Finally, a good eight years after my divorce, when I threw all my DVDs into four large moving boxes, I've just this month gotten around to converting them to image files...that is, after teaching myself the ins and outs of converting them, as I lamented last month about DVDs no longer being a "thing".
Made some really good progress, burned an entire moving box down in the past two weeks. Still have three to go, but overall - not a bad chunk to start.
Not everything going as smoothly as I hoped.
A few DVDs in my collection came with proprietary viewing software I either couldn't get around, or didn't feel like fighting for it. The Tron 20th Anniversary set was one, came with something called "Inter Active Player", and you had to accept the software loaded on your computer to watch the damn thing. Turns out, this was a brief fad companies flirted with back in the day, when digital media was still in its infancy. Pffftt - NEXT.
"The Descent" and the bonus disc for "Herbert West, Re-Animator" both gave me a weird vibe; they seemed to convert just fine, but refused to play. The Herbert West one was particularly strange, because the movie DVD itself ripped and played no hiccups. The bonus/extras disc is fighting me tooth and nail. The same error comes up for The Descent as well, I might just rip them both to straight-up MP4 files and be done with it.
The emotional aspect is a different matter entirely.
Like my book collection, these DVDs were old friends of mine. John Carpenter's "The Thing" was simply converted from Laserdisc to DVD, and it really shows in the menu formatting of the time. That was the first DVD I ever bought. I remember, before Anchor Bay studios released George Romero's Dawn of the Dead five disc ultimate edition, there was a guy who had ripped a fuzzy VHS copy to DVD in the late 90's, and was hawking it on Ebay for $500 apiece.
He got some takers, too. I was *almost* one of them.
My Mystery Science Theater collection got me through a lot of my spinal trauma, as did Monty Python. All my eclectic horror/sci-fi stuff, David Cronenberg's "Rabid", Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Boris Karloff's Thriller series, Ray Bradbury Theater collection, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Bowery at Midnight...and let us not forget the King of Monsters. I came close to real tears when I ripped my Godzilla collection to digital.
Getting rid of the physical DVDs almost feels like being divorced all over again, every time I throw another one on the pile. I amassed this collection during my marriage, and each one brings back memories of where we were in our relationship at the time I got them. I feel like, for 20 years of marriage, I should have something more to show for it than my prized Hammer Horror box set.
Then again, it could also be that I'm just a rank sentimentalist who puts too much emotional investment in things, and should really move the hell on, like the rest of the world has.
I haven't ruled that out.
No comments:
Post a Comment