I know. It’s just that, while I have no problem in making lightning swift huge decisions, I am tiny-decision challenged. I decided which house to buy in a couple of minutes, but I’m helpless sometimes in deciding whether to wear a white or a cream colored turtleneck (usually it’s quite clear, but occasionally it’s iffy). I used to agonize as to which bear or other animal to sleep with because I’d hurt the others’ feelings - and I was in my mid-thirties at the time! My husband would have to choose for me. What car to get? No problem. Which DVD to watch tonight? The entire evening can be gone without my deciding.
Yes, I know. It’s kind of weird. I don’t know why I’m like that. But at 52, I don’t think I’m likely to change a life-long pattern.
It’s from the book/movie High Fidelity. Rob Gordon is the main character and he is REALLY into music and has tons of vinyl and CDs. Whenever he has some sort of big life moment, he might decide to re-organize his record collection. After a main event in the book, he decides to do it “autobiographically” so only he knows where the records are - the records are in the order he acquired them. One example I will screw up completely by using a different record and date is “if I want to find this Joni Mitchell vinyl I have to remember I bought it for someone in the fall of 1981 and decided later to not give it to them for personal reasons.” But that is the gist.
I first acquired a movie collection while working at Blockbuster, so I just used their system: alphabetical within category, with a few subcategories. Numbers go in front of A, but spelled out number words are words. A, An and The at the beginning of the title don’t count.
I liked this system because I often feel like a certain genre of movie, not a specific title. If I feel like a corset movie, I want *Elizabeth *and Dangerous Beauty and *Quills *and Mrs. Brown and Sense and Sensibility all in one place.
IIRC, the categories went something like
I. Action
A. “Wild Action” (ie. T&A with guns - I didn’t have any in my home collection)
B. Horror
II. Comedy
A. Romantic Comedy
B. Musicals
III. Drama
A. Romance
B. Historical Drama (aka “corset movies”)
IV. Kids
V. Documentaries
My husband declared the whole thing too complicated when we merged our collections, and it switched to purely alphabetical, minus the kids-only movies and a few random box sets that don’t fit. Princess Bride stayed in the main collection, 'cause we might watch it, but *Teletubbies *and Baby Einstein went (and are still) on the “Kid’s” shelf, where the kids know they can help themselves.
I like this, but then I get very caught up in the minutiae of the categories. For example, many, but not all, of my Costume (corset) pieces are Action-Adventure, and bear no resemblence whatsoever to actual history. These include things like Pirates of the Carribean, Zorro, and the Three and Four Musketeers. But then I have the usual dramatic suspects, the Jane Austens and the Amadeus, the Immortal Beloved and so-forth.
Then, on the other hand, I sometimes go on a particular star jag. I’ll want to watch a bunch of Tom Hanks or Johnny Depp or Russell Crowe. Or a director jag - Speilberg or Ron Howard or James Cameron.
Then, I won’t watch a movie for months. Then I’ll watch several a day for weeks.
We have ours strictly alphabetical, unless that throws off the set aspect, like Indiana Jones. They’re all together under I, but they’re in chronological order. (the movies are called “Indiana Jones and the” whatever. So that’s easier for the alphabetical. All of the Star Wars movies are together, but in Episode order rather than chronological, because that’s what makes sense to us.
The Highlander series gets its own shelf. We have our BluRay separate from our standard DVDs.
Well, the “Die Hard” movies are all together – largely because we think of them as “Die Hard,” “Die Harder,” “Die Hardest,” and “Die Hardester.”
And I kind of like the accidental serendipity that has “Being There” next to “Big Trouble In Little China,” for example. YMMV(apd), but the oddball combos are sometimes a pleasant surprise to me.
I think erratic best lends itself to pure alphabetical. Consider making a database of your movies so that you can move *that *around as you wish. Have it sortable by actor, director, genre(s), time period, etc. so that when you feel like, say, a corset movie with Kate Winslet, you can sort your database by “Kate Winslet” and “Corset” and get a list to look at - and then go over to your stacks and pull the movie from a straight alphabetical arrangement where everything easy to find.
BluRay’s just another format of storage - VHS, DVD, BluRay, etc.
Blu-Ray would only be useful if you have a high-definition TV or want the best quality for down the road. I have one Blu-Ray movie, Resident Evil Extinction. It’s pretty, but Blu-Ray movies are too expensive IMO. Blu-Ray still doesn’t meet the effective resolution of film, but it’s definitely sharper than DVD. Interesting thing, my local PBS station showed an old Johnny Cash documentary that was shot on film. They broadcast it in high definition so there I was looking at footage shot in the late 60’s that looked better than most DVDs in my collection.
Anyway, I organize my movies into Action, Horror/Zombie/Vampire, War, Comedy, and Kids.
When I started to acquire a large DVD collection, I’d take all the discs out of their boxes and place them inside large DVD books in no particular order, each of which had the capacity for 200 discs or so. Then, after putting a little sticker on each disc and numbering each one, I compiled a database on my computer of each movie and its respective number and would let the program sort the movies alphabetically. That way I didn’t have 800 movie boxes taking up shelf space, and any time I got a new movie, I could just put a new sticker on it and add it to the database. It would have been impossible to sort alphabetically anyway with my system, as I would have needed to re-arrange every disc any time I added another movie to my collection.
Although now I’ve dropped that entire system and I insted rip every movie to my hard drive on my computer which is hooked up to my TV. Not only are movies automatically sorted alphabetically, they are very easily accessible and I now have a backup of each one.
Dayum! That does appeal to my not-so-inner geek! But I do like having the boxes. And it is dependent on your computer being up and running. On the other hand, it’s not worse than I have now, which is no organization whatsoever.
Hm, I’m thinking something similar - keep the boxes, but number them. Maybe put them in rough alpha order. I just hate to get rid of the boxes! On the downside, they take up an awful lot of unnecessary space that I really could use for other things. I’m about to move to a place half the size of my current place, and in the long run will be moving to a smaller place yet. And I still have a fair number of VHS tapes that can’t be condensed. I have to think about this.
My computer is not linked to my TV. I don’t even know if I can. I can watch TV on my computer, so does that mean I could rout the output to the TV instead?
Probably not. Depends on the outputs your computer has and the inputs your TV has.
The most common ways for this to work is your computer’s video card needs to have a composite or S-Video output, you would route that to your TV. Or if your TV is LCD or plasma it may have a VGA input, then all you need is a long VGA cable.
I have no idea, and frankly, at this point I’ve got enough to do and worry about without adding that. Moving is no fun. My TV is not LCD or plasma, though. My monitor is.
I’d prefer to have them separate, actually, come to think of it. When I’m watching junk science shows, I like to be able to look things up real quick.
I have a dvd collection of well over 1000 single dvds and over 1000 box set dvds. I had both collections placed away from one another and both in alphabetical order. I also had a list of all these dvds in order on my computer. Sometimes I’d go nuts and put them in ordr by genre! Man I really should get out more!
Do you put all the ones starting with the word “A” and with “The” under the “A”'s and under “T”. I put the “A” worded ones under “A” but I ignore the “The”. I use alpha by title except for sets of different flicks by same actor. They are all at the end, alpha by actor. I put the tv shows in the alpha group by its title. The only major break in pattern is that I have the vhs’s (several hundred) in a separate section of media storage rack shelves, but I have my computer list in total alpha (MS Word table) but with a separate column for D or V for DVD or VHS. The racks line the walls of an enclosed former attached one car garage.
Yes, we do watch a vhs flick now and then. What esle should I do with them if I don’t want to buy a duplicate in DVD format?
Oh the worst part is that the "Best of"s go under B for Best.
I bought mine at Best Buy a few years ago for about $30 each or so, I believe, although any Wal-Mart or Target store should also carry them.
As for my music collection, I actually do organize my songs in a sort of autobiographical way, I guess. Whenever I acquire new music, but only music that I actually end up liking, I classify my music by the current month. So now if I decide I want to hear a particular song, I know to look under October 2005, for instance. Or, if I feel like reminiscing about June 2003, I can just pull up that file and all the songs will take me back to that time period. I don’t even have a database of the song titles and their corresponding months because my brain somehow has them all mapped out automatically.
I organize mine mostly alphabetically by title, with sections for tv boxed sets, and recorded off tv / home movies. For DVDs I like to keep the boxes so I store them that way; but for my CD collection, I keep the cds and liner notes in a CD album and got rid of the jewel cases. I ignore “The” and “A”, as well as spaces, so “Fruition” and “Fruit I Love” would be right next to each other. I don’t have any movies with numbers in the title that aren’t already spelled out so I haven’t had to decide to do with movies like “21” yet. If movies are in the same series but have disimilar titles I stick them together. “Serenity” is treated like the last episode of “Firefly”.
