SPEND MORE TIME WATCHING THAT DVD THAN LOOKING FOR IT.
My uncle, Aubrey Fleming, has more than 1200 DVD’s. I have about 400 myself. When we first began collecting DVD’s, he and I devised a way to quickly locate any DVD in less than 30 seconds.

First, he had shelves built (I bought racks) so that each DVD can be stacked side by side and not stacked on top of each other. Second, we number each DVD as we buy them and enter the TITLE, ACTOR, GENRE, and the SEQUENTIAL NUMBER we assigned to it into an Excel spreadsheet (I use an Access database). Now our collections can be printed out in alphabetical order of the movie title (or actor, or genre, or number) along with the shelf/rack location of it. Now we can just look at our list in alphabetical order, find the title and go to the DVD number in less than 30 seconds.

Want to take things one step further? I have a 300 Plus 1 carousal DVD player. The first 300 of my DVD’s are already loaded so when I find the DVD number on my list I just have the carousal automatically load the DVD. Any DVD numbered above 300 gets manually loaded into the extra slot for viewing and returned to the shelf when the movie is done. Also, I load my list into my PALM PDA (Aubrey prints his out) so that when we go to the store we have it with us and avoid buying duplicate movies.

PS We also always look for the best sale price and buy newly released DVD’s on DVD Tuesday at Wal-Mart, Best Buy and other locations. Other good deals are 2 movies for $20.00 or less.