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
- You can customize the toolbar menus in the preferences. Add or remove icons easily here.
- You can switch between movies easily using the Ctrl-9 and Ctrl-3 shortcuts.
- 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.
- You can add or remove existing Internet movie databases from the catalog software.
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?