Building My DVD Collection

I have just discovered that I can copy DVDs that I have recorded from broadcast television to my computer.

The trick seems to be the way in which the DVD files are read by the media player that I have recently installed to my Macintosh. This media player, available free on the Internet, reads the files that make up the recorded DVD in a way that my present DVD player, the one that comes as standard with my Mac, does not.

One consequence of this is that this new media player means that I can read DVDs from all regions. And the fact that I can copy DVDs recorded from broadcast (obviously not those that are copy protected and which I have purchased) means that I can begin to accumulate my collection without having to continually find somewhere to keep the DVDs.

And by using just if you rewritable DVDs, I don’t have to keep shelling out for blank DVDs, either.

The fact that I have recently purchased a surprisingly large yet inexpensive backup data drive, 1 TB for less than £70, means that I can easily store hundreds of films in the virtual space the drive offers. I still have around 300 GB available, and if this is not big enough, I could always purchase some more storage space.

Making it so much more interesting as a means of giving me instant access to the films that I have been recording for a couple of years now. I have about 700 films recorded from broadcast television, many of which I perhaps won’t be watching too many times again.

But many of which I will. And perhaps this new means of storage will encourage me to organise the way in which I keep my films, creating categories that stretch far beyond the technical categories of action films, war films and so forth.

One of my favorite categories is that of films that write or rewrite American history, such as Sahara, and the National Treasure films. Not to mention Night Time At The Museum.

We all have our favorite ways of organizing things, and I like to try to observe some kind of order amidst to the chaotic wealth of films, and sometimes perceive the links between films that I think of as almost genealogical.

So for example the way in which the Matrix series has affected the way in which certain films are made, stretching the boundaries of the way in which fast action can take place. This is evident in Equilibrium, and indeed is a close relation to the kind of action sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

It is endless, this pondering of film categories. And the fact that my new media player seems to show my films off with sharper colour and better contrast makes them all worth watching over again. Which I like to do anyway, just to make sure they really are the way I remember them.