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Organize Your Movie Collection
We have a lot of movies, I mean a lot. We started buying DVDs back in the day when the only place you could get them was at Circuit City and the cheapest you could get was 18.99. We would go every couple of weeks and there were maybe 20 titles and there would be one or two new ones which we would add to our collection. Now we probably own around 1000 DVDs. Movies are our biggest 'vice'. We live 30 minutes from town and with the cost of going to the theater these days, it is cheaper and easier to purchase the movies we want to see and have them here at home. Plus, there is the added advantage of the extras you get with DVDs and the fact that by owning the movies you can watch them multiple times and loan them to friends. Our neighbors love us!
We have a book shelf and a half full of DVDs, plus two boxes of videos. This year, we had to make more room for the DVDs, so we went through our 200 videos. Some were given away or sold because we knew we could get replacements on DVD (like the Rocky collection). the rest are sitting in 2 boxes until we can actually replace them. They are older movies and good movies, but we are not sure we can find them on DVD and until we can, we don't want to get rid of them.
Then there are the movies Daniel TiVos, the movies we very occasionally borrow from Blockbuster or a friend, the movies we watch on PayPerView, and lastly the movies I get from Netflix...All of this can become very confusing to keep up with, needless to say!
Our videos used to be organized by category (Christmas, horror, comedy, etc). Our DVDs have always been stacked alphabetically (don't ask me why we used the two different methods because I don't know!). You have no idea how many times we have thought we had a movie only to find out we didn't. We end up realizing it was a movie we borrowed or watched on TV, but not before we wonder who we loaned it out to and forgot to write it down. When people borrow movies, they write them down on a piece of paper for us. Then when they bring them back, we tear up the piece of paper...very complicated...very 20th century...And so I was thinking perhaps we should move into the 21st century with our movies and create a database. Plus it would be a great way to convince the insurance people that we really do own a thousand movies in case of fire or robbery.
Fortunately, software companies are a step ahead of me and ready to help me create my Personal Video Database. This will allow me to list all of my movies, keep track of who has borrowed what and keep track of whether a movie was something we saw on TiVo, DVD, VHS, or whatever. No more scratching our heads and going...'didn't we own that movie?'
All My Movies looks like a great product that will do what I have been thinking and more. It is also said to be user friendly, Vista Compatible (which is great as many programs aren't yet), And it has some other neat features...like you can get a cheap barcode scanner and it will put all the information about your movie in for you. It also provides extra information about actors and you can export your list into other formats (such as HTML and Excel). Have you tried All My Movies? I would love to hear from you! If not, I will be considering this as a gift for my geeky husband this Christmas! He is always complaining that movies are disappearing. This should answer that question once and for all!
