Ask Slashdot: Huge Digital Media Libraries 361
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."
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to just use directories of symlinks on the odd occasion where I want a logical collection of something. Kind of the hacked file system equivalent of a playlist. I can even put additional detail in the symlink name that I would leave out of my “main tree”. Generally though, a simple hierarchical structure has worked fine for me and my 6+ TB of media. If I anticipate wanting to search for something down the road, I also sometimes put it in the file name (indexed by slocate every night).
You are probably looking for a tagging/metadata tool but I think the problem with those is you have to obsessively tag/provide that metadata and they aren’t going to integrate with all your favourite viewers and such. It just seems more trouble than it’s worth to me, but with different levels of motivation and borderline OCD, it could work very well (and probably does for many).
Calibre, open source ebook manager (Score:5, Interesting)
Used iTunes? It's like that for books but less bloated. Syncs to many devices, and can scrape RSS feeds from magazines, build them into EPUBs and sync them to an ereader, like a text-based podcast. This works surprisingly well, superior in some ways to reading the same material on the Web.
And it's FLOSS.
http://calibre-ebook.com/about [calibre-ebook.com]
Re:iTunes (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what I've done as well.
We have pretty much sold our soul to Apple just for the convenience of not worrying about pulling stuff when we need it. We create a significant volume of recordings of interviews, meetings and design brainstorming discussions during software development. We upload these to iTunes to keep them organized. We use Home Share from a (reasonably old) Mac Mini so everyone in the office can get them when they need it. Additionally, just bought Apple TV's for two conference rooms so we can use AirPlay to play back presentations to the room we are in.
One more step though, we use IDentify from Justin Pulsipher to edit tags on the videos and podcasts. This means that if we ever need to rebuild the library (which we've had to do a couple of times), we don't need to tag items again. The tags are embedded in the file and will work irrespective of which file they are in.
Re:XBMC ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to say this, but you already have, so I'll just expand on it.
XBMC is great for organizing media. It has some neat features:
-looks really nice, suitable for a living/theater room, not geeky
-movies, pictures, sound
-IMDB integration
-scripts (do anything)
-contributed lists of Internet TV stations
-support for IR remote controls and universal remotes
-remote playback (playing computer being separate from the storage computer)
http://xbmc.org/ [xbmc.org]
One thing it's not really designed for is to record TV. For that, use MythTV [mythtv.org].
MediaTomb (Score:5, Interesting)
re: iTunes (another option) (Score:5, Interesting)
I certainly won't "flame" you for this suggestion. As maligned as the iTunes software is, I think its ability to index media and very quickly retrieve it by a number of different fields is pretty darn good -- especially for a program you can download free of charge for both Windows and the Mac.
As a Mac user myself, I started using another free program to manage my movies and saved TV shows though. I really like Plex (www.plexapp.com) for the purpose. It doesn't have the restrictions on playable video formats that iTunes has, and has a great UI to serve as your media center via a remote control.
I believe the latest update to Plex added some interesting, if slightly obscure, functionality -- like the ability to search the subtitles of your movies for specific strings, too.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)