All My Movies – Great Software for Organizing Movie Collections

Background

For some time now, I’ve been lusting after a barcode scanner. I have a pretty large collection of DVDs and just can’t bring myself to spend hundreds of hours sitting in front of my computer manually entering the DVD information into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the barcode scanners I was looking at were several hundred dollars and I couldn’t bring myself to spend the money.

Over the break, I did some reading and came across the CueCat. For a much smaller price, I was able to purchase one of these devices to help out with the cataloging process. Now, I just needed to find a software program capable of scanning online databases and pulling in the information linked to each ISBN number scanned by the CueCat.

After searching several programs, I came across the software All My Movies. I started out by downloading the CatNip software to decrypt the encoded string output by the Cue Cat on my Windows XP machine. Then, I grabbed a stack of DVDs and went to work. Using the Movie, Add Movie by Barcode function, I was able to quickly scan a set of DVDs (the software has an option for “batch mode” which allows you to scan several DVDs at once before the lookup occurs) and have their information retrieved automatically from several online DVD databases such as IMDB, Amazon, or DVDEmpire.

Strengths

All My Movies is a pretty sophisticated movie organizer. The quick filters feature allows you to quickly sort depending on whether or not you have seen the movies or using other categories. In addition, there is an option to keep track of movie loans and whether or not your friends still have the discs you have loaned them.

The movie database software is also nicely designed. You can export your movies from the master listing into several different formats, including HTML and XLS spreadsheet format, and the export option is highly configurable (you can select individual fields to include). I scanned about seven DVDs when I was testing this and each of them was recognized, categorized, and added to the database within a couple minutes (for the entire batch).

Weaknesses

I did experience a few “out of resources” errors when using the software, but these were fixed by rebooting my computer, so it’s possible my own computer was to blame. Also, when sorting, I wasn’t able to find a way to configure movies so that articles (a, the, etc.) were not included in the sort string. In other words, it would be nice for The Incredibles to be listed under the “Is” rather than the “Ts”, but I wasn’t able to find an option to enable this. However, the author seems to update the software regularly, so perhaps this will be in a future release. In the trial version, you are limited to using the master database, which will be overwritten when the software is reinstalled.

Overall

From my experiences so far, this software seems to do exactly what I am looking for. It will enable me to spend much less time classifying and organizing my DVD collection. The interface is slick and polished and includes multiple languages and much customizable content (movie genres, etc.). It works with my Cue Cat with no problems. As an added bonus, the author provides a free registration license to those users willing to help write a review (as I am doing) and those who do proofreading and editing for his Web site or documentation files. Sounds like a deal to me!

Update (4/19)

I spent about an hour today adding DVDs.  I’m going at it in alphabetical order.  Made it through most of the Ds (over 200 DVDs) and the program works great.  I found the fastest method of entering the DVDs and retrieving covers is to use the “Add DVD by bar code” feature in batch mode, around 10 at a time.   Cue cat is also holding up nicely, and it turns out the CatNip software isn’t necessary.  All My Movies can decrypt the data on the fly and grab the unencoded ISBN.

.EDU Underground

Great article on Technophilia about free online educational resources.

On The Road

Finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this week.  Brilliant novel.  Highly recommended for any fathers out there.

AMA to recognize video game addiction?

Interesting article from today’s Orlando Sentinel: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/health/orl-addiction2107jun21,0,2952811.story?track=rss.

Rudy McDaniel’s Introduction

Hi Everyone,

This is long overdue, but I thought it might be nice for me to finally create my own blog and post my own introduction, especially seeing as you all have done such wonderful jobs with your own introductory posts and blogging this semester. Here is everything you ever wanted to know about me, and more.

Being the eldest son in the family, and following a traditional naming scheme that goes back at least three generations (and now forward at least one) my first name is Thomas. I’ve gone by Rudy, though, ever since I was a little boy. Growing up, I was painfully shy and had a speech impediment, so I spent some time early in elementary school working with a speech pathologist to help me pronounce my Rs (back then, awuhs). I also had some trouble reading, so I was sent to a remedial English teacher who apparently worked some magic and was able to fix me up and get me reading at grade level by the second grade. I’ve been a lifelong reader ever since and I usually try to read at least a book or two every week. I started out escaping into the worlds of C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, and Franklin W. Dixon (of Hardy Boys fame) before moving into the more literary (and school-enforced) narrative domains of Dickens, Flaubert, Orwell, and Bronte. In terms of favorite authors, I’m a big fan of Jasper Fforde, F. Paul Wilson, Robert Jordan, Greg Bear, Asimov, Larry Niven, Koontz, King, Dostoevsky, Bradbury, Fitzgerald, and most anyone else who can spin a good yarn. Though I generally read across genres, I have a strange fascination for apocalyptic fiction and fondly remember books like On the Beach, Alas, Babylon, and The Stand.

I spent third grade learning how to write stories, and I somehow managed to win a young author’s award in fourth grade for a tale I’d fabricated about a little glass horse we kept in the classroom. I’ve dabbled in creative writing ever since, but I don’t seem to have the discipline to finish an entire piece of fiction (my last attempt at the National Novel Writing Month fizzled out at around 35,000 words). Most of my writing these days is strictly scholarly (journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and book drafts) though I do get my fix of cathartic silliness with an occasional irreverent email sent out to friends or family.

I enjoyed fiddling with computers from an early age and had fun goofing around with an old TRS-80 computer. In fourth grade, I worked with a friend of mine to construct an epic computer game in BASIC that was never actually programmed, but that was great fun planning and sequencing on paper. It was resplendent with horribly mangled syntax, impossibly spaghettied GOTO commands, and irreconcilably twisted nests of logical statements. Since graduating from my Trash 80, I’ve worked my way through a variety of computers as a typist, Web developer, Web applications programmer, technician, consultant, and general frustrated user. I recently rewarded myself and built a new home computer which looks like something out of a science fiction movie – glowing blue lights, strange humming sounds, and the annoying extra-terrestrial ability to particalize and then beam my most important files away to hidden locations until they are no longer needed.

As my dad worked in construction, we spent a lot of time moving around when I was younger – I attended several schools in Texas, New Mexico, and finally Florida before my parents divorced in the fourth grade and Dad moved back to Texas. After moving around so much during my first ten years, I had no desire to move around anymore during my next eight. My last two years of elementary school, all of middle school, and high school and college were all spent here in Central Florida.

I attended UCF from 1996 to 2004 and earned degrees in English, Technical Writing, Computer Science, and Texts and Technology. For my dissertation, I wrote a software application that parsed and categorized vocational stories organized around specific events within an organization. I also spent some time theorizing about textuality, media, artificial intelligence, and knowledge management. I married my high school sweetheart in 2002, and we had our first child, a little boy, in June of 2006.

I’m currently working as an Assistant Professor of digital media. I held a visiting professorship in both English and digital media for a year, but have since transferred fully over to digital media. I love teaching and working with students as I find it incredibly rewarding, though it is also challenging and complex, particularly with the publishing and grant-writing demands placed upon tenure-track faculty. Almost all of my current research involves narrative/storytelling and digital technologies, though I do occasionally do some work with video games and game studies. I’m currently directing the PROSE (partnership for research on synthetic experience) laboratory and we have three active grants focused on investigating various research questions having to do with story, interactivity, and gaming. One project I am particularly excited about involves building a game world to demonstrate ethical decision making in virtual space. I’m also working on a storytelling and media book that I am co-authoring with a few colleagues in the Institute for Simulation and Training and an XML (eXtensible markup language) book that I’m co-authoring with a colleague in English.

In terms of media, I consider myself a bit of a media addict. I have amassed well over a thousand DVDs, hundreds of video games, and multiple console systems (Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, Xbox, Wii, Gameboy, and Nintendo DS). Of course I don’t have time to watch any movies or play any of these games, but they are sitting on the shelf faithfully, patiently waiting and dreaming that one day The Man or The Woman will return to rescue them from their dusty prison-shelves before The Baby destroys them. I’m also a fan of computer games and have recently been experimenting with Half-Life 2, Fable, and Doom 3.

My wife and I don’t have much time to go out to the theater, so we generally stay home and rent films on DVD (she has long since cut me off from purchasing, though I do occasionally sneak a previously viewed DVD home from Netflix). I’m not overly discriminating with what I watch, but some of my favorite movies include Donnie Darko, Pan’s Labyrinth, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger than Fiction, Life as a House, and Old School. We did just make it out this past weekend to see Ocean’s Thirteen and Knocked Up, the former which was fairly good and the latter which I found to be excellent and hilarious.

It has been really great getting to know all of you so far, and I look forward to spending the second half of the semester getting to know you even better!