Overview
Personal Video Database is a free movie collection manager, or video catalog software. It can retrieve information about your movies from several internet databases, includes loan manager and full unicode support.

Review 

If you have been reading my previous posts you already know that I am a movie maniac. I have more than 2500 movies in my collection right now, and keeping them organized is a must. I have been using Movie Collector for a while, but after switching my computer to freeware only programs I installed Ant Movie Catalog, an open source program. Ant Movie Catalog is pretty good, but the appearance is kinda ugly, not appealing at all.
I found Personal Video Database a few weeks ago and I’ve been testing it since. I was highly annoyed at the beginning. The only good thing was that it was able to import my Ant Movie Catalog collection easily, that was a big plus. And also the appearance was quite nice at a first look.

 

 

But getting used to its functionality took me some time. I don’t use the mouse too much while working on my PC, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts. And in Personal Video Database the keyboard shortcuts are a complete nightmare. Just imagine, the Ctrl+S command does not point to the “Save” function!
After a few days I got over that and explored the program features, and I must say… it’s well worth the keyboard shortcuts frustration. You can grab information about your movies from almost any internet database, you can download posters and covers too. And the layout is neat, nice and fully functional. And the cherry on the cake, the statistics!

Another great feature is that it can get information about your movies right from the folder in which they are located: file size, length, codec, subtitles, etc. If the file name is properly tagged the program easily identifies your movie on Imdb or other databases.

Version Tested 
0.9.8.19

Author
www.videodb.info


Operating System 
Windows All

Download link

Summary
You can search almost any internet movie database, even for posters and covers.
The layout and appearance are very nice.
It takes some time to get used to, some commands and keyboard shortcuts are absurd.

Rating
 

Verdict
 
I’m keeping this one, it finally proved that it can manage my movie collection. Ant Movie Catalog is still a very good open source program, but its author gave up on it, so the chances it might get better are quite slim. Personal Video Database had its latest release this year, so maybe there will be better future versions coming up.

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If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!