Movie Night – Tell us those must see movies and TV shows

January 7, 2012 by

Now that the wine debate is settled, it is time to think about entertainment. Most folks dream of sailing off over the horizon and reading all the great novels of the last 3 centuries.  I am honest with myself – that will not happen.   I watch way too much TV while being a landlubber and can not go cold turkey.   To my credit, I did not buy the optional satellite TV that the boat builder offers.    Instead I am creating a large movie and TV library.   What are your desert island movies?   Please tell me so I can add them to the list.  Again space and weight are a concern but technology has come to the rescue.   No need to pack my Star Wars collection. Instead, I just use a program called Handbrake that converts my legal DVD into a file on my computer.   CODEC (type of video files) are a complete confusion but after a bit of tinkering you can have all your movies in a small space and leave the disks behind.

So how did we build our list?   Not very scientific but found a NY Times list of 1,000 movies and crossed off the ones we have seen too many times already and skipped the ones that we missed in the theatre on purpose.   The process for TV shows is similar but I left less of the editorial call with the web and selected stuff we like that we have not watched.   An exception was made for Law and Order.   We have seen it but a second dose will be great on rainy days.   Did you know there are 20 seasons, not including the 3 spin offs?

Finally, documentaries are going to be great prep for visiting new lands.   Brazilian and Argentinian videos are my first focus but the field is wide open! Globe Trekker shows are a personal favorite.   The boat probably will not make it to land locked or polar region countries so Frozen Planet and Mongolia are off the list.

So where do we watch these videos?   We have a salon TV but for nice nights out at anchorage we are going to use a projector and a large screen hung by the bow.   The screen will be hung on the front of the boat and we can relax on the trampoline watching that night’s movie.  The Furuno TZ touch screens can play video from the Fusion 700 stereo from an installed iPod.  Oh, did I mention the TV in the master bedroom?
A proper sized collection of videos for a multi year trip will take up over 5 terabytes of space.   We will also have tons of our own photos and videos.   So how do we store all of this in the marine environment?   This box to the right has plenty of disk space and will work fast with the onboard laptops.   But more on the computer set up for Two Fish in the technology section.

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