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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.


Spot on !!! It's a time thing. In my experience ripping a DVD is not quick at all, esp if you are ripping only parts of the DVD etc... If you have made the decision to go for that playback solution you have to include backup in your plan. RAID 5 is perfect as you get max space out of your drives while still having cover if one of the drives fails.

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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.


For me it's a space issue. I don't have the space downstairs in my living room for shelves of DVD's and CD's. The megachanger allows me to hide my collection, in my case almost completly (under the stairs), feed the main TV and also the rest of the house via the TV distibution system in the loft. An IP based solution is the next step on from this.

Day to day it's great having all our moves in one place, I watch more moves because of it, I sit down to have my meal and if there is nothing on TV just select a film I haven't seen in a while, easy

Cheers

Cris.