I’m trying to decide what to do with my DVD collection

Ever since DVDs were introduced in the late 90’s, and I watched my first DVD film (The Matrix) in Pasadena during my new hire training month, I’ve been collecting DVDs for my own personal media library. I probably hit my peak purchasing frequency around the mid-00’s. I think a lot of people were like me at the time. Back then, DVDs contained what we considered at the time excellent video and audio quality, and the disc media was seemingly more resilient than VHS tapes. I’d never had a collection of films on VHS, so this seemed perfect. I’m sure the Hollywood entertainment industry was rather pleased by this increasingly profitable new revenue stream. Special editions, boxed sets, etc.

Sometime after the kids were born, the frequency that I would buy DVDs has dropped off dramatically. You can blame a few reasons:

  1. People realized that after purchasing a film on DVD, they didn’t go back for repeated viewings.
  2. Film quality diminished, and people weren’t interested in owning bad films.
  3. The rise of streaming video over the Internet.

My biggest reason was that I realized I simply wasn’t going back to watching films in the library. There are certain films we watch over and over again, especially the children’s films. Also, certain sci-fi and action films (e.g. LotR, Star Wars) are also in heavy rotation. Many others are sitting around. Also, we watch a lot of films via Netflix, either streaming disc-by-mail.

So where does that leave us? While many of our new purchases are blu-ray, the rest of my collection is DVD. I’m slowly replacing select films from the family library, because I know we (as a family) will watch those films repeatedly. At the moment,  though, I don’t know what to do with the old DVDs. I like the HD quality video and lossless audio on blu-rays, and watching what used to be considered high quality video/audio on DVDs isn’t so great any more on the big screen, or on my HD LCD monitors.

Decisions, decisions.

I just finished rewatching The Matrix this evening. I’m considering watching every film in my collection, and making a decision afterwards to either put the DVD in the “keep” pile or the “sell” pile. It might be interesting to revisit each film in our collection this year.

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