I have a lot of DVD's. Okay, a lot isn't really the best way of saying it. I have just over 800 of them. A lot of that came when Suncoast Video shut down and I decided to take advantage of it to pick up a bunch of cheap DVD's.

Now, the problem with 800+ DVD's is that it takes up way too much room. At one point, I had two-meter bookshelves across the entire teleivision room. I was looking at it one day and decided that it was rather... egoistical of me to present them that way, so I tried to find a different approach.

A friend of mine used those 200+ CD booklets, which I tried for a while. However, I lost a couple DVD's because I watch so many of them so often that they were getting scratched with the constant in and out. So, the next approach was the slim-line CD cases. They were tiny, you can get about 300 of them in about a meter of space, no more than 1.1 dm in height. Most importantly, they had held the DVD away from the edges so they didn't get scratched.

Of course, the major drawback of transplanting 800+ DVD is that you have to either ignore the covers, cut up the DVD covers (which is kind of one way), or find another way of showing information. Now, many DVD's have useful covers but just as many are bright and shiny, and almost impossible to identify unless you read the 6 point font along the inner ring.

I decided that I needed to keep track of my collection anyways. Mainly to make it easier to find the DVD I'm looking for. I'm using Tellico for that, which leads back to my prior comment that even though I'm mostly Gnome, this KDE application is probably one of the best ones I've ever used. Tellico has an XML export which I created a XSL-FO stylesheet that formats it quite nicely into the exact (mostly exact) shape for a consistent display of information.

Now, there is a fair amount of white space in these, but the size of the descriptions is pretty varied and it covers basically the information I need. The most important part of the cover is the upper right. The four letters (and numbers underneath) are to make it easier to sort them. I've never been really good at sorting letters, but the numbers work out very well for trying to arrange all of them quickly.