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Why? The physical DVD's are the backup, aren't they?

I was gonna reply that very thing. Then I thought about it.

He's talking about doing the DVD equivalent of what we do with our empeg car players. And I still keep my MP3s backed up in at least one additional place other than the empeg itself, even though I've still got all my CDs. Because what I'm protecting against isn't permanent loss of the music, I'm protecting against the lost time spent in carefully ripping, encoding, tagging, and organizing.

On the other hand, that also makes me think: For DVDs which (save for a hadful of favorites) I will only watch once or twice, I wouldn't even bother to go to all that trouble of buying the server, configuring the software, ripping, and organizing everything. A DVD collection isn't the sort of thing I'd need to put on shuffle play, so for me it's easier just to buy a nice bookcase for them and be done with it.

I admit, the idea of having a screen full of thousands of movies I can just click on without leaving my couch is tempting. That'd be pretty awesome tech. And if that's integrated with a MythTV tivo-like kinda thing, then it starts to make a lot of sense. But not if I have to be the one to encode all those DVDs.
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Tony Fabris