Movies

The Perils of Owning Multiple 1TB Hard-drives

So there is an inordinately high number of movies on my hard drives. Most of them were downloaded over the last year, some from hearing a passing mention on some blog, others based on suggestions from friends, and yet others because of the primal urge to own 27 Gigs of Stephen Chow movies. They stay arranged in a folder called – duh – “movies”, and loosely grouped under categorical sub-folders called Anime, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and H.  Yes, “H” – which used to be called “Hollywood”, until I downloaded a Harry Potter blu-ray rip collection and found out that the filenames were long enough for the subtitles to not extract themselves into the location I wanted them to be in, and only after I removed “ollywood” did I manage to get things done the way I wanted them.

The sad thing is that there is hardly time to watch movies nowadays – I seem to have run out of free time, period. (The blog has not been updated in 6 months. You need more proof?) Dinnertime is about the only portion of the day I get any time to indulge in anything, and a TV episode beats a full-length movie every time. On top of it all, the obvious fail-points about a list of downloaded MKV/AVI/m4a rips: after a point of time, the names tend to blur against each other as the numbers increase. Until you forget that Mary and Max was the claymation movie and Lars and The Real Girl was the story of the blow-up doll, and most of the names are just….names. When I want to watch something, I would be like – “what the hell is this movie all about? When did I download this? Wait, did I download this at all or just copy it in some mass dump from someone else’s drive?”  At times, I even took to deleting the movies I was sure I would not watch. I mean, really, The Condemned?

The other problem is that of choice. You know how it is – you want to watch an action movie or whatever, and the only ones you want to see are the ones you’ve seen already. Or the one you want to see is in a DVD and that’s in the wardrobe and you’re too lazy to walk over and find it. (Ironic, because that was the reason I stopped buying DVDs in the first place.) The more the days pass, it becomes harder to justify why exactly I keep the movies still on the drive.

Anyway, I have arrived at ( what I think ) is a sane conclusion to this mess. I have moved everything into two piles – “seen” and “unseen”. The unseen folder will be the one I hit everytime I want to watch something. By December, if there are still movies in that folder, I will delete the lot. I figure that means there is some element of urgency to it, a bit of self-encouragement, for me to watch things that I have not seen yet.

On a side-note, I seem to be headed towards an ailment called NoMoreDownloaditis, caused by over-saturation of media.

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5 thoughts on “The Perils of Owning Multiple 1TB Hard-drives

  1. sajith says:

    I know what you’re talking about. Boxee’s queue feature seems to solve this problem to some extent for me. Only, I’m just too lazy to reach for the external hard disk.

  2. Ah! Was in a similar position for a long time until providence struck….. The hard drive of unwatched films went kaput. It was liberating to say the least…

  3. Korean movie anyone? says:

    Experience has taught me that the best way to watch movies you haven’t seen yet (and would probably never even see if it was your choice) is to attend movie nights. And never suggest a movie of your own. Works like a charm.

  4. Santosh says:

    Wow. I bet I don’t have a fifth of the collection you have, and I’ve already got a bad case of NoMoreDownloaditis… although this might have something to do with the fact that I stick to Hollywood and Brit cinema, for the most part.

  5. azazel says:

    Miss your posts to say the least.

    The “seen/unseen” solution is something I was thinking of applying too.. I’ve watched only a third of the movies I have sitting on DVDs/Drives/PC..

    We simply need more time :)

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