How Big is your digital movie collection in iTunes?

Otago Lad said:

I now have 3x3TB drives inside of the Server instelf, 2x5 Bay Tower Enclosures each with 5x2TB drives and 2x3TB USB drives which are all "Pooled". That means currently there is 35TB of which 13TB is used and 13TB is a "duplicate" thereby leaving 9TB free (although really only 4.5TB due to duplication). Expansion capacity is huge as I can just keep adding drive tower enclosures.

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I used to do something very similar - maintain a large power-sucking NAS computer with a bunch of RAID'ed hard disks. I am very much over that now.

I now just have a single 2TB bus-powered drive connected to my Mac Mini. This is more than enough to keep a decent amount of movies and music locally. Everything else is in the Cloud - NetFlix streaming gets a lot more viewing in my household than my locally stored content.

All my local media is backed up to the Cloud as well - thanks to CrashPlan unlimited storage plan. So I don't even bother with RAID enclosures or local backup.

My setup is very simple, lightweight and easy on the power bill.

As of this specific moment I have 469 Movies taking up 991.35GB of space, and 152 Seasons of 30 different TV shows, for a total of 2668 episodes taking up 2.13 TB. This is all according to the bottom ticker on iTunes.

This is all stored on a Synology DS413j NAS with 2x3TB and 2x2TB drives in the Synology Hybrid RAID (essentially RAID 5). This equates to about 6.5TB of usable space with the rest for formatting and redundancy. I'm a firm believer that if I have 2 drives fail on me within the 3 days it takes to rebuild a RAID array, then God hates me and I deserved to lose the data. After 25 years of building these units, it has never happened to me yet.

bt22 said:

jtrenthacker I couldn't agree more. I have 266 movies of which about 30 are blu-ray rips... just started doing the blu-ray rips.. wow what a difference in quality. I have over 10 k songs. There are 3 in our house with 3 iPhones, 2 iPads and 3 Apple TV's. Since the blu ray rips are so good using Make MKV and Handbrake I am just watching the rips now. It's so frustrating wading thru all the promos on the actual disk. Nice to just select your movie from a list using your iPhone or iPad as a remote and enjoying the show. It's fun creating music playlist that we listen to as a family on our trips. I've ordered a Corsair Voyager Air to carry some movies with us when we travel that can be streamed to phones or ipads while in the car, can't wait for it to arrive.

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Awesome! I haven't heard of the Voyager Air. I will check it out. I am very impressed with the bluray rips as well. I still buy the bluray discs of my favorites because I want the absolute best image and audio (DTS-HD & True HD) on my main system. However, for ease of use and accessibility for the wife and kids, I love having iTunes.

At last check, my collection included 400-plus movies -- a mix of SD and HD rips, along with a bunch of TV series. All told, I'm looking at about 2.4 TB of data.

Right now my setup is fairly simple -- I have everything on a 3 TB external MiniStack drive, which is hooked up to a third-generation Mac Mini running headless. At some point soon I'll need to upgrade the drive to 4 TB to accommodate HD updates of SD movies and a few more TV series.

I agree with a lot of the recent posters -- I really love the media server versus the disc. I've gotten really annoyed with all of the promos and animated menus you have to go through when you pop a disc in to watch a movie.

The other thing I love is how much it cuts down on space. I found that the vast majority of DVDs I bought I really didn't watch very often -- maybe once a year at the most. I mean, I really liked the movies or shows, but my schedule didn't permit lots of rewatching. So I had a lot of discs literally gathering dust.

After ripping them all, I got rid of pretty much all of them. I mean, I still buy movies -- but only movies in Blu-ray that I think are really worthy of the format (such as the Lord of the Rings extended trilogy, Indiana Jones saga, etc.) that I want the best quality and want the extras.

I try really hard not to be a digital hoarder -- although space is theoretically nearly infinite, I always have to ask myself if something's good enough that I'll ever watch it again. I'm hoping that my jump to a 4 TB drive will be the last major storage upgrade for a while.

Around 350 movies, mostly blu-ray rips, and several TV shows. I'll occasionally go through and purge the collection of movies that I thought I might want to watch again, but won't. Sometimes I keep movies just so I can rewatch them with people who haven't seen them yet. I have over 100 movies just for the kids - having an Apple TV in the kids' rooms is the greatest thing ever. Parental controls, no discs to get scratched/broken/stuck in players, even my 3yo can navigate the apple tv interface... what's not to like?

re TV shows, I have several that I like to rewatch once every 2 years or so - Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, BBC's Sherlock, The IT Crowd... Movies and TV shows can be like good books: worth revisiting multiple times. I'm the type of person that "gets" a little bit more each time I watch something, so I like rewatching movies/TV shows again every so often.

there's definitely an element of hoarding/"collecting" to it, I admit. I don't purge as many movies as I probably should. But... who cares. I've helped Apple sell at least 6 Apple TVs just by having someone over and holding down the scroll button to fly through hundreds of movies available "on demand" in my library. The response is universally "I WANT TO DO THAT!!!"

Probably about 40 movies, ripped from DVD's I own. However, there are 13 that are indispensable, and are backed up multiple times. I am referring to the Pixar feature films, which are called upon multiple times per week by my 2 children, especially my 2-year-old. They can watch them as much as they like, while the originals remain tucked safely away in the drawer.

3,593 episodes of 45 shows (169 Seasons / some just partial seasons) that take up 2.8 TB's, and I have 56 movies that take up 91 GB's. A total run time of 97 days, 18 hours. All of this is stored on a Drobo FS with 5 x 2TB drives with dual redundancy turned on.

Then, 2 x 2TB external HDDs are used as an offsite backup (I keep them in my desk at work) for the content in case the Drobo does decide to just up and quit at some point or a fire or whatever.

Let me count them up ... hmmmm .. ok .. looks like ... yeah there it is ... Zero

I'm always working on my MBP and the TV mainly serves as glance up entertainment so I just stream Netflix freebies or mirror the iPad and pull up a show on the ABC app or something along those lines. LOL

812brrip's.
qnap nas
4.2tb worth of media
stick to mkv, 1080p or 720p depending on the movie and how often I will re-watch it.

netflix fills the gap for tv shows/everything else.


Wife and I stopped purchasing blur rays, we noticed our pattern repurchasing certain movies that we have on dvd just for the 1080p factor. Since 4k televsions is right around the corner, we dont want to be repurchasing our current media in this format as I feel that it wont last more than a 7 years until the next best thing comes out. and last factor we're trying to minimize our materialistic items (except paper books). TV/nas does the job.

We do continue to buy dvd/BR for the kids, I rip, and store on the NAS so they can watch it in the living room. But the kids have a small tv/dvd player in the kids room, and I'm keeping it that way. Kids like physical/colorful objects and the interaction of taking the dvd out of the case and placing it into the dvd player excites them.
I have a feeling that our next baby in 5 years time may never see anything other a menu and streaming service on the tv :/

Hail Caesar said:

I have over a hundred movies, slowly curating it. Adding some deleting others, truly trying to obtain the most diverse collection. TV shows i have quite a few too, almost a 1000 episodes, Sopranos, Rome, Lost, Heroes, etc. How you rolling?

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It's aprox 1,500,000 Terabytes. It's called the Bay. A special bay. One with unlimited music and movies galore

I have 775 movies and 6570 tv shows. 8 TB of content.

mountaindewbass said:

I have 775 movies and 6570 tv shows. 8 TB of content.

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Are you using a drobo

I'm currently running at over 50TB consisting of around 800 Movies, approx 11,000 tv shows (episodes that is) and an enormous collection of Motorsport content (both vintage and modern day). In addition I have a vast collection of music (mainly FLAC) - probably well over 60,000 tracks ranging from classical through to jazz, pop music etc.

Part of it is a bit of an addiction (but, hey there are worse addictions out there) but my family and I get a significant amount of enjoyment out of it.

Plex is my media centre of choice (currently delivered to four fixed clients around the house, and multiple iPads) and I also have a multi-room Sonos (8 rooms) for playing music.

I love it!!

Everything stored across two Drobos:

17,292 songs (all ALAC encoded): 434.13GB
738 films (mixture of BD & DVD): 5.72TB
100 television series (302 seasons, 4094 episodes, mix of BD & DVD): 5.69GB

Though -- I only use iTunes for music. The rest is handled by Plex and XBMC. The interface and tagging is simply far more intuitive and flexible than anything from Apple.

I have exactly 1 movie in iTunes and only because a Blu-Ray I purchased happened to include an iTunes copy and we wanted to watch it upstairs on one of our Apple TVs. I do, however, have about 400 movies in a Windows HTPC. About a year ago, I stopped growing it unless it was a movie that I knew I'd watch maybe 3+ times or so. I hardly ever even buy a movie anymore.

Hoarding digital media just grew to seem pretty stupid to me. Out of all the movies we have online, we've watched maybe 20 of them more than twice. I definitely don't bother with TV shows since all the ones I'd ever want to watch more than once are either on live TV all the time or are on Netflix.

366 Movies
3180 TV Shows
8213 songs

lol, I'd guess than 90% of the people posting here with thousands of movies/tv shows are getting them from "alternate sources".

StinDaWg said:

lol, I'd guess than 90% of the people posting here with thousands of movies/tv shows are getting them from "alternate sources".

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Some do; some don't. Many of us rip from CDs and albums and don't download anything. It's up to each person to decide what they want to do.

570 movies, some HD some not.

Too many TV shows to count but probably more than movies.

Out of a 3 TB ext HDD, 2.2 TB is used up with video content. Already looking for a new one to start backups of the movies. The TV shows I can lose though.

NMF said:

Apple TV rentals are 1080p/5.1 DTS.

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Apple does not support DTS playback. They use Dolby Digital for 5.1.

My own 3TB USB 3.0 media drive is nearly full (over 500 movies plus quite a number of tv shows, over 9000 songs and 20k photos).

Three. Two SD movies and one HD. Totaling 9.9GB. I don't watch very much TV.

StinDaWg said:

lol, I'd guess than 90% of the people posting here with thousands of movies/tv shows are getting them from "alternate sources".

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Speaking just for myself, all of my encodes are from "legitimate" sources, as in either recorded from over the air (using my Elgato Hybrid and then commercials removed, if applicable) or encoded straight from a DVD or BD. I will admit, though, that about 1/3rd of the 700+ films physical discs might have left my possession (either sold back to stores or given to friends).

I consider myself "mostly legal".

9500 songs, 960 movies (approx. 70% HD), 5960 TV Episodes. 7.2TB of G-Raid Thunderbolt storage (x2 for backup).

I have to say that I am completely infatuated with the whole Apple "Ecosystem" and the resulting ease of use that I can offer to my whole family. I can't remember the last time we actually watched Free-to-air TV. I even get Elgato's EyeTV to record and convert the daily news so that we can watch it at our own leisure later in the evening.

I don't understand people that try to compare Apple TV with Roku (or other standalone gadgets). When you have iPhones, iPads, iPod Touch's, Apple TV's, Airplay speakers all supported by a large iTunes library with Home Sharing, iTunes match, Airplay etc.... what more do you need?

913 albums / 356GB, 593 Movies / 1.3TB, 77 TV Shows ( 4614 Episodes ) / 3.4TB on a mid 2011 Mac Mini Server with a Drobo 5D ( 5x3TB WD Red ), feeding 2xATV2's and the usual suspects with StreamToMe / Plex.