massively reduced from the typical 30+Mbps or so and still look fine. Others are welcome to disagree but most mortals can't tell any difference at my house. Granted we don't sit around doing A-B comparisons, we just watch it and nobody's enjoyment of the video seems to suffer in the least.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Like many, I rip my CDs too, but I do that mainly for portability (and now sharing w/ the family as well) although I like the cataloging aspect too, which I used to do separately long ago (mainly for my classical collection) -- actually, I really dislike the way classical CDs tend to be listed/cataloged in the public domain and always have to redo them when I rip in iTunes. I usually rip to Apple Lossless first for archiving and then convert to AAC at 256Kbps VBR for higher quality music or sometimes at 192Kbps VBR for lessor music. But if I'm going to sit down and really listen (w/out all the hustle and bustle) I still stick w/ the original CD (or SACD or music BD) on my HT system as much as possible. For my movie collection though, I just don't see enough benefit to warrant all that time and effort (and extra cost) of ripping them, especially since I've been steadily moving from DVD to BD for higher quality. Maybe I'd feel differently if I like/want to stream movies all over the house or when I'm out, but that's definitely not me. Yeah, might be nice to catch a TV show or two on-the-go at times, but that has very little to do w/ ripping an entire movie collection. I do rip a handful of DVDs, but that's mainly for the kids when we're on road-trips and such. I (and even most of my family) really have little-to-no desire to watch movies on small screens -- IMHO, that's the one habit breaking side benefit of going big (enough) w/ HT. There's plenty more than enough great things to do away from the HT me thinks -- and you can often bring some music along for those other places and activities anyway, if you want... Still, yeah, if the physical storage issue/problem is big enough, I suppose going that route is something to consider though the needed time-and-effort seems too great to me (at least for now)... _Man_

 

[DonnyC123]

Keep your eyes open for video store closing sales. They usually sell their fixtures, including the wall rack units. For a total of $50 I purchased three separate wall rack units. Floor to ceiling movies, way cool.

 

[Keith Cobby]

Having a large DVD/Blu-ray collection presents a further dilemma to the storage problem - namely what to watch. I find it can take a lot of time to decide which film or TV show to put on so I divided my collection into favourites, those I wouldn't watch again and disposed, and others which I am working through. I should keep my collection at about 500.

 

[Raul Marquez]

That's one advantage to the system I'm using. You can easily create Playlists by genre, sort films alphabetically, and easily mark which films you've seen using the AppleTV. Also, playing a selected title takes around 10 SECONDS. When you use Handbrake with the Apple 3 setting while ripping, the playback quality is very good. Definitely better than STREAMING in my case. Raul

 

[Kevin Collins]

Amazing... I found this thread on Google to help solve the problem I had already been posting on HTF here!

Per the thread, I am digitizing my entire collection, but I obviously still want to keep all my discs. However, I don't want to put them binders, I want to put them in cases that I can take out to the garage and just have each case have a range of numbers taped to the outside that matches the number that MyMovies assigned the disc. I would also put those colored "stickies" on each case and those would be numerically ordered in the case.

However, I haven't been able to find a case that meets my requirements. I want the case to be the height of a DVD, have a slotted bottom for each BD/HD DVD/DVD to fit in and close up and be stack-able.

I haven't seen that talked about or discussed here in the thread. Has any tried to do this?

 

[Kevin EK]

How the heck did this get in the Reviews section?