15 July 2008: I write Horie Yui, but my heart says Yui Horie: Part Two (not about Love Hina)
I am through with optical media. Well, not exactly. However, I am ripping all my DVDs and CDs to hard drives. I'm not even taking the time to re-encode them or cut unwanted language tracks; I'm copying exact ISOs. The reason is because while storage space for optical media continues to improve, reductions to spin-up and seek times remain marginal at best. You're crazy if you think I want to manually load discs and then wait for the optical drive to reach a playable state.
I had the idea to construct a DVD TiVO years ago, but it wasn't cost effective at the time. I'm still doing this manually, but I know others have had the same idea and written various scripts to automate much of the procedure. I don't know if anyone has created a fully-automated file server/media center to do this yet, but he's surely a thousandaire for his efforts.
Of course, I'm still at square one with regard to Blu-ray, though. Damn you optical media! Play more faster!
