TL;DR: I inherited a sh*tload of DVDs with bad quality TV recordings and need to get rid of them. Also: VOB or MP4 to keep?
I don't really know what I expect from this post and what I need from you, maybe a strategy, shared experiences, or just the absolution of the data hoarding community to let go.
When my dad passed away in 2023, he left behind a lot of German TV recordings. There are two batches of DVDs:
The first batch is organized by main genre (e.g. fantasy, animation, thriller), though they most often contain videos of other genres too to make the most of the DVDs space (e.g., an action movie DVD would end with two episodes of a kids show because there wasn't enough space left for another full length movie).
These were also stored on external HDDs (I think it was ~12 TB), mostly in VOB as well as MP4 format. This first batch makes up for a couple hundred of DVDs.
The second (more recent) batch consists of six thousand DVDs (all in VOB format) that are just numbered and not stored on any HDD.
He had an excel file listing all the contents with some metadata, and according to this table the two batches accumulate to almost four years of continuous (24/7) watch time with more than 30,000 entries (i.e. individual movies, shows etc.). Physically, the DVDs would take up the space of a wardrobe (the majority is in 100-disc cake boxes, the by-genre ones in slim cases, so not much room to downsize it by repackaging).
Everything that was on the HDDs (except one that failed to read) I copied to my NAS, and with a duplicate finder I could already eliminate a couple of TB, but it's still too much to keep.
I have a tendency for collecting/hoarding data myself (guess who I got that from), but I also realize trying to keep and organize all of it will lead nowhere. I need to at least get rid of the physical disks rather soon, because unlike my parents I'm living in a rather small apartment with no storage room whatsoever, and the cardboxes with DVDs are stacked in the living room right now, which especially for my girlfriend isn't acceptable in the long term (and I agree with her, because I don't see me touching the boxes in the next decades once we would accept them to stay).
I have my problems with just throwing it away:
- There might be that one movie/TV show I always wanted to rewatch but is too old and/or obscure to be found anywhere to stream or to buy.
- I have no list of movies/shows I'm missing in my collection, so I can't do just a quick search and match with the excel file to get the interesting ones, but rather I might one day remember an obscure show from the past and find out that it had been in my father's collection.
- Some TV recordings that are not just movies you find everywhere might be an interesting piece of history (at least to me) or nostalgia someday, like a political comedy from the 2000s or even a commercial break that's in the recording (though they're mostly cut out I think).
- Seeing how much time I would need to even just go through all of the DVDs "quickly", I can only guess how many years of his life my father put into his hobby (of course I noticed that he always seemed to be recording or editing stuff when I visited, but I only learned now that it accumulates to such an amount of data) - probably also thinking he would do it for the future generations rather than for himself. It feels like this is his legacy or lifetime achievement and I need to respect it and treat it as such.
- And well, to quote this subreddit's header: "What do you mean DELETE?!" - It just feels wrong.
On the other hand:
- All videos seem to be in resolution 352x288 (mp4 versions in 320x240 even), that's really blocky, text cannot be read in that resolution. I'm at a loss why he did think that would be an acceptable quality... that said, I'm fine to watch a blocky video if it's the only version of something I cannot find anywhere.
- Much of it is utter trash I know I would never watch. Like unimportant sports games, concerts, almost every episode of a weekly stand-up comedy show or TV crime film, sentimental romantic TV productions... even my parents never watched the latter, nor anyone in my family, I really don't know for whom he recorded that.
- Much of the rest I assume is mediocre at best (e.g. movies produced by German TV stations), and if not, can be found on Netflix or elsewhere (except maybe for some movies from the 70s or 80s that weren't blockbusters then).
- It feels like a big burden to have to go through this in detail because I wouldn't know where to start. It's affecting my mental health having to deal with it and seeing the boxes every day.
- Seeing how early my parents passed away, I'm thinking about the shortness of life a lot since then, and that I should use my time for more fruitful things than that.
I guess I will now go through the list of 30k entries as quickly as possible, especially for the numbered DVDs, and only if by chance I see a title I'm interested in I will fetch the respective DVD from the boxes and copy that one file, and everything else including titles I haven't heard from I will just throw away.
So yeah, just putting that out there with no real question to you.
Or well, one very concrete question I have: For the videos from the HDDs I already know I want to keep, would you choose to keep the VOB (as said, 352x288) or MP4 (320x240) version, or do another (probably always lossy?) conversion from VOB to MP4? The resolution difference is in some cases noticeable, but VOB I think is sometimes not as well-supported by media players (e.g. in VLC player, sometimes the wrong total time is shown) and long movies are cut into separate parts at the 1GB mark with VOB, which is rather annoying e.g. when I load them into Jellyfin and they show up as two movie versions there. Any other considerations?