A catalog for your movies

I have a large collection of movies both off-line and on my computer and it is sometimes hard to keep an overview of all the movies that are in my possession. It happened more than once that I bought a movie that I already own which is rather dumb because there are ways to prevent this from happening.

Ant Movie Catalog is an open source tool that makes it easy to create a database of all your movies, mainly thanks to its web-based approach that utilizes the power of movie databases on the web to fill out most of the information for you when you are adding new movies to it.

It crawls sites like IMDB, Amazon or tv.com for information about the movies that you have added to the catalog. You may then use some or all of the information it retrieved for your own local database and even download cover images.

The utility has many features, more than I can describe in this short review but I would like to point out some interesting ones at least. Ant Movie Catalog analyzes and imports information about video & audio codec and bitrate for movies that are stored on your computer, and adds those information to the catalog automatically. This makes it easy to check if another version of that movie has better quality and would be worth a download, rip or purchase.

You can add comments to every entry with additional information and export all movies to various formats like html, csv, sql and images only. There is an extensive statistics module which displays various statistics about your movie collection.

Update: A standalone viewer ready for kiosk PCs is available next to the standard version. There is also a plugin for Media Portal which some users may find interesting. Information can now be stored both in the movie catalog's own binary format, or in XML files instead. The program can also import movie information from other formats, including csv and other movie catalog file systems.

Tips

1. You can customize the toolbar menus in the preferences. Add or remove icons easily here.
2. You can switch between movies easily using the Ctrl-9 and Ctrl-3 shortcuts.
3. Make sure you check the media files importing menu in the preferences. You can for instance import the file name as the title, change the file size unit format that is displayed and other importing options.
4. You can add or remove existing Internet movie databases from the catalog software.

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