MovieShelf uses LED strips to light up the Blu-ray you want

A touchscreen catalog for physical discs

A Reddit user named Peter Somersby has built a smart shelving system that brings the browsing experience of a streaming catalog to a physical Blu-ray collection, according to TechRadar. The project is called MovieShelf, and it pairs a touchscreen with LED light strips fitted to the shelves.

The screen displays the whole collection with posters, search and filters. When someone picks a film, the spot where that disc sits on the shelf lights up, so there is no scanning rows of spines by hand. A shuffle option lets the shelf choose a movie itself and illuminate it, and when the screen is idle it runs a slideshow of posters.

MovieNights picks the film, the shelf finds it

MovieShelf is one half of a two-part setup. The other half is MovieNights, an app that lets friends or family nominate films for a movie night and then eliminates them one by one until a single title remains.

The two apps run separately but can communicate. When MovieNights settles on the evening's film, the shelf lights up the location of that disc, and someone walks over to collect it. TechRadar reports the whole system runs on a couple of Raspberry Pis and an Arduino, with help from the Claude and Codex AI tools during development.

Where the idea came from

TechRadar says Somersby was inspired by a short video from a creator called almostinventor, and decided to add a touchscreen and LED strips to his own shelves. The result drew praise on Reddit, where one commenter described it as one of the most unique ideas they had come across.

The project sits in a tradition of elaborate home-built fixes for small everyday annoyances. TechRadar compares the approach to the imaginary contraptions drawn by cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, whose inventions solved trivial problems with absurd complexity.

What comes next

Somersby has considered going further, telling TechRadar he has thought about a robotic picker that would fetch the disc itself. He described that as a big step up from LED strips, and framed the current build as phase one.

For now, the system remains a personal project rather than a product, and no pricing or availability has been announced. Readers who want to add discs to their own shelves without the lighting rig can still do so the traditional way.