[av.pallino]

While I love the picture and audio offered by Blu Ray, I just hated the fact it was so dofficult to properly calatog the movies. However, I believe I have come up with a pretty good future proof method. Even my wife was pretty impressed

Basically what I did was to create a contact category on Microsoft Outlook (I am assuming any email system can be used for this including hotmail - best is to use a program where you don't have other contacts) called 'Movies' and created one contact card for each movie I had. I entered the following information:


Name: Name of the movie (also filed by the name)

Company: Movie (basically my category to search by)

Job Title: Genre

Web Page Address: blank for now, but if I can copy my Blu ray disks, this will point to the location

Address: First line is for actor, director

City: catalog number (I have assigned a number for each disk in the order in which it was purchsed, so 300 is 25 and Pirates of the Caribbean 1 is # 6 etc). All disks are stored physically in ascending order as I buy them.

Notes: Has a synopsis of the movie as well as links to online reviews. I also put links to trailers where available (trailers are usually SD only)


Picture: I put in scanned art work for each title


Once I did this I had a superb catalog of all my titles. All I need to do is turn on my HTPC (which is connected to the same monitor as my Blu Ray player) and open up the contacts (which is open and once HTPC comes out of standby ready to be accessed almost immediately).


All of the cataloging and searching etc are managed by Outlook (for me). So if I wanted to watch a movie about volcanoes (I am not limited to the name but also can search by volcanoe in the description etc).


Another great benefit is that I can synch my contacts with my PDA phone (ATT Tilt) so I can view my catalog on my mobile device as well and don't really need to even turn on my HTPC in most cases.


Overall, I am really happy. The only difference between this and my DVD collection is that I can also click on play by selecting the link and it launches my media player on my HTPC.


I looked at several cataloging software, but in the end this worked best for me. Plus you can put in the phone number of the director if you have it

EDIT:


I just realized. If you don't like the address book type fields in Outlook, just go into the create new form option and you can pretty much rename each and every field as well as change icons etc. For instance, I now have fields called Genre (instead of title), Starring/Director, Year Released and Major Awards etc. Renaming the existing fields to reflect the terms you want to use (i.e. I no longer have a field called City - it is Location Index). The flexibility is amazing! Also, you can hide all the menus and all email views (so that only the contacts show up - with the search windows open).


Best disk cataloging software ever

 

[Slirp]

All good until you accidentially send an email to one of your Blu rays

.


Pretty good idea with the sync to handheld.

 

[av.pallino]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Slirp /forum/post/14286197


All good until you accidentially send an email to one of your Blu rays

.


Pretty good idea with the sync to handheld.

Actually I have given each an email address - name of [email protected] . That way I can go to my outbox (since there isn't a real address to go to

) and use emails to add additional content for a title if needed!


So the email content also becomes part of the search feature.


Like I said, you need to set this up with a system where you don't have other contacts. The people I have shown this to think it's pretty awesome. I may try and create a software package if my beta testing works out well (basically it is renaming the fields in the contact database to reflect movie info). You can even download most of the cover art from online sites.


The cataloging was driving me nuts. I even looked at a $3000 Sony system for Blu Ray, but the way I have desgined mine now has a much much better user interface and it actually takes less time to load and watch a movie). The demo of the Sony server was very unimpressive. The thing took several minutes to load a disk.


I had to do this before expanding my Blu Ray collection. Now every time I buy I disk (even before it arrives from Amazon). I just create a contact and it is all good to go! Outlook also lets me sort by recently added!!

 

[getmyrunon]

Clever! This could be the underpinnings of a cool iPhone app... something that would pull the contacts and then arrange the disc art in the iTunes cover-view style, expandable when clicked.

 

[Kuma79]



Quote:
Originally Posted by getmyrunon /forum/post/14291325


Clever! This could be the underpinnings of a cool iPhone app... something that would pull the contacts and then arrange the disc art in the iTunes cover-view style, expandable when clicked.

THAT is a great idea, if i could have my list all in my iPod tough and then have the ability to use it as a Blu remote. I would be in nerd heaven

 

[BBowermaster]

Why not use cataloging software that is out there?
http://www.softsea.com/software/Movie-Collection.html

I know a few of them have PDA applications too.

 

[av.pallino]

Thanks a ton for that list. I tried out a few and found Movie Label 2009 to be the best! In fact I am going to use them and they download the trailer and everything. I am taking half day off from work to do this today

I still prefer Outlook for my PDA though. The concept though is pretty much the same between Outlook and Movie Label, but I like their reporting feature. However, the Outlook catalog interface is cleaner and less cluttered but much more work to get each title in.