What do I do with all these recorded DVDs?

Back in 1997 I got my first VCR, a Matsui, and started recording and collecting films, mostly from TV. In September that year I was doing Work Experience at the Oldham Evening Chronicle, where I happened to stumble on a load of Empire magazines that had been left in a waste paper basket. I rescued them and read them all. One of these magazines included a feature on film collectors, some very heavily-obsessed movie nerds who lived and breathed films. I wasn't as intense as they were, but I'd already amassed a fair few films, 2 or 3 per tape, recorded in Long Play. I decided, at that point, that I was film collector.

In 2006 I bought a DVD recorder, a Phillips DVD-R 3305, with the intention of transferring all of my films onto DVD. By this point I had about 300 videos, each with at least 2 films per tape. This was going to take a while, but it would, I assumed, save my collection from erosion. I recorded one and checked that this was working fine, which it was. But, the way this recorder worked is, once you've recorded something onto DVD+R, you needed to 'finalise' the disc to make it playable on other DVD players. This 'finalising' process also stopped you from further recording onto the disc.

I'd recorded hundreds of films onto DVD before deciding to finalise a single one of them. In hindsight this was a dumb move. After finalising each disc I noticed that the scanning function no longer worked- I could no longer scan forward through any of the finalised discs: not on the 3305 nor on my computer's DVD drive. In fact, playing the discs on anything other than the 3305 seemed impossible, although I did manage to get a couple of them onto Youtube.

The fact that I could upload a couple to Youtube implies that the content is still stored on these discs, hundreds of feature films, many of which you'd know, many you wouldn't. There's also hundreds more short films, live action and animated, bunched together on discs. They are on there, but they aren't particularly viewable. Hence, having moved out I've hung onto all of them. But what do I do with them? Most I can't put onto Youtube without receiving another copyright strike (an upload of Oldham Live, a local festival featuring a performance from Sweet Female Attitude, was taken down resulting in that penalty. How is that fair?!) and my hard drive is nowhere near big enough to store them all.

So for now a lot of these discs are stored under my bed as they were before the move. What do I do with them? It seems a waste to bin them after all that time and money spent cultivating the collection. I might get away with uploading the short films to Youtube: these were originally recorded from showcase TV programmes in the wee hours of the morning, in programmes like Shooting Gallery, Dope Sheet and Short and Curlies. But uploading my own cut-for-TV version of Terminator 2: Judgement Day is only going to result in a strike or the removal of my whole Youtube channel.

So what should I do? Any videographers want to throw their 2 pennies in? Comment below or tweet me.