OldBoy

I finally had it with ALL my DVD's. they sat upstairs in my storage room, never used, hardly touched, just taking up space.

finally this week i made a 4 step plan to get them out and get rid of them. most are going to Salvation Army who are picking up for free and almost 200 to the clubhouse in my my mom's complex or whatever. i sorted and only picked out appropriate stuff for older people.

i brought them all down to garage and then they'll be picked up. just my DVD's mind you. my blurays and whatever else i may get in future they'll bury me with them, but all those DVD's were just worthless. they were inferior (which i know Blu's will be soon, if not already). i even put The Abyss Special Edition DVD in the other day and it just looked like crap compared to the clarity of blus and especially digital streaming stuff. that is where it all lies in streaming and whatever else, but imo DVD's are just obsolete.

so gone they will go and i really am not thinking another thought about them (except this little rant of course ). i didn't use them, so bye bye.

i just see the magnitude of my collection and even my thousands of blurays nicely sorted in drawers in my closet and some overlapping on shelves above give me pause. so much money, so much hard work in acquiring (some at least) and now i couldn't care less.

hopefully, they'll find a better home, but for now i am just glad they are out and going to be gone by tonight.

so ever feel so overwhelmed or even ashamed that your collection grew so large and have you done anything about it?

OldBoy

of course i kept a few, some collections: Sopranos, West Wing, Six Feet Under, Greatest American Hero, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, couple others, but that's it. i just couldn't part even though they are all streaming in much better quality.

orangerunner

I wouldn't say I'm "ashamed" but the volume of DVDs I still have is not something I voluntarily share with others. Every time I want to cut-back, I always stop myself.

I still have a lot of titles in both DVD and Blu-ray because the packaging presentation and artwork of the DVD is often so much nicer than the Blu-ray. Take for instance the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) Platinum Edition on DVD is amazing - a 2-disc set in a nice cardboard fold-out Digi-pak with a metal embossed plate (yeah, kinda useless but...) and an envelope with extra printed materials all housed in a beautifully printed cardboard slipcover.

The Blu-ray equivalent? A one-sided paper trap sheet in a standard Blu-ray case. The audio/visual presentation is better of course but I think I only watched each version once in the last 15 years.

The other reason I keep the DVD is that sometimes the Blu-ray goes out-of-print and starts selling for a hefty price. For so-so titles that I have in both formats, I'd rather flog the Blu-ray for top dollar and keep the DVD.

Norm de Plume

No, I probably don't have as big a collection as most here.

Alan Smithee

Never! I may be a bit nuts for having so much, but have zero regrets other than regular DVDs looking like ass on current equipment. As I am out of shelf space I do need to cut down, and the main thing I am stopping is regular DVDs even if they're just $1. Unless it's an absolute must-have, I won't buy it anymore. Trying to do the same for Blu-Rays as well at least until I finally move and have more room for them.

My aunt and uncle should be more ashamed- they live around the corner from a Big Lots store (where a large percentage of my discs have come from) yet they have a very small disc collection and waste most of their time and money on cable TV!

Why So Blu?

Does their place look like yours? If not, then they have nothing to be ashamed of.

MR Round

At once point I thought I was. I recently passed 11,000 different titles and I thought geesh this is too much and I thought about the money i've spent over the years. But it's my hobby and I actually do watch them and I watch something I've never seen each day. So even though its going to take me awhile and I have room for them all I'm not ashamed anymore to have a hobby I enjoy. My wife loves movies as much as I do too so that helps alot

Kurt D

I'm afraid it's the other way around for me.

milo bloom

No, but like some others I feel there’s titles I’ve bought that I could have done without so I could focus more on what I really wanted. The parts of my collection that I’ve made the effort to collect and find are the ones I’m more proud of, collector-wise and the rest I’m working on downsizing.

OldBoy

Now that I think about it maybe ashamed wasn’t the right word. Maybe just amazed at quantity and how those dvds are really useless to me and barely thinking twice about letting go. Barely that is. Little bit of me crushed, but very little. Don’t get me wrong, I am proud of what I do have now and loved collecting those DVDs, but just in retrospect, I think it could have been used for different things. No one in my own family even understands. 2 friends of mine who are also movie fans understand, but I only share rarely...

Kurt D

IMH, movies have finite consumability. Sooner or later, even your most beloved movies will be hard to watch if you watch them too much. As people age, it could become easy to let go of all that stuff, realizing it doesn't matter all that much. I can always rent Star Wars when I'm 80, if I want to watch it again.

Hazel Motes

Only when I dump them all in a huge pile on top of me in my living room, and then gratify myself.

Shannon Nutt

"Shame" isn't quite the right word, but I did consolidate a huge amount of my single Blu-rays and DVDs into folders and threw out the boxes/cases they came in. I still have collector's sets in their original boxes and have kept my entire Criterion collection and 4K releases in their boxes, but that's it. I've also stopped buying DVDs and Blu-rays almost altogether - going with the digital versions if I really want something. I only buy Blu-ray now if it's a collector's edition of something I really want (like the recent Big Trouble in Little China release by Shout!).

But, like many of you, I suspect, I could retire tomorrow and probably never get through all the titles I own - many of the ones I consolidated into folders were still in the shrink wrap when I did so.

Toddarino

My ex wife tried to make me feel shameful about it, but it didn’t work. She used it as leverage in the divorce which did work however.
I’m not interested in throwing out all my cases or dvds and jumping ship to digital. I don’t feel like abandoning a hobby I had for decades because downsizing is hip right now.

Nick Danger

We occasionally have parties, and sometimes young people in their twenties come to them. I sometimes imagine that they smirk to each other when they see my CDs and DVDs, having the same attitude I did at their age when I saw something that was hopelessly old-fashioned.

Bluelitespecial

I love my collection but sometimes I look at it as symbolic of my isolation and loneliness.

Coral

These days I don't have much of a collection to be ashamed of - as it's pretty small.

However, I don't bring up discs in any conversations - because I've gotten snickers from others because they can't believe people still buy physical media.

Adam Tyner

Last year, I did a pass to see how many DVDs I could get rid of without a second thought. (I've done this a few times, but never to this extent.) Although I did put hundreds in bins to sell/trade/give away -- which I still haven't done -- I wound up "keeping" quite a lot more than I assumed. It's definitely heavy on TV-on-DVD (Kids in the Hall, MST3K, Buffy, Angel, Masters of the Universe) and concert stuff (particularly Devo, Weird Al, and They Might Be Giants). I'm still dragging my feet on investing in a real storage solution, but whenever I figure out what capacity there actually is, I'm sure I'll have to make some tough decisions.

At this point, I have far more titles on Blu-ray than on DVD. I have hundreds upon hundreds of those in plastic bins to discard as well, but I still feel overwhelmed by what's left. The challenge for me is that I hate the idea of space-efficient solutions (putting everything in plastic sleeves or slim cases), I don't have room to accommodate prepackaged shelving for thousands of titles, and custom shelving / drawers would cost a fortune. There is certainly a part of me that wants to say "screw it" and just get rid of it all.

milo bloom

The other thing that bothers me is that even stuff I have on DVD, my wife is much more likely to watch it on streaming just because it's so much easier than digging out the disc, firing up the player, sitting through the FBI warnings.

I was okay letting something like the TNG DVDs go, because they looked like crap. We never rebought them on Blu because we'd rather stream something like that.

I did however keep the 40 disc TOS collection I put a lot of work into completing. My wife has asked about upgrading it, but it's the only physical release version that has the episodes in production order instead of airdate.

I try to put in a disc at least every weekend to make some progress on my unwatched pile but it's going to take literal decades at that rate.

Alan Smithee

Music titles are usually the hardest ones to find and seem to go out of print fast. Out of everything I have, they also get the most repeat play.

DJariya

Not ashamed, but I've realized that there is so much in my collection that is simply not worth owning. I've probably paired it down 500-600 titles in the last 3 years or so. In fact yesterday I sold about about maybe 40 or so discs/TV shows and made about $62. Not great, but the $62 is worth more than having those 40 discs sitting in boxes unwatched and gathering dust.

BuckNaked2k

Good for you OldBoy! Does this mean you won't be the Prime Mover on the Last Blu-ray You Bought thread any more?

And yes, my more than 900 title collection is too many. I should have exercised more discretion along the way.

Josh Z

I'm telling you, Discsox sleeves are the most painless (albeit not necessarily cheapest) solution to this concern. You can keep the original artwork (aside from Criterion Blu-rays, which have non-standard size art), inserts, booklets, etc. and get rid of the keepcases. (Slipcovers you can often sell on eBay.) This trunk they sell claims to hold 300 Blu-ray sleeves, but that's an extremely conservative estimate. I have at least twice that many in mine with plenty of room to comfortably fit more.

https://mmdesign.com/Decorative-Case...er-dvd-pro.php

Adam Tyner

I got so distracted by other tangents that I forgot that you recommended those. I'll have to give that some serious thought. It does sound like it solves a lot of my concerns.

orangerunner

I think my downfall was the fact they became so incredibly cheap on the used market. By 2009, I probably had 75 titles. Ten years later I had roughly 4,000 titles.

When you come across a batch of 300 discs for $75, it's easy to get carried away at $.25 a title!