DVD Changer

A week ago, Jay brought up the topic of movies on demand in his house. He was starting to look hard at going the DVD-to-hard drive route, when he ran across this awesome Media Center setup from Sony. That’d be a fantastic solution if I were willing to pay that much for it. Unfortunately I’m not.

Int he past I’ve made several attempts at having a computer in our living room hooked up to our tv. At one point we had been using MythTV for a year or more. It was a bit clunky but worked. But then we got an HD tv and started renting a dual tuner HD DVR from our cable company and disbanded the Myth box. Several months after that, my parents gave me their unused Tivo so I setup Galleon to allow us to play our MP3 collection with it. I think we’ve used it once. And now that my PC is in the next room with a decent set of speakers, I see us using it even less than once in the future. Shrug, I’ve tried.

But now the thought of on-demand movies… We have a lot of DVDs but hardly ever watch them because we’re…ahem.. too lazy to get them off the shelf I suppose. Instead, we often find ourselves watching the same movies we own on TV – with the commercials and crappy picture. On-demand would be very helpful. However, I don’t like the idea of (these overlap, don’t complain) 1) building a computer to drive it, 2) paying for the computer to drive it, 3) have the annoyance of MythTV or the cost of Media Center. In short, I don’t want a computer in my living room running it all. I’ve tried it and I find it just too annoying.
So today I think we solved it by purchasing Sony’s 400 Disc DVD Changer. It took a while to get configured with all of our movies, but it’s now up and running. All 200+ of our DVDs are now just moments away for a lot less money, time, and annoyance than a PC.