Mattflix

I'm way late to this discussion but wanted to participate

I've got about 1300 total DVD's, which I thought was a lot but I seem to have met my match here. I have a small 2-bedroom condo, and the collection is in the 2nd bedroom, which has become a weird library/gym/den thing. They're in three full wall units that I got from Office Depot. I've just slightly outgrown the shelves by 20 or so discs, which I have stacked on top of the third shelf.

I've got them split into categories:

Movie Boxed Sets & TV Seasons - I try to keep them from mixing, and I try to keep them alphabetized, but my priority with this part of the collection is to optimize my space. These are larger so they tend to leave odd gaps if you try to keep them in perfect order. I don't buy sets frequently anymore, and I'm out of space, so I try to remove the gaps.

Anime - I've got about a row or so with anime shows & movies. I don't group by genre normally but these feel like their own flavor. Plus I had a big anime phase for a while.

Blu-Rays - I mostly keep these in their own section.

Concert & Standup Comedy DVD's - It's a rare mood that I pull these out. I only have a dozen or so. Hell if I can even remember the titles. So I have these together, in order by the last name of the artist. So for example George Carlin: Jammin' in New York would go under C.

Criterions - I've got about 40 of these, sorted by spine #

DVD Movies - Just about everything else is together mostly alphabetically, about 2/3 of the collection.

Within the movies, I make exception to the alphabetical rule by keeping franchises together. So Hannibal can be found under S right behind Silence of the Lambs. Usually if I watch one entry of a franchise I'll go through all of them. Likewise if I have a Blu-Ray of a sequel, I'll put them together in this area. Same with multiple versions of a movie.

Games - About 1/3 of the last shelf holds my video game collection. It's mostly DVD-shaped stuff like Playstation games and such, but there are a few older cartridge games there too.

On top of these shelves go any elaborate movie sets that I want to display, such as the Blade Runner Case set, the Battlestar Gallactica Cylon head set, etc.

And finally I have a couple dozen DVD's with cast member autographs on them. I go to area autograph shows and book signings. These are displayed in shadowboxes on the walls above the units. I don't watch them, so I take the discs out and put them in blank labelled cases with the movie collection.

Dick Laurent

With my latest move (third in a couple years) I'm trying a new tactic, and that's moving into a smaller house with half the storage and no garage. I'm hoping this will force me to downsize my own hoard. I still can't seem to part with my LD player, though, or my four boxes of VHS, or my three "back-up" receivers... Hmmmm, gotta get to work before the packers get here next week. (But there are two storage facilities within a mile of my new house, just in case I break)


Do you sort by spine with DVD/BD mixed? I go back and forth on that. Right now I'm DVD by spine then BD by spine. Looks more pleasing to the eye that way.

This all sounds great. Would love to see a pic!

Mattflix

I do mix the Criterion DVD's & BD's. I agree that they look odd with the different-shaped boxes, but I guess I want them together by theme rather than by format.

Mixed amongst by regular BD's I also have some previously-viewed BD's I got from blockbuster, and what they do is take the BD's and put them into DVD cases with blue covering. It looks terrible having these taller cases, but I had to choose to save some cash so I could get some more movies.


I'll try to post a pic at some point, thanks!

Spottedfeather

There may be people that have more, but Coolduder on youtube has one of the biggest dvd collections that I've ever seen. Personally, I have 454 titles at 989 discs. Coolduder has over 3000 dvds and blu-rays.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

About 14,500 titles over here.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

So I'm in the middle of getting all my new stuff, and the floaters, on shelves. I'm down to the M's and then realize I have a small pile of about 6 movies that I forgot to pickup. 4 of them are letters I passed, so I work my way back. Why is it that there always seems to be some box set at the end of a row, which turns me trying to fit in 4 movies into moving half a shelf, row to row, because I just need to add one movie but there's a 6 disc box set at the end? I don't seem to recall being able to add something new and have a nice big empty space to put stuff into. It's always the other way around.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

And in a cruel twist of fate, I get to the 'S' section and pull out a box set containing a movie that starts with 'A', that I put in the 'A' section. At one point, moving that one movie had me shifting 10 DVDs along the shelves and it finally stopped at 'H'.

WOODPRODUCTIONS

This is the least of my worries. Due to time constraints because of my job and other life commitments etc. My collection does not come close to the mass collections some people have here. With these time constraints I use a lot of discretion in my purchases, mainly trying to fit them into my schedule for viewing. As much as I admire the large collections folks have here, the beauty with my situation is that there is PLENTY of room for expansion. Great ideas in this thread to plan accordingly for the future as my collection continues to grow.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I have finally put every DVD on a shelf, not including some box sets that will go on top somewhere. I still have some of the discs out from those Mill Creek 50 movie packs I need to return to their sets. My next task will be to catalog my new blu-ray purchases and hopefully fit those on shelves. Than I need to walk the shelves and figure out what titles made it to the shelves before getting cataloged. I know there's a bunch, especially the kid stuff. I also need to remove the titles I've sold off or currently trying to get rid of, from my database. Finally, I need to clean up my binders and start putting new stuff in the spaces of things I've gotten rid of.

That's the order I plan on doing things but the closer to the end, the less of a priority it is for me. Doing 30 binders of 200+ discs in each one is going to be a pain.

When all is said and done, I'm probably just under 15,000 movies.

Trevor

I'm not sure what happened, but I've actually been working on getting my stuff cleaned out and organized the last couple of weeks. I had two storage sites near my old place in Virginia, and after 8 months of not visiting them, I did some major work. I took a car load of stuff to the trash, two car loads to Goodwill, and a car load to our house. With that and some major Tetris skills, I was able to consolidate the two storage sites into one. That $90 a month in savings will go straight into my midlife crisis sportscar fund.

I've also been working on completely changing my DVD organization. Let me get some pics together, back in a few.

Trevor

When I moved in with Jen, I made the largest wall in our bedroom my DVD wall. I put up ten or so random ratty old bookcases, stacked and poorly organizing a good chunk of my collection. Here are a couple of pics that accidentally showed a bit of my hodgepodge wall of DVDs.




I decided that this display was too ragtag for Jen to have too see every day, and moved the bookcases out to other rooms, mainly my "junk room" for my books and graphic novels and CDs. For the bedroom and my DVDs, I decided to bite the bullet and buy some Elfa shelving during The Container Store's 25% off sale. I'm the least handy man in the world, and discovered halfway though that my bedroom is a bit crooked; so to keep the standards off the floor trim I have one shelf slightly skewed. But overall, I did about as well as I could hope. I now have ~14' of floor to ceiling shelving; ten rows.



Took a break to post this, but now I'll go fill that 140' with BDs and DVDs. I hope it will fit about half of my collection, "the good stuff", with the remaining bulk titles going into binders perhaps.

Pizza

If it isn't "good stuff" why keep it?
I consider all my stuff "good." Like I said before somewhere, best decision I made was dumping the DVD cases and switching to slimline CD cases. Solved so many of my problems. I tried the binder thing, it really compressed the space the DVDs take but was hard on flippers plus difficult to rotate titles around the way I like. I knew I had to either go with some kind of numbering system for filing or start all over. I started all over and been happy.

Cute cat by the way.

Trevor

Yeah, I think everything I own is good too, but with ~10,000 films/seasons, I can't possibly display it all. My hope is that between this 13.5' of shelving and a few other bookcases, I can display most of my 'subset' collections (MST3K, Godzilla, Criterion, Peanuts, Adult Swim, horror, Muppets, blu-rays, Disney, etc). Then the normal DVDs that don't belong to any subset, 40 bankers boxes labeled A to Z, can be bindered or something.

slop101

I'm in the process of "tossing" a little more than half my collection, mostly DVDs but also good deal of blu-rays. By whittling it down from over 2K of stuff I like to just under 1K of stuff I love, I feel it'll be a collection even more specific to me.

And by "tossing" I mean giving away to friends, selling what's sell-able, and giving the rest to the library/goodwill.

LJG765

Trevor-you make my fingers itch to help you organize! I love to rearrange stuff and make it look nice. I don't have enough space to do it a lot with mine but I love figuring out how to place things and in what order to do it in. I odd, I know. Then, of course, that only applies to my collections (books, movies, music...) not the rest of my life. That big wall of shelves makes me want one of my own. I don't have near what you do-around 1,000-so it'd be good enough to shelve all of mine, I think. Been looking around for cheap ways to build shelves, but I don't have any money right now to play with.

mickey65

My collection is not quite as extensive as a few of you fellas here. I probably have close to 3,000.

My OCD way of organising my collection is by genre. All the mobster films together, then cops/police action, to prison flicks. Also have a section for war movies, sci-fi, rom-com, etc. You get the picture.

I have it all set up like that so I can select something I'm in the "mood" for. Plus (to me) it's kind of cool seeing all my movies blended together and how they are all set up in separate genres and "related" to one another.

I also have a few binders of burned discs (movies burned from video tapes I've bought for a $1 or less at thrift store). If that movie is a "related" in some way to another, I'll match them together by putting the burned disc in a paper sleeve and putting it inside with the other DVD that is on the shelf. One of example I can think of on the top of my head is Nicolas Cage - "Leaving Las Vegas" and his "Honeymoon in Vegas". Or "EDTV" and "The Truman Show". There's plenty of others I've matched up.

Or I've burned DVDs that are part of "sets" of movies too.

You get the point. I know that sounds odd, but I like it.

Mattflix

For those with the larger collections, how can you find the time to watch all of them? Again, I've got 1300 DVD's and I feel like that's too much because I'll never watch them all. At one a day, if I were to try to watch everything, it would take me 4 years to go through everything. As of now, I've purged everything that I can't see myself watching again. And anything I do buy is going to be something that I truly loved. So no more blind purchases, or even just buying stuff that I merely "like" on the cheap. So my collection ends up being truly good movies.

No disrespect intended or anything, but how can you manage this for collections of 3k-10k?

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Watch stuff as you get them, or at least shortly after. A large collection may also be the result of small purchases over a long period of time. I've been collecting movies for a couple of decades, so I've had a decent amount of time to amass a large collection.

LJG765

I look at it as now I don't have to worry about something not being available when I want to watch it. I've also probably spent less buying than many people do renting. Plus, I'm not the only one watching, so if you compare that with how much you'd spend going out to a movie with staying home, I do a lot better money wise buying than anything else.

Pizza

The horror challenge is coming up soon. Join in and burn through part of your collection.

I'm betting you'll regret it.

Mattflix

I can definitely understand and agree with that. But still, as the number of movies you genuinely enjoy grows, they start to take priority over one another. So if I'm going to rewatch a movie, I'm more inclined to rewatch something that I loved as opposed to something that I only like, so I think those movies naturally get pushed lower in the totem pole.

So if you've got hundreds of A+ movies at your disposal, why would you ever watch a C- movie again? There are enough great movies to go around, so I figure flush the rest out of the collection. Even though that's my approach to my collection, I still have more movies than I know what to do with them.


It's a space thing and a money thing. If I only had a small collection, it might be worth it to buy something I'm not so into on the cheap. But at this point it's not worth spending anything on a movie, even if I find it for a dollar at a garage sale, if going forward it'll never get play in the future. Also at this point if I'm really aching to see it I can always Netflix the disc or pay $2 to stream it. But that's not worth buying an array of discs to have at my disposal IMHO.

slop101

Why?

I tend to forget about the stuff I get rid of.

starseed1981

I went thru the same process recently and its interesting because I'm actually liking my collection quite abit more since I've whittled it down 75%. It doesn't feel so overwhelming.

Spiderbite

Totally agree. I went thru my collection several years ago and removed a ton of stuff. I still try to go thru my collection every so often and remove stuff that I am not watching. I definitely appreciate my smaller collection more than when I had a ton of movies and would sometimes see stuff and ask myself, "Why the hell do I own that?"

As someone else said above, it seems to make the collection more personal.

Viper187

When I have discs I don't want now, like when I upgrade from DVD to blu and the DVD release was fullscreen/flipper/otherwise shitty, or I need a 2disc case for sometihng and want to drop a pointless bonus disc... I'm just throwing them on a 100-disc spindle in my desk drawer. You know, the kind blank discs come in. Saves some space and they're still there should I ever feel the need to look them up. I also have a spindle with all the digital copy discs I pull from the BDs I buy, since I consider them utterly useless. Half are probably expired anyway by now. lol