What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of redundant storage and accessed over the network. Be it full VOB rips of DVDs to Xvid or x264 encodes of movies and TV it can all now be played back by the new HTPC. Of course with as much digital content as we have, we need a decent system to manage and search it. Read on for the best solutions I’ve found…
MyMovies
This plugin provides a full management suite for keeping details of your movies. What I particularly like is the standalone Collection Management tool that allows you to add and edit details from any machine on your network. Once installed you can create categories and filters that, for example, limit the list on screen to just your HD movies. The onscreen interface seems to be some kind of HTML variant rather than the “native” media centre applications, this is the only criticism I have of it.
Imagine having a version of IMDB tailored specifically to your movie collection. That’s effectively what you end up with onscreen. Just enjoyed a film and want to see another by the same director? Click his name in the interface and you’ll find not only a biography but a list of all his other films that you have already got. The same goes for the actors in the films. You also get full cover art (front and back of the DVDs), audio track information and a brief synopsis of the film.
MyTV
The MyTV plugin reminds me of the Library functionality that I could never quite get to work in XBMC, only this time it works. It queries thetvdb.com to find the titles, graphics, synopses and a myriad of other details for every episode of nearly every TV series you might have on your server. Even if it can’t find them you can, in true collaborative style, add them to thetvdb yourself (as I have done for several shows).
Once it’s found the show, it relies on you having named the episodes correctly; for most TV downloaders the format will look familiar: Battlestar.Galactica.s01e01 would cause myTV to populate the database with the data from here. Outstanding.
Both of these plugins work immediately out of the box and require relatively little faffing about. They also both have very healthy communities built up around them offering support. MyMovies has a contribution feature whereby if you find data missing in their database, you can upload if yourself earning points in the process. You can also show off your entire collection via a free website should you want the world to see.
