When you have a large collection and you want to see a particular title, trying to find the movie, load it on the Blu-ray player and having to sit through endless trailers and dull menus before the movie starts, can kill the urge to watch it. For me, the only way for me to enjoy a movie I am in the mood for, is when I have it at my fingertips. This is the reason why, for years I have been dreaming of digitizing my collection.

When I met Raphael Tabutin at ISE last year and he introduced me to the Zappiti server I knew right away that that is exactly what I needed. The timing was also right; I was building a theater for my new home in Athens and I had just moved my collection to Greece. The Zappiti server would add to the theater what every collector needs: fulfilment at his fingertips. But how do you start digitizing so many tiles without becoming overwhelmed? Well, the answer for me was to take a deep breath, make peace with the fact that I will be spending a long time in front of the server and then start the process, one title at a time.

I was born to catalogue things. Organizing my collection of videos with Zappiti has been fulfilling and fun. The process has allowed me to “manipulate” the data by making certain edits,  such as making sure the selection is not a movie with the same title but from another year, changing the disc’s cover art with the original poster of the movie, entering the correct aspect ratio, etc. More importantly the process has allowed me to rediscover movies I did not even remember having in my collection. After playing with the server every day, I have a hard time stopping to do anything else. But that’s the obsessive nature of collectors. That’s me….

 

Theo Kalomirakis