Doesn't this cause problems at customs though? Aren't they curious to know what exactly it is you have stored on there taking into account the conservative nature of the regime etc?
Off topic, but I'll answer. Actually bringing movies into Saudi on a computer hard drive is much easier than bringing in the DVDs themselves. The customs officials ignore laptops and external HDDs, at least, in my 7 years here, I have never even heard of anyone having their computer searched. However, if a customs official sees DVDs or CDs when your baggage is X-rayed (yes EVERY piece of baggage belonging to everyone entering the country is x-rayed and usually searched upon entry) that's it, you are going to be held up for a long time while the customs official goes through every disc, every piece of paper, book, photo, dirty laundry etc in your luggage. I have colleagues that have had to wait over 12 hours while the customs officials scanned every DVD in their bag.
Now, which DVDs you are allowed to keep and which are confiscated is a lottery. It can be as arbitrary as Star Wars = OK, Return of the Jedi = no way. Why? Who knows..... Clearly, anything with bikini clad women running around is going to be confiscated as is your meticulously catalogued collection of 70's porn chic. Bringing such items into the country, and getting cought, will result in something like a $150 fine per film and your name being put onto some list. This has happened to a few colleagues of mine. One was his own fault, he was bringing in disc of porn. The other had simply fogotten about a few CDs with images in his computer bag, he knew what was on them, but simply forgot to take them out before he left New York. In this case, having a Mac actually saved him some expense, as some of the discs couldn't be opened on a Windows machine and no-one is Saudi has any idea about Macs so he just let them fiddle around for a while until they gave up. Same thing with HFS formatted external HDDs, Windows machines can't see them.
Ask anyone who has worked in Saudi and they can bore you for hours with stories of arbitrary and unexplicable confiscations by the customs officials. I have one student whi was returning from a summer vaction in the US who had is Physics text book confiscated. A photo lab refused to print some photos of my bosses newborn baby because the baby was naked. Just last week I was refused entry onto a Saudia domestic flight until I had changed out of my below knee length shorts into long trousers, they even held up the plane until I had done so. Just some of the trials of working in Saudi.
To be fair, over the time I have worked here, customs has relaxed a lot. Often you can simply be waved through now, after the x-ray.
As I said off topic. But hopefully a little interesting for some of you.