Organizing my DVD collection

This post is a follow up to my like Goodreads, but for movies post from last week. Since then, I’ve managed to scan a little over 100 DVDs (and one Blu-Ray) into my blu-ray.com database. (According to the site, I now have 88 movies and 38 TV seasons in my collection.) This is maybe a third of my collection, I think. Maybe “accumulation” is a better word than collection, since it’s in mostly random order, and I barely know where anything is. But I’m trying to transform it from an accumulation into a collection, and hopefully pare it down a bit.

I’ve mostly been scanning older stuff that I’ve watched already, but I’ve hit a handful of DVDs that I’ve never gotten around to watching, and a few that I might have watched, but I don’t really remember. So I’m trying to get a handle on the watched/unwatched status on everything, in addition to just cataloging it and trying to organize it a bit.

Figuring out what to do with old DVDs can be a challenge, since they don’t have much resale value. There are some that I might be able to sell on eBay, but mostly, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. I have a bunch of DVDs that I got through Peerflix back around 2006-2008, and those aren’t really suitable to resell or even donate, since Peerflix’s model basically required you to send the DVDs in a plain envelope, tossing out the case and the inserts, so I only have the discs. (And they’re usually a bit scratched up too.) I’ve already tossed out a few scratched up Peerflix discs, and I might toss out some more eventually.

I donated some books to my local library book sale last week, and I included a few DVDs in with the books. I’d like to donate more, once I can sort out some stuff that I know I’ve watched, and that I’m pretty sure I won’t want to watch again.

Anyway, back to Blu-ray.com: their mobile app has worked out pretty well. Most of the stuff I’ve scanned is in their database. The stuff it doesn’t have is generally oddball kung-fu movies. (Actually, sorting out and organizing my oddball kung-fu movies is probably worth a whole other blog post.) The site includes a number of useful features, though it’s missing some stuff I’d like to see, and the organization is sometimes a little weird. They have an export function, but it just exports a list of UPC codes (no titles or other info). So I guess that would be good if I wanted to move my collection to a different service that allowed UPC import, but not if I just wanted to export it to a spreadsheet. They do also have a printer-friendly view that could probably be cleaned up a bit and copied into a spreadsheet, so that’s good. And there’s some ability to facilitate trading between members, but I haven’t figured that out yet, and it doesn’t seem to be at all automated, really, so it’s not like Peerflix.

On the subject of stuff that I’ve had sitting around unwatched for way too long: I just started watching an Invader Zim box set that I bought in 2007. This one has apparently gone up in value, since I bought it for $16, and used copies are now going for $84 on Amazon. I don’t know if that’s a realistic price, since there’s a newer version of the set that can be had for $35, though I guess the newer version doesn’t have the commentaries or special features that are on the older version that I have.

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