Digitization at 12:00 AM

A non-weather related post! First one in some time, I know. No worries, more of that will likely be coming later.

More to the point, I have a pretty extensive collection of movies at home. It's not nearly as extensive as it used to be, but it's pretty darn large. Lately I've gotten a lot choosier about what movies I'll actually spend money on because there's a lot of junk there that I just don't watch anymore.

As part of my march into the next decade (which starts tomorrow), I am considering whether to join the vanguard of a connected future. I'm considering digitizing most of my video collection (that I care about at any rate).

The path of least resistance involves a couple of steps. The first is to figure out how to stream everything to my TVs. Quite simply, there's no point in digitizing anything if there's no way to get it anywhere. To that end, I've settled on the excellent Roku Digital Video Players (DVPs). I've had one for a couple of years, and it's only gotten better with the continuous support and upgrades Roku provides. I'm thinking I'm going to get another with some gift cards received for Christmas.

Local streaming, however, is not an in-built feature of the Roku boxes. However, getting it set up only took about a half hour or so. I had to set up a web server accessible internally, and then I had to download a "channel" on the Roku box which streams the content from the server. It's easier than you'd think, and it was working very quickly. FYI, the channel's name is Roksbox.

The other step is to, you know, actually rip the movies. My computer, at the moment, doesn't have a blu-ray drive. Fortunately these have really come down in price, and once again I've got some extra cash and gift cards laying around from Christmas, enough to offset a significant portion of the price.

Then it's just a matter of circumventing all of the copy protection baked into the blu-rays to get the movies onto my hard drive. Unfortunately, high-def content takes up a lot of space, so I'm thinking of getting a 2 TB drive for media storage. The 500 gigs I've got right now won't cut it for long with the movies that I've got.

Anyway, the possibility is tantalizing. The thought of not having to deal with physical media beyond ripping it? Getting high-def content straight to the TV via my own internal network? No more fast forwarding through previews because the movie studios have disabled actual chapter skipping? No more stupid, mandatory things to watch at the beginning of a movie? Just buffer and play?

Yes please.

I'd say the only major concern is that the picture quality likely won't be quite as good. But it might be a sacrifice worth making. I used to firmly be in the camp of blu-ray players and physical media. Not anymore. There is a future, and it likely involves streaming.