The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your DVDs
If you’re like me, you own a few DVDs. Actually, you own enough to finance the founding of a small country for the betterment of humankind. So how do you organize all these DVDs? Sure you can download a database organizer like DVD Profiler or just use a text document, but what about your physical shelf?
Most people have either the random shelf where you browse through titles which have no order whatsoever or the shot gun shelf where the DVD cases look like they’ve been shot out of, well, a shot gun. Can you live with your DVDs this way? Sure you can, but don’t come crying to me when you can’t find your copy of Willow under that pile of last week’s laundry. It becomes even harder as your collection grows and you have to look through a hundred titles or more.
Dedicate a Shelf
Clear a shelf (or two… or five…) of things you either don’t need or you can move somewhere else. Having one place to hold all of your DVDs will help more than anything else. Even if you have all of your discs piled randomly, it’ll be a lot quicker to scan all the titles to find the one you want.
Separate Your DVDs
To limit the amount of search time for a specific title, separate your discs into two categories or more. I collect films and TV shows so I separate those into two categories. If I collected a bunch of Yoga and home improvement DVDs, I’d create a third category for instructionals.
At this point, your probably raring to break your collection down to different genres. Don’t. Why not? Well, the problem becomes where to put a few of your films. For example, where would you put Kill Bill? Martial Arts? Western? Or where does Bad Taste go, Sci-Fi? Horror? Comedy? One solution would be to create sub-genres to accommodate these cross-genre films but then you run the risk of making so many that your shelf becomes random again. Not cool.
Alphabetize
That’s right, good old fashioned A-Z listings, nothing simpler than that. Sure you can go chronologically if your a date freak, or autobiographically if your just insane, but my memory is terrible and I have trouble remembering my own birthday. Besides, you might miss out on some of my favorite tweaks.
Tricking Out Your Collection
Yes, I geeked out my DVD collection. Nothing too fancy really, but come on, organizing alphabetically is boring! So why not spruce it up a bit? For example, does 2001: A Space Odyssey go under the letter “T” or the number “2”? Neither, it goes under “K”. Clerks under “S” and Desperado under “R”.
I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. I remember (and if you’re reading this, you probably do as well) lots of films by the director so I generally alphabetize by the director’s last name chronologically unless they directed a series of films. Like Clerks and Clerks 2 are side by side even though there’s a few films between them chronologically speaking.
This may annoy your significant other who can’t understand why Aliens and Titanic are next to each other under “C” but it will make you feel like you’re Lord of the Discs.
Breaking the Rules
Now that I’ve laid down all the rules I use, you can break them. If 2001 was the only Kubrick film I owned, I would file it under the number “2” because it’s visually easier to see. I also organize film series by title if there are more than one director. Star Trek is filed under “S”, the Alien films are filed under “A” and so on. I also place 2010: The Year We Make Contact in the Kubrick section right after 2001 because you can’t think of 2001 without Kubrick, but I don’t want to separate those films.
One final weird thing I do with my collection is that you will find War Games, Sneakers and Hackers next to each other under “H” (for Hackers triple feature) and Willow, The Princess Bride, Stardust under “F” (for Fantasy Triple Feature). There are some films that are so similar in tone and concept that when I think of one film, I think of another film or two so I just pack them together into double and triple features.
The Future
I’m hoping to eventually rip my DVD collection to my computer and build a media server. I don’t really believe Blu-Ray has won the format war as I think physical media is dying in its current form. So replacing my collection with a better format that isn’t going to be around long just doesn’t make sense to me. And with Apple leading what looks like the digital media business, I’ll be hoping my investments in DVDs pays for a long time after.
No related posts.
