The Project: Part Two

I was going to post on Friday because it was a milestone - at 27 weeks I was exactly 13 weeks from my due date but because it was the 16th I was also exactly 3 months from the due date. Yay! That still sounds like forever though... But I was too tired to post. Like body aching exhaustion.

Anyway, back to the VHS copying debacle. I mean project. No, what I really mean is "endeavor guaranteed to eliminate my sanity".

I am two weeks in and am (1) not that close to finishing, (2) somewhat regretting embarking on the "project" and (3) bound and determined to finish even if it kills me or my sanity. I will win dammit!

Two weeks ago my parents brought over their combo dvd/vcr when they came for Easter. Hubby and I had bought a jumbo pack of blank DVDs and I was all excited to get started. Oh I was so naive back in those days. *sigh*

I put in the first VHS tape and blank DVD. As I was starting with the shortest movies I believe it was "Austin.Powers.and.the.Spy.Who.Shagged.Me". An essential addition to any serious collection. It copied beautifully and I felt I was on my way!

The next movie I put in abruptly stopped copying right away. A message then appeared that informed me that it could not copy copyrighted material. "Hmm," I thought, "the last one must have been copyrighted too though right?" So I put in another and had the same thing happen. I panicked. The first one must have been a fluke. How was I going to follow through with getting rid of these bulky VHS tapes if I didn't have copies of such precious titles as "The Water.boy"?!

So I did what any normal person would do. I went straight to google. After extensive googling and many, many hours of wasted time research, I learned several things: (1) Some, but not all, commercial VHS tapes were protected with something called macro.vision. Marcro.vision and I are not friends. (2) If you are able to make a copy of a VHS tape lacking macro.vision you are legally able to do so as long as it is for "archiving purposes" and you keep the original (or so says some guy on the interwebs) (3) I could defeat macro.vision by buying an expensive piece of equipment of questionable legality.

This information left me few good options. So I decided I would go through each movie and determine which ones I could copy. The ones I couldn't copy I could get rid of, keep, or replace with new DVDs. The ones I could copy I could safely get rid of, er I mean keep "for archiving purposes". Ahem.

All told it looked like I was going to be able to copy about 60-65% of my movies. Not too bad. We would be saying goodbye to such illustrious titles as "Night.at.the.Roxbury" and "The.Ladies.Man". DARN IT, sorry hubby (heh heh). But in all seriousness I was losing two of my faves, Mall.Rats and Billy.Madison (I mentioned I collected these in high school and college, right? As in 10 or more years ago).

So I started up again. Things were going fine until we started having problems with some movies taking FOREVER to copy. Like we'd start it at night and come back the next day after work and it still wouldn't be done. I'm talking about you Dirty.Dancing you Dirty SOB. We would manually stop the copying and sometimes you'd be lucky and you only missed part of the credits but often you missed the last 5-10 minutes. You can't watch Dirty.Dancing and get to the part where Johnny pulls Baby up on stage and then not see them do the lift! That is the most important part! That and when he mouths part of the words to "The.Time.of.My.Life" to her. I don't care if I have seen this movie 500,000 times. When and if I ever watch it again I will need to see that part! Anyway, we suspect this problem has to do with the number of chapters the VHS tape tells the DVD to make. It happened in Top.Gun too. And we tried Dirty.Dancing three different times, all with the same results. I had told hubby to stop trying that one and we could do it last and then it could take 8 months to copy if it wanted to. But he was persistent.

As of now, two weeks into it, I think we have about 20 movies copied with about 15-20 to go. And all the longest ones are left. At this pace we may be able to train the baby to copy the last few.

On a happier note, while we were out shopping this weekend I was able to replace Billy.Madison for $7.50. I also found Dirty.Dancing for $7.50, showed it to my husband and asked, "Is it worth it." He emphatically answered, "Yes!" So that battle is over.

We were also able to buy storage binders for our CDs and get them and their liner notes nicely filed away. The empty CD cases are now in a box waiting for word from our city's recycling program as to whether they are recyclable. God I hope so.

Oh, and I had to keep all the cases for my Foo.Fighters cds. I told hubby he could get rid of those when he pried them from my cold, dead hands.

All this to clear five boxes out of the house. Sheesh.