If memory serves me correct, I brought home my first DVD movie in 1999. I believe it was A Bug’s Life. I had just bought a DVD drive for my computer. They were still relatively new at the time and I remember being very excited to get one. The memory of the first time I saw a DVD movie playing on my 14″ CRT monitor is still very clear. The picture looked as sharp as anything I had ever seen, I was amazed. Of course on my 14″ CRT, with a resolution of 16 pixels by 16 pixels, it didn’t take much to be impressed but I was nonetheless impressed.
From then on, I stopped renting or buying VHS tapes. It was DVD all the way for me. I began buying DVDs for movies that I really enjoyed or hadn’t seen before. In total, there was about seven years where I collected DVDs. My collection isn’t that large, I’d figure about 100 in total. I stopped around 2006, when Blu-ray made its appearance. Knowing there was a high-definition format out there made it seem like a waste of money to keep on buying standard definition DVDs.
Since then, my DVD collection has sat on a bookshelf, taking up space. I can’t remember the last time I even popped a DVD movie into my computer, Xbox 360, or Blu-ray player for the express purpose of watching a movie. Over the weekend, I decided it was time to retire the collection. I thought about just giving them away but the hoarder in me doesn’t want to do that. Instead, I settled on just taking the discs, saving those, and recycling the disc cases. I bought one hundred disc sleeves, the cheap paper ones with cellophane window on the front. I’ve started to move the discs to sleeve but some of the disc cases give me pause. Some of them are quite nice, while others contain inserts that I’m not sure what to do with. What should I do with things like maps, posters, and unique promotional items? The easy answer is just recycle them too but perhaps I’ll have to give it some thought.
When I’m done, I’ll have freed up two whole shelves for other stuff. I may finally have room for my 8-track collection.