Entries RSS
Contact Us
Join the Team!MC Organizer Adds Cover Flow Aesthetics to Movie Collector
DVD collecting is just something I can’t master. I don’t have the slightest problem wandering into an electronics store, scooping up a few titles, swiping my card and heading home to expand my miniature DVD kingdom. The problem is I don’t keep it too organized, so instead of running my finger across a few alphabetically sorted boxes until I find the title I want, I dig through endless boxes pulling out DVD’s like I’m unloading a copyrighted dishwasher. Thank goodness technology has a better way.
Fortunately, Collectorz makes software designed to keep tabs on an entire movie library called Movie Collector. Movie Collector software fetches and imports all the details of a movie into a database quicker than the user can remember whether they liked the movie or not, via either manual title entry or scanning the DVD box’s barcode. The software is excellent for keeping a very in depth catalog of titles that can be browsed at one’s convenience. While very useful, Movie Collector isn’t going to help me hunt down my copy of Mrs. Doubtfire when I want to watch it, although I’ll know the plot outline, see the cover and know the main characters. So what can I do?
Enter MC Organizer for Media Center (via Missing Remote), exit my organizational torment. While MC Organizer is technically just a front end interface for Movie Collector, it teaches the old dog enough new tricks to put it on Animal Planet. Most importantly, MC Organizer adds the capability to play movies through Media Center. Movies can be linked to any video files that Media Center supports; if there’s multiple files for a movie, it’ll play them in order. For those who don’t keep DVD’s on their hard drives, the program integrates with the Ziotek Media Carousel Plus, showing the location of the DVD within the carousel on screen. Mix in a glassy, modern interface that looks like an incarnation of Apple’s Cover Flow and you have a very attractive program, which along with the other perks is completely free.
So if you use Movie Collector or want to start, I say give MC Organizer a shot. It’s useful, looks great and above all it’s free. Maybe now I’ll finally have a DVD collection instead of a DVD catastrophe.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Filed under: Software
January 28th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Hopefully this verson of Movie Collector integrates with Vista better than the previous versions. i tried a demo of the previous version and was rather disappointed. The overall program seemed rather nice, but the the MCE integration definitely felt tacked on.