In recent years the coverage and convenience of streaming services has improved hugely, but I still have terabytes of DVDs backed up which I'd love to explore and consume just as easily.<p>What are you using to store and enjoy your own movie collection?
I tend to use a lot of randomization for this.<p>The LAN has a cron job that rebuilds two m3u playlists every 45 minutes. One is for low-bandwidth video streaming and one is for higher-bandwidth (so you can pick whatever's more appropriate depending on location on the property / distance from wifi).<p>Locally where other collections are available, I usually have keystrokes bound to create a given playlist on the spot and open the playlist in a media player.<p>As an example I use this idiom a lot for creating things like m3u playlists:<p>find . -name "*.format" | shuf | head -n 150<p>This usually gets me a nice shuffled list of things to watch. I open up 3-9 windows at work and lower the volume of all but whatever one I'm watching. And whatever I'm watching usually needs to be something I've watched before, so I can focus on my work and also take advantage of the energy effect from the video that's playing.<p>I also do this shuffling thing with books, comics, long-form MP3 tracks like relaxation, lectures, etc. They each have a button in the xfce panel. Aaand I really wish I could do something similar with streaming services and my various cloud book collections...
A Mac Mini 2011 I use as a file server (SMB) + Infuse on everything (iPad, Mac, Apple TV). Infuse scans the file and pull its metadata from IMDB or something. I don't watch much, but having the same experience everywhere is a nice touch – I use Plex for music and it's not as smooth.