I owned a dvdrom (with Creative Labs DXR2 decoder card) that I bought for $250 before I purchased my first dvd, Matrix, 6 months later when I joined in Sept 99.

My avg price per disc is still hovering around betw $7-8 thanks to the absolute madness of the dotcoms.

I got my first DVD player in March 2000. The main insentive was the bonus features -- as widescreen and Dolby Digital / dts meant nothing to me then..

But the collection started growing and growing, and after 18 months, I was totally annoyed at the cool titles available in R1 land..

So mutlizoned I went, then the dts setup and never looked back... The addiction has gone crazy -- but I am trimming back 30 or 40 early purchases from the collection which no longer are worthy of being viewed.

I started in January of 2000. I had a friend I worked with who kept telling me about DVD and all the wonderfullness of it. I wanted to buy American Pie and I saw that the VHS was over $100 and the DVD was around $20(I think). So I ordered the DVD(along with Lake Placid) and sometime after it (they) came I bought a Sharp DVD player. Now here I am, 4 DVD players, a home theater system, and about 750 DVD's later.

I actually starting to buy the DVD's before I bought my player. I remember going down to Tower Video the week the first Warner Bros. DVD's were released and bought "Blade Runner"

Now with rental outlets like Greencine and Netflix, I don't buy as much.

Time is of the essence. I work for one of the biggest financial firms in the world, workin' on average 8:30 AM - 8:00 PM Monday-Friday with occassional work on the weekends. I also place goin' to the gym and daily reading of the Bible as a huge priority so those come first. Now I'm studyin' for Level I of the Chartered Financial Analyst Exam in June so that's takin' up all of my time.

Neways, I'll get around to LOA eventually. Dang, that's the same acronym for Letter of Authorization.

Well, you'll get the time frame of this when I tell you what my first DVD was: Bride Of Chucky

I purchased a new computer at this time, and knew that new computers were able to play DVD's. So just for the hell of it (since DVD's weren't really popular at that point just yet) I picked up Bride Of Chucky as soon as it came out. Turns out my PC didn't have a DVD-rom (god I knew nothing about computers back then). I chose to hold on to this DVD as an incentive to buy myself a DVD player. I saved up money (as I had a shitty job that paid like nothing at the time) and in the summer time, I bought my first DVD player. Then the obsession slowly started to sink in....

Readin the bible? Oh...you dont need that...you just need to watch LoA!

Bought a region and copy protection free Apex player off eBay in the summer of 98 for $300 and then discovered it wasn't the promised version of the Apex player. That was also my first valuable eBay lesson.

My first DVD was Excalibur and now I have over 500 DVDs. And come this September I'll be able to retire my last VHS movies when the Star Wars original trilogy set is released.

My one piece of advice to new DVD collectors - Don't pay full price for a movie (unless its Ed Wood). Every movie is on sale at some point whether during its initial release or as part of a 3 for $30 sale.

My brother-in-law bought me several titles ( Duck Soup, not yet OOP, among them!) the Chistmas my wife bought me our player. Who knew what would follow. I ended up completely revamping my home stereo, buying a large flat screen Sony TV, and now have 250+ titles. I rarely buy anymore, mostly rent, and am selling off titles on Amazon to shrink my bloated collection.

i wanted to be cool so I bought a creative 6x dvd-rom with decoder in summer of 99. i also bought Total Recall and in the summer There's Something about Mary and later The Matrix. no more dvds. it wasn't until fall of 2000 where i went crazy and started buy 2-3 titles a week and stuff. this is because my girlfriend broke my heart and i had nothing better to spend my money or time on =) been addicted ever since.

finally got a real dvd player, surround sound, tv in summer 2001.

In college, 10/30/99, bought Blair Witch Project and an Aiva player from egghead.com for $120, which I sold for $200 due to its region free capabilities...

Got my DVD Player in '98, but can't remember the first title. Maybe "Clerks"...

Got my player early 2001, first movie bought was Live And Let Die. Think there were a few others at the same time, but that was the first one I saw on the shelf that I wanted, and it was going quite cheap.

I think I started buying a lot of movies fairly quickly, and have only recently started to slow down. Over 400 now, been a while since I counted and updated my lists.

My first DVD was The Matrix...I got it my sophomore year of college (2000) when my family got their DVD player. From there, I would pick up DVDs when they were on sale (mainly at Movie Gallery PVD sales) until I got my first player in 2001. Up to that point, I just watched my movies on my jack ass roommates player.

The first two movies I bought after getting my player were "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?" And "L.A. Confidential". After I got a steady job in college, my collection took (relatively). Then, in June of 2002 my apt. got cleaned out and I was left with Ocean's 11, Rushmore, and Erin Brokovich. I had to rebuild completely, and that's how I got to where I am today with my collection.

And as I look at all of my movies, I wonder "Why in the hell have I spent so much money on these dang things?"

Sadly I'm a grown man with only around 40 dvds in my collection that including some bollywood ones, YES FORTY not 400.

Listen man just buy what you really really want, that what I do, and I still feel guilty when I buy something and don't watch it for a while..usually if I want something new I try to trade a title I have not watched for a while...why keep it if your never gonna watch it again....

I understand somethings are sacred like the Sopranos Collection to me is and Six feet under, Tombstone and ........

Basically this is no competetion.. you can 4 dvds or 400 dvds its just how much you value them....its upto you, no one is wrong and no one is right we live in a freeeeee world...

I bought a cheapie Apex DVD player and American Pie: UE about the time it was first released. The Apex skipped, I bought a Sony the next day, and my collection grew from there.

I started my collection when I had a Jaime Pressly fan site, somewhere around six years ago. I liked to collect as much stuff as I possibly could that she was involved in, so sadly enough my first DVD was Poison Ivy 3: The New Seduction. I slowly bought more JP dvd's and some others along the way. Then one day I discovered the joys of Columbia House and my collection skyrocketed. I then started buying all sorts of movies for all sorts of reasons. In recent months I slowed down on the buying because it's hard to do when you are a broke college student, but my collection is still growing. I have a little over 150 right now, and I have always said that I would stop at 200...but now that I am closer I really doubt that will happen.

I got my first DVD in the fall of 1997. My roommate at the time had a great job and bought a DVD player (a Panasonic, don't know the model number though), and we went to Tower Records to get some DVDs. Back then they had a small shelf with probably less than 100 titles to choose from in their Laserdisc section. My roommate bought the original release of Se7en (that you had to flip over in the middle) and The Usual Suspects (with the weird pull-out packaging, where the DVD slid out of the bottom of the case), and I got Risky Business because it was one of my few favorite movies that I didn't already own on VHS. From there we both kinda went nuts and each bought around 40 DVDs each in the next year before we got our own places and I had to buy my own player (a Toshiba).