The Natural Philosopher wrote:

My pragmatic advice there would be 'if you want to watch it, rip it' and
then its done for good and you can keep the originals as backup.

Thanks. It would certainly free a good deal of shelf space and I can see
the convenience, but I'm still slightly dubious about the long-term
reliability of hard drives.

Tapes - that's a BIG job. can really only be done in real time. Replace
with CD/DVD wherever possible

Alas that's quite impossible with my collection, virtually none of which
consists of commercial recordings. But as I said, I would like to do this,
as and when time permits.

What would be the simplest way to achieve that?
I'm not sure.

For simplicity, I rather like Dave Plowman's idea of using several tuners,
each permanently set to a particular channel. If all are connected to a
single amp, then the individual room remotes only need to be able to control
the amp in order to change both channel and volume.

Bert