Has anyone gotten the new Lord Of The Rings collector's edition yet? The one with the bookends and whatnot? Is it worth the $59 or so? I heard that the movie is split over 2 DVDs and you have to get up and switch it. Is this true? Thanks...

It's true with the other extended edition (the 4-DVD set w/o the bookends) as well. I'd suggest that you get that one unless you're really interested in the bookends. It has the same DVDs, minus the National Geographic special.

You do have to get up and switch it. Most of empeg was round my house earlier this week to take advantage of my new plasma to watch it - and Rob cooked an excellent chilli in a huge vat in order to feed everyone.

The bit with the octopus-type thing coming out of the water still made me jump, but that could also have been down to the subwoofer John bought along

Hugo

You do have to get up and switch it.

Is that so rare? A third of my DVD collection has the feature split over two discs.

Peter

PS. OK, so my DVD collection is only six films . The other one that's split over two discs is Lawrence of Arabia.

in answer to your question, it is excelent. definatly worth the $25 (@ best buy) for the "regular" special extended edition (without the bookends, national geographic dvd, etc.) the added parts really round out the movie. im a big fan of the books. while i thought the theatrical release was acceptable, i didn't love the movie untill i saw the extended version. yes you have to change the discs but i feel it is a small price to pay for such a great movie. several other movies have done this (pearl harbor, godfather II). if it is that big of a deal i would say get a changer. or maybe someone would like to make an empeg like device that we could rip all of our movies to that way we could watch our entire collection without getting up from the couch.

"or maybe someone would like to make an empeg like device that we could rip all of our movies to that way we could watch our entire collection without getting up from the couch. "

I've been wondering when someone would do something like this. It would be great to set up a server with all my DVDs on it and stream the movies to my TVs on demand. As I've recently started buying X-Files and Star Trek: TNG seasons on DVD, this would be awesome for pre-bedtime viewing!

Someone already has. It is called VLC/VLS from http://www.videolan.org
It does streaming from live broadcast, video in and files. Pretty cool.
Just use the many DVD rippers and editors (DVDDecrypter/IFOEdit) to get it on disk first.