DVD / Blu-Ray Cataloging

[agtjones]

Hi,

I have a large collection of DVD's / Blu-Ray and recently I have duplicated a few purchases as I have forgotten that I have purchased a movie years ago!

To help prevent this problem can anybody recommend a piece of freeware that will allow me to catalogue my collection on PC. Ideally I'd like a nice GUI that has an description of the film etc but I don't need to use the software as an interface to play the movies.

[PuzZLeR]

It happened to me with my massive CD collection - I've duped a purchase, or three, myself.

Probably not the answer you want to hear, but just to contribute somewhat, over the years the best database for me has been a good ol' spreadsheet, such as Excel.

I've tried other solutions in the past, for CD/movie collections, but never stick to them. They are either slow, inflexible, or too "flammy". Since many are abandoned by the author/company, why would you want to build a database that would be useless in the future? And if I ever pay for one of these apps it would be like going to a restaurant and ordering cereal and milk - I can do that myself.

Personally, it's more worth it to gather the movie info from a site like IMDB yourself than rely on potentially inaccurate software (low paid employees doing the entry) or buggy link searchers.

I like spreadsheets because I can customize them to my liking. I can choose my own fields and filters and order the records any way I like them. Sometimes you need special attributes of your own that are not available in the "solutions".

As the list grows and demands more eye candy you can migrate it to Access, then utilize, and design, attractive "forms". I know it may be a learning curve for several, but it's so worth it since these apps are practical for many, many other uses as well.

Not only for movies, but I do this to manage my entire CD collection (hundreds) and my music video collection (over 6000), and love it. It's only an opinion, but I would highly recommend a DIY solution for this.

[redwudz]

Excel is probably a good choice if you have to enter all the data by hand anyway. If you don't have Excel already on your system, Open Office is freeware equivalent and they have a Excel compatible spreadsheet program included: http://quick-download.info/openoffice/?gclid=COb0v_CWm5cCFR9bagodVSJ0Qw
For my video on my hard drives, I use Extreme Movie Manager. About $15US, lifetime upgrades. It will search IMDB and other sites for covers and movie info. http://www.binaryworks.it/extrememoviemanager/

[olyteddy]

Ant Movie Catalog, Freeware that can 'fill in the blanks' by going to IMDB. All you need do is enter the title and run a script.