Freeware Mission – Best Free Movie Collection Manager

by Mike 23 July 2008 5 Comments

Welcome to the eighth episode of the Freeware Mission! Here is another problem I had after my Windows XP crashed: i have a movie collection, about 2500 films, and all the information about the DVDs that I own was managed through a commercial program called Movie Collector. Now I have to find a freeware program that can replace it and maybe even manage to import my collection data from the other program. If I don’t find one, I’m doomed.

There are a lot, really a lot movie collection managers available, some free, some not, but none of them could satisfy my needs. Until I found Ant Movie Catalog: open source and quite promising after a first view of the feature list.
I was very happy to find it because I could import with it the .csv file that had all the data about my collection. And after that, it’s grabbing more information time! Ant Movie Catalog can get info about the films from a huge range of internet sources, mostly through scripts written by its users.

I must say I’m impressed with the capabilities of this open source program, and maybe except the “gray” interface, it’s better than the commercial software that I was using before! It offers huge possibilities for a movie maniac like me to manage his collection and add information about the films (it can import information about your video files – codec, bitrate, resolution, statistics, export to various file formats).

You can download Ant Movie Catalog from here, it’s free!

My Evaluation	9.5
Operating System	Windows All
Size	3.58 MB
Author	Antoine Potten
Version Tested	3.5.1

The Freeware Mission will continue tomorrow, when I will try to find a freeware CD/DVD burner to replace the Nero suite that I was using before the crash. Stay tuned, it’s going to be quite interesting!

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5 Comments »

xorgate said:

Hi man, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to test this movie database program. I currently use Movie Collector and really like it. How would you say this program compares to Movie Collector? And, did you mention that the prog is no longer supported? So the program isn’t updated anymore?

# 22 October 2008 at 5:59 am

Johnny Karp said:

@Xorgate
I was using Movie Collector too, but I switched to Ant Movie Catalog because it offers a lot more options regarding the websites you can import information from, and also you can export your collection to various file formats, feature that in Movie Collector was pretty lame. Now I’m using another free program called Personal Video Database, it’s still supported and it works just fine once you get used to it. I reviewed it here:
http://www.freewaremission.com/2008/09/personal-video-database-09819.html
I think you should give Personal Video Database a try and maybe tell me your view about it. I think it’s a lot better that Movie Collector. And, of course, it’s free.

# 22 October 2008 at 6:18 am

xorgate said:

Thanks jkarp. I downloaded the program and you’re right about the lack of ease of use. It was a PITA figuring out how to download a movie. When I get a chance I’ll try importing my already existing database and play around with it some more. So far I’m liking Movie Collector better. It’s pretty robust and easy to use. If this one doesn’t suit me I’ll test out the Ant Movie Catalog.

# 22 October 2008 at 6:50 am

Johnny Karp said:

@Xorgate
You have to be patient. I rejected Personal Video Database at first sight too. After that I decided to give it another go, I took every commend and menu and checked them out. Now I can’t live without it