I’ve been planning for a while now to start using a movie database to organize my movie collection. The purpose is not so much to remember what movies I have, or even where they are, but to make it easier to decide what to watch and avoid analysis paralysis.
I’m particularly looking for the ability to record my own ratings and add custom tags. Genres are nice to have too, but I want more specific tags like: fencing, coming-of-age, revenge, historical-fiction, gangster, other-world, curtain-of-reality, etc.
If anyone uses something like this please let me know. I’ll be googling stuff of course and I’ll report back if I find something promsing.
If nothing fits my wants exactly, maybe I’ll make it my project to build this thing. I’d like to have something that just runs on a desktop computer.
Eventually I plan to get Jellyfin working so that I can stream my movie collection.
I’m hoping that Jellyfin (or the client software) will organize my movies for me, but I won’t know for sure until I get it working.
It can organize them no problem if the names are logical e.g. \Movies\Name (year)\Name (year).mkv . I have a jellyfin setup on a local proxmox server with Kodi acting as a client on different puters.
I use Plex. It does a nice job of organizing movies on my NAS and allowing me to find things easily or just browse. But my interest is having a catalog across several different storage devices. I have 32 TB on my NAS, but then I have another 32 TB (or so) across a few different other drives. Of course, remembering where things are on these other devices is a PIA. It takes a long time to mount them and search for content.
A DB that could track content and keep track of disc names would be great. The daunting part is getting everything entered into the DB to begin with…accurately, These movies go back 10+ years and my naming convention has changed…
Just as an update, I tried Coollector and EMDB and wasn’t really happy with either. I’d like my solution to be fully functional offline, and I don’t like having a gui built around lots of data fields I don’t want to fill.
I might plan my own database schema and then manage it with a GUI application–hoping I can find one where cover art could be displayed. I think Microsoft Access might have had some functionality like that, but I don’t really want a MS product. Programs I need to check out are LibreOffice Base and Kexi.
I haven’t done anything with databases since I took a single database class probably a decade ago. Gonna be doing a lot of reading to try and make sure I organize this in a way that makes sense. The groupings are not done by table yet, they’re just a rough categorization.
If anyone can think of some more good fields to add, I’m taking suggestions.
TBF I used a wikipedia page and a blu-ray.com page as a starting point.
For me, the main feature will be tracking my spending, my re-watches, and easily categorizing movies based on my own tags. Official genres are too limiting–I want tropes and story structure tags too. This’ll make it easier to find what I’m in the mood for.
I think I’m actually going to narrow the cast down to just the Stars/Leads to cut down on data entry.
BTW I realized later that I forgot to include my rating of the movie or a cover art field for the upcs.
Not sure if that is the functionality you are looking for howver i belive the backend can be manipulated and there used to be a large number of plugins available.
Thanks for the suggestion but it looks like Kodi is more geared towards being used as a player and file manager. Currently I’m just trying to make a searchable inventory of physical movie discs.
