The great heroic project of our age is more or less finished. For all practical purposes, I’m calling the effort to transfer my DVD collection to hard disk mission complete. With the exception of nine disks that I’ll need other software to rip and encode effectively, I managed to bring down the curtain three weeks ahead of my self-imposed deadline of the end of the year. As far as those couple of outliers go, well, I’ll get to them when I
get to them. For the most those few disks are fairly oddball titles that you’d really only want to watch once or twice in a lifetime anyway. Still, I have them, and it would be nice to go from finished to really finished eventually.
So, you’re asking, what’s the tale of the tape? Weighing in at a grand total of 1.21 TB (1210 GB), I’ve got 123 movies and 1380 separate television episodes, and 1185 songs available for streaming to every television and iDevice in the house across my own network. Put another way, that’s 10.5 days of back-to-back movies, 44 days of television, and about 3 days of uninterrupted music. That’s certainly not the biggest personal audio-visual library out there, but I’m proud of my little collection. That should prove to be more than enough to keep me entertained during the impending apocalypse.
It’s alot like having a 24/7 commercial free television station that plays only content that you know you’re going to like. I had a real geek-out moment there when I realized just how awesome it really is. Using the Apple TV interface makes it very similar experience to actual channel surfing. When you get bored with one show you can switch immediately to another and then back again even on a TV in a different room. Basically, it’s what TV would be if television wasn’t just an avenue to put eyeballs on advertisements. It’s possible that I’m in love.
In the interest of keeping things safe and sound, I’ve got a redundant copy on site and an offsite backup ready to go into rotation. It might seem like overkill, but iTunes, as we all know, sometimes does funny things and this isn’t a process that I want to go through a second time. I’m not there yet, but I think I’ve taken a big step towards making cable television pretty irrelevant in my life.
Sadly there are still several large boxes of CDs stashed in the basement that need to be ripped since I seem to have lost alot of content dragging it from computer to computer over the last five or six years. Since I seem to have finally stumbled on a solution that’s is going to stick, it might just be time to go ahead and rebuild my audio library while I’m at it… but that’s a project for a later date. I don’t think I can stomach seeing any more shiny plastic discs just yet.