DVD library

This page lists my library of 870 movies on DVDs burned from recordings of digital broadcasts. It does not include my far more modest collection of commercial DVDs. This library contains a lot of material: over two years at one movie per day, or about 54 days of nonstop film.

Sources

I recorded this material in 2011 to 2014, mostly from TCM. TCM shows beautiful prints at the correct aspect ratio without commercial interruption. Thank heavens for TCM! A few recordings are from Retroplex (part of Starz). Retroplex shows movies without commercial interruption, but its SD feed crops widescreen movies to 4x3.

Technical

I recorded SD broadcasts, not HD, so all the DVDs are 4x3 rather than 16x9. The quality of old 4x3 movies (mostly b+w) is excellent. More recent widescreen movies (mostly color) are letterboxed in TCM SD broadcasts, so the 4x3 DVDs have significantly poorer image quality than TCM's 16x9 HD broadcasts. A few recordings play correctly as .wtv under Windows Media Center but have bad audio sync (audio preceding video) on the burned DVD, presumably due to a Windows Media Center bug. TCM's clock is not synchronized with network time servers, so their programming always begins early. I start my recordings 2 minutes before the scheduled time, but still occasionally miss a few opening seconds.

Click on a column heading below to sort the list accordingly. Click on a title, director, or star entry to search in IMDB. Enter a search string (e.g., "Ford", "Bogart", "1939", "silent") below to filter the output.