Why I don't use DVDs or CDs anymore.
I like TV, film and music, a lot. I started recording films on VHS in 1983 and soon had an impressive collection. I also bought a lot of film and TV series on VHS and then a few years later I bought them all again on DVD. Fast forward a few years and I'm co-habiting, my DVD collection doubling over the space of a weekend. We had over 300 films on DVD and we were still buying more. It was getting out of hand and we were getting short on space and annoyed with the clutter.
A few years later I decided to bite the bullet and purchased a Pinnacle Showcentre on a friends recommendation. This was the future as far as I was concerned. There were no discs to lose or damage and it was just cool having everything there at my fingertips. I used it almost every day and had most of my films stored as disc images on an old pc that I re-purposed as a server. I added additional hard drives as and when I needed them and kept adding more and more films to it. We no longer wasted an hour crawling round on the floor in front of the DVD cupboard, or pulling boxes of DVD's out from under the bed every time we wanted to watch a film. All of our films were accessible with a simple remote control and it was so convenient that I could never imagine going back to discs. Around this time, HD flat screen TV's started to become more affordable and I wanted one but I also wanted better picture quality than the Showcentre could provide. So, I gave my great big hulking 32" CRT TV to a family member and installed my new Sony 32" LCD.
My next purchase was an Xbox 360 (with external HD-DVD drive) and I started to replace my favourite films in HD. However, I didn't get very far as HD-DVD was made obsolete (wrong choice I know!) but at least it gave me a taste for HD content. I looked at going down the conventional route and upgrading from Sky+ to Sky HD, but the subscription costs in my opinion were too high to justify it and besides I wanted to eliminate the number of set-top boxes that I had in the living room. I decided to go with a Media Centre PC so that I could still watch all my films from the server, and by adding some HD tuner cards, I could replace my 40Gb Sky+ box and expand the storage as necessary. With my recorded TV and films stored on a server, multi-room was a nice free aside, top gear in HD downstairs for me, whilst some girlie tat is played upstairs by my other half.
