Hi there collectors, with the last vhs recorder being produced in 2014 and the death of dvd as a medium on the edge, i thought it might be interresting to have a more technical thread about how to organize and presaving all of your treasures propably. To many of you, these infos might not be new, but maybe new collectors are "lost" and seek for guidance. I started converting my self recorded vhs matches to dvd around 2006 with a panasonic hdd/vhs/dvd recorder, which produced better output than earlier video converters like canopus. i am quite satisfied with the result, however i am almost afraid of thowing the tapes away, hoping for better conversion tools in the future. so they are in my cellar. I always thought DVDs are a mess. they have this menu structure, that sometimes is corrupt and you cannot access the video files anymore. You can also never be sure, if you can access the matches in 10 years or if your cheap chinese dvd-rw-disk will work. also backuping is a mess. Consequently, i started to buy lots of (than expensive) external hdd drives. At that days, 500-1000 GB was standard. As a DVD has around 4 GB, you can sum up to 250 matches at one of these bigger drives. I was satisfied just for storing, but i was missing the "cinema feeling" somehow. all was in windows explorer folders. I didn't like the windows media center either as it was a strict format of displaying my treasures. A NAS (Windows Home Server 2011), which i bought around 2013 helped organising the backup between in-NAS-HDDs and external HDDs, but the problem of no-visualization was still valid. then, around 2014, i was looking for a nicer solution. I considered buying a home media server, maybe setting it up myself. Damn the prices (around 700 €) were high, and i was afraid of a second server in my living room, where the NAS was already running creating a lower noise. Then i came across a very easy and cheap solution which i can only recommend nowadays: I have always liked the xbmc (xbox media center) as it was smooth and customizable and was looking mainly as i would do it, if i do it myself. it has all this features like movie poster download from internet and you can organize you music as well of tv series of photos. that should be my standard, i was asserting. Do you know Kodi? it is the open source development based on xmbc, which is no longer maintained by microsoft. Today if can be run on a very small computer, the size of a credit card (bit a bit thicker) that makes no sound at all. It is called Raspberry Pi and costs you around 80 €. It has no vent and is producing zero noise. The hardware has been found. I agree, the setting up is a bit of a mess, but there are many tutorials on the internet. the great thing is, that - with a little tweaks - it plays all the formats. mkv, mpeg (=vob), ts and so on. if you have a football dvd on your hdd, it can display the menu and do continuous play of all vob-files by itself. it has also modification options like deinterlacing, making a 80es match look like from the 2000's. Fascinating. So the kodi on my rasperry pi has access to my nas now and can display all the terabytes of football videos, that i recorded myself over the last 3 decades. my dream of a young collecter has became true. All my recordings, accessible at TV, from tablet, laptop of even my mobile phone (kodi app). I started making nice menues for my "football" section which is on the same root menue as movies, music and photos. i drew icons myself and collected pics for each match, to make the cinematic feeling complete.