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DVD collections and the mobile lifestyle

G

GanChan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 21, 2005
617
27
I am making early preparations for transitioning to life on the road in an RV. I've determined that I can do without about 90 percent of the crap in my apartment as I pare down my list of mobile possessions. But I've also determined that I'd rather NOT do without my DVD collection. Unfortunately, storage space will be at a premium. So I'm wondering what makes the most sense....

1. I could ditch the cases and store all the discs in a carrying case, but I worry about the vinyl sleeve retainers possibly scratching the discs every time I remove and replace them. Is this an issue?

2. I could digitize everything and store it in the cloud somewhere. But then I'd be at the mercy of my Internet connectivity and bandwidth whenever I wanted to watch something.

3. I could digitize everything and store it on my laptop, with cloud backup (I currently use Crashplan for general off-site backup). But it would take forever, and the choice of file format might limit playback device compatibility.

I dunno. What would you do?
 
Rip to external hard drive(s), make a few copies and also store them in the cloud, if possible.

That way you always have a copy and a back up copy of all your movies. External drives are small, in terms of size, so space shouldn't be an issue. A little larger than a wallet. Depending on the size of your collection I would also look into ssd just for mobility.
 
As someone who lives in a nice big house at the moment but the threat of moving into a smaller house (due to work location) I've had to think on this too. What I'm probably going to do is get underfloor storage for my games, DVDs and Blurays. I don't want to digitise them because I'd lose quality on the TV. If I was just streaming to an iPad or something small I probably would digitise, though, and store it on an external HDD wired into a wireless router as a network drive.

Currently when I travel I put the games I want to play into one of those CD cases that holds 10.

But yeah, in your position I'd probably digitise and sell the DVDs. More money for your adventure.
 
I digitized our approximately 320 DVDs to a hard drive, even though we don't travel much any more.

I used handbrake and ripped them to MP4 with no interlace and fairly high bit rate, and the quality really isn't that bad. MP4 is pretty standard and can play on most anything.

It was all great until the hard drive failed. Of course, I haven't even tried to revive it as I've been too busy, but it's on my list.

It's really convenient to have them on the drive, as it is networked and I can stream it pretty much anywhere.
 
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