Lots of good info from Tony and KAD, Ill just add a thought on file stuctucture. Although you can keep your movies in individual folders, as Tony noted, it will be easier if you build some type of structure that is easy to navigate. Putting them all in one folder can be a bit overwhelming if you are trying to find something and have to scroll through 100s of 1000s of movies. Many of here break them down into Genres Folders, such as Action, Comedy, Westerns etc. By doing so, you wil be able to see the data for those movies when you enter the genre folder, yet not have to go through all of them, just the ones for that genre.
A standard setup might look something like this
SMP ROOT
-----> Movies
---------------> Comedy
--------------------------------> Comedy Movie 1
--------------------------------> Comedy Movie 2
--------------------------------> Comedy Movie 3
---------------> Action
--------------------------------> Action Movie 1
--------------------------------> Action Movie 2
--------------------------------> Action Movie 3
---------------> SyFy
--------------------------------> SyFY Movie 1
--------------------------------> SyFY Movie 2
--------------------------------> SyFY Movie 3
SMP ROOT
---------------> TV Series
--------------------------------> TV Show 1
------------------------------------------> Epidode 1
------------------------------------------> Episode 2
------------------------------------------> Episode 3
--------------------------------> TV Show 2
------------------------------------------> Epidode 1
------------------------------------------> Episode 2
------------------------------------------> Episode 3
--------------------------------> TV Show 3
------------------------------------------> Epidode 1
------------------------------------------> Episode 2
------------------------------------------> Episode 3
You can stucture in anyway you like, but if you do some reading on these boards, I think you will find that the majority of people will use something similar to this with Genres Folders for Movies, and TV Show Folders for series. It will make finding movies and TV episodes a lot easier then either individual folders for each video, or all in one big folder.
Good Luck
-P