We feel kind of giddy about this one, how we do this particular tech. We don’t usually share it. It’s our secret, our claim, because it is basically what makes us, Us.
Basically, we have our entire movie library available to watch, all the time, any at time, any where in the world.
(imagine what that is for a second. yes. we have that. and we hacked it ourselves).
We have always been obsessed with watching movies. If we have something on, it’s usually a movie. Jeffrey has it on when he is working, he likes the background noise, the kids like to have a movie on rather than a tv show if they are working on something. if they're looking for background noise, or something to do together, it's a movie.
We used to buy 100s of movies. DVDS were everywhere. At one point, we owned two 400 DVD changers that we put a good chunk of our movies into so that we could access them without having to find the case, put it into the player and yada yada yada.
It literally chewed up DVDs like it was snack time.
We had to stop that.
But we were still annoyed by the stacks of DVDs, kids moving them around, getting scratched and damaged, carting them all over the place when someone wanted to be in this room or the basement or in the car.
So we took the time to digitize all of our movies and put them onto a server that we could access anywhere in our home.
It has evolved into this much more elaborate system today, where we can access it from any room in our house, from any of our devices, even while we are traveling away from home.
The Movie Server is housed on an old Apple Mac Mini computer that we converted to a server. If you have read our other This is how we Tech posts, you will know that we have hacked all of our tech to work for us.
We literally have any of the movies that we own at our finger tips from anywhere in the world.
We still rent movies, we still buy them from iTunes, but we never ever watch them on Demand. We never ever watch them on regular tv ( we don’t do regular tv, link to post).
AppleTV
As I've mentioned in our other How we do Tech posts, we are obsessed and tied to our AppleTVs. They are the central hub of our entertainment world. And through this device we access our movie server on our local TVs.
The AppleTV access to the movie server allows us to look at our movies in a few different listings: By genre(which is usually dictated by jeffrey when he is coding the digital copy), when it was added, if it has been watched and of course, an alphabetical listing. There is no search feature, so if we know the name of the movie we must scroll through the long list of the movies.
Plex
This is a second application to access the movie server. This provides more options for how we find the movies we are looking for. It allows us to actually search the data. We can search by genre, date, era, title, an actor, a series, etc. this application also will recommend other things you might want to watch based on the actor, or the genre of the movie your are watching. it also shows us the history of what we have watched recently.
Plex also has a playlist feature that we've really taken advantage of. we've created playlists for a lot of our movies in this application, like the entire Harry Potter series in order, Star Wars, James Bond, all of the Disney animated movies of all time (at least the ones that we own).
So then you might be wondering what the heck we actually watch with all of those movies?
I'd say that the action/adventure category is our favorite. all of the Marvel movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbits, James Bond (all of them), Star Trek, anything Disney, especially animated ones, Shrek, ....
I am a sucker for some of our old favorites like Dave, The American President, Sabrina, all of the Ocean's movies
Jeffrey loves Sci Fi, and so does Jack. They always go for those Hunt for Red Octobers and stuff like that.
Arianna loves Studio Ghibli and horror movies. And the old standby classics as well.
Halle is a Rom Com fan. She loves Nicholas Sparks.
We've actually gone through on a few occasions and deleted things from our collection. Things that we bought and then only watched once. man, have we learned our lesson here. we buy so much less than we used to! And then there are the things that we used to have on the server because the kids were little, like older Scooby doo episodes and other things like that. There is still a TON of kids stuff on here though, because we are Disney and Animation junkies.
We are literally obsessed. We have set up our entertainment world around our movie server.
I mean, imagine, having all of your kids' disney and animated movies at your fingertips on your movie server, where you can access them at any time, anywhere, on any device! Yes. we have that technology and we hacked it ourselves.
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