Looking for simple Movie library software

Ant Movie Catalogue might be what you want. It's free too.

http://www.antp.be/software/moviecatalog

The only elegant and simple interface you are going to find is Windows Vista running Windows Media Center w/ the DVD Library registry hack.

Edit your movie metadata with DVD Library Manager and enjoy the show.



http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930526
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1252288
http://www.sh1ft3r.com/gear/htpc/

mymovies anytime

I had similar requirements as the OP. You might want to try the last free version of Xlobby. Not too many people use it these days, but it's perfect if all you want are movies. I catalog my movies using DVD Profiler. I then export the database from that and import it into Xlobby. Xlobby automatically matches up the name of the movie, in the database, with the name of the movie's folder on my hard drives.

It takes some time to learn the quirks. It's not exactly easy to setup if you've never used it. Girder acts as the glue between xlobby, zoomplayer and my remote. I've attached a screenshot of my front end. That's all it is. No extra buttons, menus or other nonsense on the TV. I can pull up details about the movie though.

mslide

I've been looking for just such a front end for xLobby so where did you get that or did you do it yourself?

For anyone that's wondering, here's where you can downlaod the last free version of Xlobby:
http://xlobby.help.googlepages.com/home

My skin is based off of the "BluezSkin Widescreen" skin, by Colby. It was easy to modify. Press the Pause key, on your keyboard, to enter the skin editor. Here's basically what I did:
* Made the movies page the startup page, so it bypasses the main menu
* Deleted the background image and made it black
* Deleted every button and graphic on the movies page. Simple to do. Go into the skin editor, highlight something and hit delete.
* I also deleted the text boxes that showed things like the movie name and what page you are on. I simply go by the DVD cover art to choose a movie
* I enlarged the dotted lined box, that indicates where the actual DVD cover art pictures will be shown, to fill up my entire TV screen
* In the skin editor menu you can indirectly choose how many DVDs will be shown on your screen by telling it how many rows (or is it columns, cant remember) and the ratio of the picture. I chose 13 and 5x7 I think. I'm not at home so I can't tell you exactly.
* I also made some changes to the movie overlay page. This is the page that pops up when you press enter while a movie is highlighted. It brings up info about the movie and a large image of the cover art. For this overlay page, I did leave a Play Movie button to make it more intuitive for non-techies that try to use it.

It sounds more complicated than it really is. I don't have any soft buttons on the front end at all, not even a next-page type button. I use my Universal MX-810 for all navigation.

I spent months and months trying different solutions, even Linux/MythTV and OSX/Front Row. For me, this is the best solution. The only popular choices I have not played with are VMC and Meedio. I have no desire to install Vista, so that's out (would have to upgrade my HW). I'm not sure if you can do something like this with Meedio. I couldn't figure out how to do it with Media Portal. Mymovies/MCE was just too sluggish and bloated.

edit: One of these days I'll get around to making a short write-up of how I did everything, along with a zip of my skin, and post it on my webpage. Until then, feel free to PM me for more info.

edit 2: I have a 40" LCD at 1920x1080 and I sit about 10ish feet away. There are about 60 cover arts per page. Given all of that, nobody has complained to me about not being able to see the cover arts, since there are so many per page. It's easy to change this however, to have more/less shown.

Im going to give it a try. Thanks.