DVD Factory Ltd

One of the limitations that the missus and I put on Gerry and Gordon is the amount of time that they can watch TV. Actually, they don't even get to watch TV but rather, we have a stack of kid friendly DVDs that they are allowed to watch for limited periods of time during the day. The problem with this approach is that kids are not particularly good at looking after DVDs and you can expect your nice new DVDs to get scratched, stepped on, bent and thrown around with reckless abandon.

In my dad's day, you would have to just suck it up and spend a ton of money on DVDs (or rather, VHS?) while bringing out the cane to teach those damn kids a lesson about respecting property. Damn kids today are spoilt rotten anyway and could do with a little thrashing ... sorry, where was I?

Oh yes - DVDs.

Luckily, with the wonders of modern technology, I've gotten around this issue by making a backup of the DVD and then giving the backup to the kids while the original DVD goes to a safe location. Anytime a DVD gets too beat up and is no longer playable, I simply burn another DVD and the kids are back in business. As you can imagine, spending less money makes me a happy pappy!

After running this system for a while, I recently realised that there is a downside to this approach. As the backup DVD is simply the DVD+R plus the name of the DVD written on the face, its hard for the kids to find the right DVD that they want to watch. Basically, all they see is a stack of dull looking DVDs with lots of words on them. We needed a way to make it easy for the kids to find their favourite DVD.

Cue the DVD label. Over the weekend, I went out and bought a stack of DVD labels. Coupled with a quick online image search, I've been able to print out labels with different graphics for the different DVDs and I have to admit - the results have been pretty spectacular. Granted, you can tell that they aren't original DVDs as the graphic doesn't always line up perfectly with the disc but at first glance, they look pretty authentic (particularly to kids).

Or another way of looking at it - I now have all the tools to start my own pirate DVD factory...