my best friend had an electrical fire start when he wasn't home, and had his house burn down. he lost everything. literally EVERYTHING except the stuff in his car and the clothes on his back.

the insurance will take care of it. most of it.

he was a huge DVD collector, and had over 500+ discs.
unfortunately, he didn't have a list, and can't provide them with all 500 titles.

catalogue your discs so in the event of an emergency, you will have a list for reimbursement.

I keep ALL of my DVD receipts, plus have local and online databases with the titles. Since I get most of my DVD's online at places like DVDEmpire & DVDplanet, they also have almost all my discs listed in my account history, whihc is good also.

i didn't know dvdplanet did that. they have a retail store a few blocks away, so i usually go in, and lose reciepts. i should start shopping with them online.

So they'd accept a DVDSpot or something like that as something to refer to for insurance purposes? Glad I'm doing that already then...

I am finally planning on cataloging my collection this Monday. Have maybe 1500 discs, arranged alphabetically now.

Plan to jot them down quickly in a notebook, then add to DVDspot as time allows.

Maybe I'll make a photocopy of that list and keep it offsite.

If you can find slave labor, that helps. I just paid my daughter $1 and hour to enter my collection into DVDSpot (She made $6!! ). She finished last night and I finally have it in my signature.

If you have a scanner you could scan them in. If not typing the UPCs is still pretty quick, unless you are tracking your purchasing information. I think it'd be easier and quicker to skip writing them down first.

Hypothetically, why couldn't your friend just make up a list of DVDs? If the DVDs are gone, how would the insurance company know?

Yeah just give them a list of 500 average price DVDs, they don't care. That's what I did when 200 or so CDs were stolen from my car.

I already have - just in case my puny collection catches on fire.

Something I learned from our insurance agent very early on in my comic book collecting days - any collection considered larger than average should be photographed or videotaped.

I now photograph my DVD collection once a year (should be every 6 months with how often I add DVDs) and store the pics online and at work. The only thing I have yet to do (and really don't want to because of the time involved) is to make a standard text file listing of my collection. Sites like DVDSpot are great, but if the site goes down you're screwed. It's a good idea to have a backup source that isn't reliant on someone else.

I know that if something happened to my house, there is no way my homeowner's insurance would believe that I had a collection worth $45k MSRP just on my say-so.

just got renters insurance didnt think about actually taking pictures of my collection but will do that as soon as possible.

Yeah, I forgot about taking pictures once in a while. Definitely a good thing to do with larger collections, in case they don't believe you and you don't have receipts.

I had a large CD collection (most of them were hard-to-find imports) stolen in 1995. The insurance guy said to name as many as you could remember, but all he really needed was a total value. I was reimbursed. I imagine that your friend will be fine, insurance-wise.

DVDSpot has an export function to csv.

I thought Amazon had rolled out some kind of cataloging feature but I didn't explore too much and now don't remember where it is.

I specifically had it noted in my insurance plan I own a DVD collection worth over $20,000 (MSRP). They said the same thing about photographing and documenting of what titles I own. I keep everything in DVDProfiler and also have receipts (though if the hous goes up, so do they).

Amazon has a record of everything I've ever ordered, back to 1998.

I just bought an 80gig portable hard drive so I could better archive all my digital photos and iPod music. We already have a list of CDs and some collectibles which are kept in (theoretically) fire-proof lock boxes. Guess a DVD lists should be next!

An opinions/preferences on what's best? DVD Spot, DVDProfiler, or DVDTracker?

I like DVDspot for online and Movie Collector for local.

For those of you with Macs, DVDpedia is awesome. You type in te title and it pulls photos and information from amazon and IMDB...and everywhere esle really. Also lets you select a title you loan out and will automatically pull the email address from MAIL and send a "you have my dvd reminder."

Also, those of you with renters insurance. My extensive record collection and dvd collection, was not even covered under renters insurance. They considered the collection excessive spending and I woudl have to carry an extra policy for teh specifics. I am in a home now...no worries on insurance. VERY GOOD idea to have photographic documentation. We went through our house with a video tape recorder.

Good idea, but I use binders and keep all the cases off site.

And I do have some slave labor, so hopefully it won't take more than a few hours to get them in a notebook, which I will keep next to the binders for additions/subtractions.

Then I'll have fun with DVDSpot during downtime at work over the next month or three.

Digital camera pics ok?

Actually, if you have a Mac I recommend Delicious Library. You'll spend waaay less time entering your DVD collection into it. All you have to do with Delicious Library is wave the DVD case in front of your computer and all the data and cover art is loaded automatically. No typing at all. Can't get any simpler than that!

When I first read that and before I actually checked it out, I thought you were just being a sarcastic ass.