Ask Slashdot: Huge Digital Media Libraries

An anonymous reader writes "Like many slashdotters, I have several TB of digital media: music, books, movies, tv shows, games, comics, you name it. I've put it all in a few HDs, but handling it all has proven to be less than optimal. I'm covered when it comes to music, since [pretty much any music player/library manager] allows me to quickly find songs by interpreter, album, genre... For everything else, all I have is a series of hierarchical folder structures, but hierarchies have limitations. I can find Blade Runner easily, but what if I wanted all of Scott Ridley's films? Where is 'Good Omens', in the Terry Pratchett folder or in Neil Gaiman's? Furthermore, in a collection with hundreds of similar items, it would help to have some extra clues such as covers (for comic books) or synopsis for TV shows' episodes. Do you have any software to help you handle digital media libraries? Specialized software (say, something that only work for comics, something else for movies), or generic media libraries? Opensource alternatives are preferred, but commercial software is fine as well."

Data crow

[cmiu007]

Use data crow and make a container for every HDD. It works for music, movies(imdb details import) and software. http://www.datacrow.net/ [datacrow.net]

Fedora Repository

[oneiros27]

Just use what the libraries use:

Fedora [fedora-commons.org]

What you're looking for in general is either a repository (if you want it to manage the files) or a catalog (if you want it to just track info about the files). A catalog might also be called a 'registry' when dealing with sciences archives, where the term 'catalog' is used for something else.

For more options, see any of the following lists on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_institutional_repository_software [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Digital_library_software [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_next-generation_library_catalogs [wikipedia.org]

Re:XBMC ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can back this up. It's a bit of a pain to get setup once, but once it *is* setup, XBMC is a great way to manage all this information.

Just make sure you have your backups automated and you can setup a great Linux based HTPC with XBMC. This should allow you to search on genre / artist / director, et

Re:Nope

[Whalou]

I'm on a Mac and I use Delicious Library [delicious-monster.com]

My brother uses the different products from Collectorz [collectorz.com] which run on a bunch of platforms.

Re:iTunes

[Mister Whirly]

You realize that most "fireproof" safes are designed so paper will not burn - at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. If you read the fine print, the temperatures in those safes can hit well over 250 degrees, which I am sure your DVDs would not survive. Unless you bought a Fireproof safe specifically designed to protect DVDs, keeping them in there is probably a colossal waste of space and only provides a "feel good" solution that will not actually protect them from damage. I know becasue a friend of mine had a fireproof safe with computer backup DVDs in it that all melted into one big lump when he had a fire.

P.S. I can save you the time/money by letting you know all of Glenn Beck's books are absolute crap. No need to buy them in the first place - unless you like to be frightened by really dumb stuff.

Re:Nope

[mario_grgic]

A filesystem is a database, just not relational database (if that's what you mean by database). Mac OS X has filesystem with extensive metadata attributes, and Spotlight that allows you to query based on that metadata (including classical UNIX ones like created/modified/accessed dates). It works really well, it's fast and manages huge libraries really well.

I'm so used to it that I can't imagine using OS/filesystem that does not have some sort of support for it.

Re:purge

[Hatta]

How much of it do you really re-watch?

Probably only 10%. But how am I to know which 10% I'm going to want in the future?

You'll spend the rest of your life transferring it from medium to medium.

Sure, It'll take an hour or so to rsync onto a new array every 5 years or so. I'm going to migrate data anyway, so the question is whether I want to migrate 100GB of data or 4TB. Since rsync can run in the background, there's essentially no cost to migrating a large array.

Is it worth it?

Definitely! Having everything I want locally saves me time searching the internet for it. When I decide I want to use something, I don't have to wait for it to download. The effort it takes to maintain is minimal, so why not?

I like my collection too :)

[RulerOf]

Having everything I want locally saves me time searching the internet for it

Agreed.

Perhaps I'm the odd man out, but I do like going over my media collection (which is automatically sorted) and just trimming the fluff everyone once in a while. Making sure files are named right, getting all the movie trailers, filling in a gap where I'm missing a season, and so on.

It's not really that it's a compulsion, but more of a hobby. I like having a movie and TV show collection, and the fact that I can have a digital one sitting on a RAID array increases the usability and coolness factors.

Organize TV Shows with Sickbeard. [sickbeard.com] Organize movies with either Media Center Master [mediacentermaster.com] or MyMovies. [mymovies.dk] Better stuff for movies undoubtedly exists, but I'm not too sure what it would be.

Also, if you want your computer to surprise you with new content and you're not afraid of complex config files, give FlexGet [flexget.com] a try.

Finding time to watch all of it.... that's the real kicker :D