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).
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
My brother uses the different products from Collectorz [collectorz.com] which run on a bunch of platforms.
Re: (Score:2)
The real solution to this problem is a database filesystem. I know these have been tried with varying degrees of success in the past. Why aren't they more common today?
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Because user tag-able metadata [wikipedia.org] accomplishes the same thing and is supported by most file systems aside from NTFS, as I pointed out in a later post. WinFS was supposed to be designed around it on Windows platforms, but sadly it is no more. Most file system searches that support metadata tagging have searches that work similarly to relational databases (i.e. you can AND, OR, NOT, etc).
Re: (Score:3)
Really? How do you use that? If I have my MP3s on an EXT4 filesystem, and want to use file system metadata instead of ID3 tagging, what tools would I use? Is there a metadata aware version of 'ls'?
Re: (Score:3)
I tend to just use directories of symlinks
Symlinks FTW!!!
It lets you organize your music by artist and your movies alphabetically then symlink them in 25 jillion ways so as to organize them any way you want.
That's alright (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I feel OP's pain. Does this film go under "Bukkakke" or by the actresses name?
Re: (Score:2)
Or he could, you know, earn money from actually knowing "computer stuff" which other people can't be bothered to learn, but are willing to pay quite well for. Would it surprise you to know that my mother doesn't even have a basement? And that I don't even live in her house? I also have a large music and media collection, though I can't be assed ripping all the movies. More likely I will be on a monthly HD streaming service before I ever need to do that.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Try using the user interface (Score:3)
There's a little box at top-right of the file explorer window. You can type words there...
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously?
Once you're there you can either use a full-text search, or use filters like "Tags:", "Rating:", "Genre:", or "Artist:" to search though metadata.
Data crow (Score:4, Informative)
Fedora Repository (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
It would be awesome if there were a FUSE front-end to Fedora Commons.
Well, actually, one does exist, and it actually is awesome, but it's currently trapped in managerial IP strategery hell somewhere in the bowels of the most dysfunctional IT department in academia, so I guess I should say it would be awesome if there were another, distributable one.
Re: (Score:2)
There are a couple perfectly good FUSE based tagging filesystems for Linux that fit the bill just fine. You get to keep your data on the filesystem of your choice (ext, btrfs, etc) and then mount the tagging filesystem with a pointer to the data store. I posted a list of them in another comment below. Search for "Semantic (Tagged) Filesystems".
Fedora Commons is far too heavyweight for my taste.
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
> Be warned, the UI is really ugly with strange icons (Hearts and stuff) and non-standard interface.
Well, I did say it was FLOSS, didn't I?
Honestly, it's no worse than Windows Media Center, which I can't even figure out. Why does everything have to have an album cover? Why?
purge (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of it do you really re-watch? You'll spend the rest of your life transferring it from medium to medium. Is it worth it?
Re: (Score:2)
Ditto! Even though the ones I bought (regretting that :P). I stopped buying movies and TV/television shows. I just borrow/stream online/download.
I do keep my music though since once in a while I listen to my old tunes including MIDI/MID, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, 669, video game tunes, etc.. :)
Re:stream (Score:2)
Watch out for those new laws kicking around congress, because it might soon become illegal to stream from a non authorized source.
Re:purge (Score:4, Insightful)
I spend very little time organizing and transferring my media library.
The current array that it resides on has been pretty much untouched for close to two years, just chugging along (getting a bit cramped for space though).
Yes, you can definitely take it too far but just keeping copies of your favorite TV shows, movies and CDs in one place can also be extremely convenient. Of course, I mainly organize it into "film/movies", "film/TV", "film/documentaries", "music/singles", "music/albums" and let the applications I use deal with sorting (as long as you name stuff properly software like XBMC or Plex can figure this out for you, downloading metadata from the internet).
I see it as an issue of balance based on various factors. Either extreme (no media at all or a copy of everything you ever come across) can be inconvenient (although I'd rather go with "no media" than deal with keeping a gargantuan 15+ TB library accessible), you just need to find the right balance.
Re: (Score:3)
> How much of it do you really re-watch? You'll spend the rest
> of your life transferring it from medium to medium. Is it worth it?
That has to be the lamest media-luddite excuse yet.
Are you kidding?
You just copy it any time you get a new and bigger drive. It's no different than old pictures, audio files, ebooks or music in this respect.
Re: (Score:2)
I tend to do this, but it's largely because I like to have a backup of my media. Just because the RIAA wants me to buy another copy of my CDs and such if my house burns down, doesn't make that reasonable. They've got their money and I personally see no reason why I should have to buy another copy when I could just load up my backups.
Plus, it doesn't take that much time once you've got the bulk archived and some sort of strategy in place.
Re: (Score:2)
Even if you never re-watch 99% of it, it's still worth keeping the whole 100%, because there is no way to know in advance which 1% you will want to re-watch.
I don't think anyone spends a lot of time going through their old media collection, casting about for things to revisit (unless they are very bored). My most common use case is when something suddenly reminds me of a specific song or movie that I last saw 5 years ago, or it comes up in conversation, and makes me want to go back and watch it again. If I
Re: (Score:2)
So essentially I agree with you. Pare it down. Keep all the music - it's small anyway. Keep all the books - also small. Turf the movies that really don't deserve a secon
Re:purge (Score:5, Informative)
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 :) (Score:4, Informative)
Having everything I want locally saves me time searching the internet for it
Agreed.
:D
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
wrong... (Score:3)
You'll spend the rest of your life transferring it from medium to medium.
Nope. Actually, every iteration gets exponentially faster. So, recording anything analog means 1:1 recording speeds. But for CDs, it's about 16:1. And once the data is on a hard drive, it might as well be instant.
Is it worth it?
"You ever see The Wire?"
"Nope, never got around to it."
"Here's a copy."
NOTE: the preceding hypothetical conversation assumes you have friends.
Re: (Score:2)
Hardly.
Data is infinitely durable. It's also not a terrible bother to copy 1MB, 10G or 10TB. The computer does all the work. You just tell it what you want done and wait for it to finish. This hasn't changed since the days of Commodore 64s and floppy drives.
Sorting things out is a technology issue and really no different than how you would deal with the same content from any outside source on "the cloud".
If you can't sort through a few videos locally, how can you hope to sort through many orders of magnitud
XBMC ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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: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].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The only times I've ever really had crashes with MythTV is when I was running development builds. This is sort of a self inflicted thing represents a personal tradeoff rather than anything inherently wrong with MythTV itself.
MythTV quickly won over my household of long time Tivo users.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OK, that's interesting. XBMC looks a lot nicer than MythTV, so that's good to hear.
Is there a list of Linux/V4L compatible cards?
boxee (Score:2)
I wrote a custom Database (Score:2)
Granted database management is part of my day-job, but it really doesn't take all that long to put together. The tedious part is data entry. Movies and books weren't so bad with a imdb and Amazon scraper script. But data cleanup still takes forever.
Re: (Score:2)
The tedious part is data entry.
It should take much less time to tag a media file than it takes to actually play it. If you're actually viewing the media in your archive, then tagging the files won't add much extra time at all. If you're not actually viewing the media in your archive, you don't really need it tagged. Problem solved.
iTunes (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that Apple's universe isn't perfect, but for me it all works together pretty nicely. I replaced my high-maintenance, increasingly noisy, power-hungry media PC with a second-generation Apple TV. This works great except that it won't play many video formats. Therefore, I've had to go through the obnoxious step of using VideoDrive [aroona.net] to transcode videos into an Apple-approved format. However, it's not the end of the world.
Otherwise, I guess everyone's different, but personally I want to spend my time doing fun stuff like riding my bicycle or spending time with my family, not categorizing my "vast media collection". I guess I'm just getting old, but iTunes does a good enough job, with less work than any DIY system I've successfully maintained in the past.
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: (Score:2)
>>>I'm likely going to be flamed
Ditto. I use DVDs, bought-and-paid for in the store (or amazon.com). The only thing I have to worry about is fire, but most of them are stored in a fireproof safe so they should be okay.
I find storing stuff in "Caselogic" notebooks to be easier than trying to organize terabytes of files. CDs are stored the same way, while E-books I store in my email (dual-stored in yahoo and google).
My final method of "storage" is in the trash. If I've already seen something 20 t
Re:iTunes (Score:5, Informative)
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: 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.
Re: (Score:2)
> I replaced my high-maintenance, increasingly noisy, power-hungry media PC with a second-generation Apple TV.
This remark was out of date long before the underpowered 2nd generation AppleTV came along.
For anything that doesn't originate from Apple's own store, iTunes sucks great big donkey balls. It really does nothing for you in terms of saving time or bother or "allowing you to do better things with your time". It's simply not designed or intended for that sort of thing. It really only has one purpose:
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. For all its many flaws, iTunes does media indexing and retrieval by a huge number of fields very well. I have a pretty huge iTunes library and typing anything in the search box at the top right immediately filters the list by what you're typing (no need to pick which fields to look for, it's pretty intelligent about that). Very very fast too, as in 'as quick as I can type, each keypress instantly filters the list with no need to wait for it to 'think''.
Failing that I don't see why you need any parti
DO NOT WANT! (Score:2)
what's the link for the repository to point APT at ?
Re: (Score:3)
Because VLC is a player, not an organizer.
Scott Ridley (Score:2)
Re:Scott Ridley (Score:5, Funny)
Well, now we know why he couldn't find them ...
More details required? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. The only thing that will work for the given requirements is a proper system level metadata system.
This is the only thing that has any hope of dealing with highly disparate types of data including things collected organically by the end user over many years.
Although a proper library management system might have some hope of coping since it seems like the most likely ready made app that's built to deal with this sort of thing.
created a website with tagging (Score:2)
Moovida (Score:2)
While I have not had the opportunity to try the program beyond some minor playing around, you could try Moovida [moovida.com] It's marketed as a media player which does it all and runs on both Windows and Linux. I believe it's in the Ubuntu repos as well.
If you do try it, drop me a line about how it performs. I'm thinking about finally putting in a media computer this year.
"Scott Ridley"? (Score:3)
You meant Ridley Scott [imdb.com] and not Scott Ridley [imdb.com], right?
Windows Land (Score:2)
Then you'll be needing to enter all your meta-data. After 20 minutes you'll be bored. The local chav might do it for a few quid, but with a rate of 96-98% perfect record entry, could you handle that many errors?
I'm not handing in my geek card. I earned it. It's mine.
Calibre and ComicRack (Score:2)
MediaTomb (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Gotta agree with purging it all (Score:2)
How often do you re-watch / re-read anything?
I guess I can understand the "I'm so smart" aspect of having bookshelves full of books in one's flat.
I can understand having large collections of music as well ... especially when entertaining
But I've never understood why people collect movies? What does that really say about someone? You can't really entertain with them in the background like one can with music. I mean they can't even be used as a reference resource like a book can. I usually just think of it a
Re:Gotta agree with purging it all (Score:4, Insightful)
You will apparently be shocked to discover this, but some people actually re-read books! And re-watch movies!
There are a handful of movies I've seen over a dozen times (Not including the family ones my son demands we watch on occasion). Some of them I still haven't got all of the juice out of (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover), and some of them I just enjoy watching over and over (The Princess Bride, Amelie). I reread Fool On The Hill and Lord Of The Rings about every second year. Our library is tucked away in the basement out of the way, and isn't going to impress anyone. We have as many books as we do because we enjoy them, read them, and share them with friends.
Purging is great, but don't apply your opinions to the rest of us. Some of us have different points of view.
Re:Gotta agree with purging it all (Score:4, Insightful)
Some stuff gets "expired" from Netflix. The same goes for Hulu.
When you decide you want to watch something again, it might not be readily available.
This is usually the reason for having your own media collection. This seems pretty obvious for Music but it seems like a real revelation for anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
You never watch a film a second time?
Some people like film quite a bit, and may watch a film several times. There are films out there that were released on video, then pulled, and are often impossible to see today. There are films where a particular version was released in one format, (laserdisk, for example), but that version is no longer available in any format.
But you know what? I simply enjoy film and watching film. If I want to go back and watch "The Road Warrior", I can, because I purchased it a g
Re: (Score:2)
It's about backing the information up. At this point. I rarely if ever actually watch most of my movies, for the simple reason that I tend to just let the TV do the deciding for me. Plus, I've got Netflix which provides a pretty substantial amount of movies and TV shows that I might want to watch whenever I like. But, having it on your computer is more convenient at times, and if you're going to have copies for backup, you might as well have the ability to keep track of them.
Plus, sometimes you just get a h
For photos... (Score:3)
I've got Photoshop Elements. The editing is certainly overkill for what you're talking about, but the library features are quite good. The key is that there's a separate database of tags and metadata which can be sorted and searched like...a database.
I'm sure there are similar things out there, but I think the key is to try a handful to see how they do it, and narrow down your choices accordingly.
Semantic (Tagged) Filesystems (Score:3)
Take a look at tagged filesystems. You can do the same thing by hand using symlinks but with much greater pain.
http://www.tagsistant.net/ [tagsistant.net]
http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ [freeshell.org]
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemFS [semanticweb.org]
The following are not really filesystems. You need to use specific programs to search the tag space.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/oyepa/ [nyu.edu]
http://blueslugs.com/2005/07/12/tag1-delicious-style-file-tagging/ [blueslugs.com]
metadata (Score:2)
What you are referring to and what the author wants is metadata, and most OS's support such tagging... but the one in use by most people, NTFS, does not. WinFS was supposed to correct that, but MS shot that project in the head, then riddled its corpse with tank shell rounds. NTFS requires 3rd party products like tag2find [tag2find.com]. If you're on Linux or Mac, you're in luck because your file system most likely supports it.
As an example, on a mac, I could bring up the properties (I believe that is where
Calibre (Score:3)
With Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) you can deal with the book problem the same way you would use iTunes to catalog music and video. It is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. I have personally used it for both OSX and Windows for a few years and it has never let me down.
The video problem is much harder because the tagging is nowhere as mature as what we have available for music. What really drives me nuts about this is that there is no consistent way to apply parental ratings to content in a way that it is recognized by OSX and Windows. This keeps me from sharing my videos across the home network since there is no way I can easily block certain videos from my son's Xbox and his iMac. I would have to manually set play lists, which is a lot more work, it would be nice if I could tag content as PG-13 or above and let the Xbox use its built-in content ratings mechanism.
Re:Calibre (Score:4, Insightful)
What really drives me nuts about this is that there is no consistent way to apply parental ratings to content in a way that it is recognized by OSX and Windows. This keeps me from sharing my videos across the home network since there is no way I can easily block certain videos from my son's Xbox and his iMac.
Your son isn't going to die if he sees some gore or some tits. If he's too young to see something, he won't be interested in it at all. If he's interested, it's your job to provide context, not censorship. Parental controls are for lazy parents. Parenting is your job not the computer's.
How many kids do you have? (Score:3)
I have two questions. How old are you and how many kids do you have? My guess is the answers are "young" and "zero". So I guess I should let my 6 year old son just watch ass-to-mouth porn then. I don't think so. Contrary to your simplistic world view, there are some things that children are not ready for. Even this weekend, I was watching Phantom Menace with my oldest son (he's 6) for the first time. It led to all kinds of very difficul
Re: (Score:3)
For instance, my 4
No standard for meta-data (Score:3)
ID3 is a de facto standard widely used for music. It is targeted at MP3 file format but many alternative music file formats also support embedding it.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3 [wikipedia.org] for more details.
Now, for everything outside music, the need/usage/online-store haven't managed to create a standard (even de facto) for meta-tagging files.
Since all formats might not support metadata, the simplest would be to use the file system meta-data/extended attributes.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems [wikipedia.org] for the list of FS supporting extended attributes.
As with music, you'll need dedicated applications to edit and browse those tags. Since you already have a folder structure, you could jump start those tags with the information that can be retrieved from the folder names. For movies and books, you might be able to complement those tags from IMDb or Amazon.
Everything (Score:2)
Script: Links + IMDB (Score:3)
I looked at exactly this problem and came up with my own custom solution.
I wrote a Perl script that queried IMDB, there are simple CPAN libraries out there. The highest rank search based off the filename was always the correct movie.
Then I pulled out the director, lead actors, proper title etc. Any details that you actually care about.
Finally I created the directory structure for each detail and put a hardlink to the file. The original files were all kept in a single flat directory for storage, symlinks would work just as well if you prefer.
The end product is exactly what you are looking for: ...
Media
-> Directors
--> Ridley Scott
---> Actual movie file 1
---> Actual movie file 2
--> Tim Burton
---> Actual movie file 1
---> Actual movie file 2
-> Actors
-->
No issues with duplicates or anything like that. No requirement for your media player to understand some sort of database. No problems sharing it across a network filesystem.
All less than a page of Perl. Unfortunately the code is currently inaccessible to me.
MediaPortal (Score:3)
XBMC. (Score:2)
That is all.
Well, not quite all - I'll sing XBMC's praises for a bit. It's got quite extensive media metadata + storage backend functionality; you basically just define a directory (or a bunch of directories), and tell XBMC "this contains movies" and "get movie metdata from themoviedb.org" and you're away. After a while scanning your files and pulling down the metadata, you have a very swish interface and movies subdivided into title, genre, director and actors. I've got a collection of about 1000 of my DVD
For most of my collection I use... (Score:2)
One word... well acronym... (Score:3)
XBMC
Works great. It indexes my 2TB of movies and Tv shows... although I am trimming the TV shows down, no reason to watch season 1 episode 3 of glee more than once.
Plus how often do you REALLY need to sit down and watch " the last 3 Sigoruny Weaver" movies.. you browse by Genre 99.99783% of the time. People all claim they want to search video content by director, actor,etc but in reality they never use that. And yes I know what I am talking about I have installed and helped with several hundred installs ofhttp://www.kaleidescape.com/ media systems... after a year you discover that by title and by genre are the ONLY search methods used. These are owned by people far FAR richer than all of you here on slashdot combined and have very little time to waste.. they dont search by director or actor ever.
Honestly step one is to be realistic about your media organization. Do not go nuts and cross reference on everything...
"Show me all the films that had a Audi R6 in it", "show me all films that were shot on a Tuesday in France when it was raining....."
Not quite the expected answer... (Score:2)
Back in the early 00's I had a problem with having a huge music library and trying to keep it synced across my work computer, home computer, and laptop. It was frustrating, I had a 'collection' but in 3 distinct piles. I'd end up with some songs on one machine and different ones on another, etc. At some point a music subscription service came along. I gave it a go and I'm still happy with it even today. Instead of having to copy 10's of gigs of MP3s over, I just install the app, log in, and play.
I know
Personal Video Database (PVD) (Score:3)
PVD sounds like it would meet your needs. It's free and can scrape multiple sources for movie/TV show information and posters. It uses SQlite for the database.
http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/ [videodb.info]
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I use multipull links to the same file.
So you can pull files from different locations?
(Sorry. Couldn't resist)
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> One has to wonder where he GOT those terabytes of digital content... ...looks at shelf full of leather bound CD/DVD binders. "Sci-Fi" spans 4 binders. "Comedy" spans 3 binders.
Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I own the David Attenborough Life Collection. It's 24 DVDs. Even assuming they are the single-layer type, that would be:
112.8 Gb. Roughly.
Now say I own, say, several boxsets of comedies, series, documentaries, a few dozen movies, maybe even a couple of dozen free promotional DVD's with full-feature films on them that are given out when the film stops selling.
Now, *NOT* including anything I've recorded from TV / Movie channels for my own consumption, not including any home videos, not including ANY Blu-Rays, etc. I can *EASILY* fill terabytes of data without even blinking an eyelid.
Hey, I could probably fill a terabyte or two with DVD images of cartoons (proper children's cartoons) and stuff I watched when I was younger (I have the complete set of Dangermouse, Batfink, etc.) and that's hardly something I go out and buy every day and keep buying. A terabyte, or even half a dozen terabytes, is NOTHING. It's just when you have to copy it all into a single place, like this guy is doing, that it appears to be a lot.
It's just that he's obsessively backing it up and/or converting it to free formats so that he can just browse from a media library, like the ones he desires, so it's all on one hard disk (or more likely RAID). It's not "abnormal". It's nowhere near "evidence of piracy". It's just a media collection stored on disk instead of the original DVD's.
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No doubt. Right now at this moment I've got 224 Gb of audio. In all honesty, no, that's not 100% "stuff I got legally," but easily 2/3 of it is, probably more. The lion's share of that is CDs I've ripped to FLAC. I'm not a big movie/TV buff, but I could see a collection like that getting huge in a hurry too.
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Re:Are you with one of the **AA's? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. "technically" DVD and BR rips are fair use.
Your attempt to hand Apple a stranglehold on the future on a silver platter is not appreciated.
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Depends on the Country the Poster is in!
In the UK there's NO "Fair Use" clause for copying digital media.
You can't legally rip that CD/DVD/Blu-ray for personal use...
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My camera is putting out 14GB/hour of videos I'm recording. My oldest girl is not yet 2 years, and our second baby not yet 4 months old, yet I've already amassed multi-terabyte of videos of them. A terabyte is not so big, so stop worrying.
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Netflix also lacks some of the features of the original media and has noticeably lower visible quality.
Netflix streaming is cool for portable devices with meagre storage but I find that I still prefer original media for home use.
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this.
and since the information database MyMovies pulls from is community maintained and vetted, it is far superior to the metadata that you will get from even good metadata sources like IMDB.
You can use MYMovies for frontend interface on Windows Media Center or you can utilize one of a number of other front ends and only use the MyMovies Collection Management DB backend.
The nice thing about this product is that it does store actor/director/crew information, so you can easily pull up any director and see all
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Yeah, but how do you break down 3TB of data below that?
Yes, it's that time again... (Score:2)
Yes but movies can be several things at once, are you going to symlink a movie into 20 different directories?
/var/media/video/faye.valentine/pornucopia.25.divx /var/media/video/sasha.grey/pornucopia.25.divx /var/media/video/mff/pornucopia.25.divx /var/media/video/natural.tits/pornucopia.25.divx /var/media/video/redheads/pornucopia.25.divx /var/media/video/rope.bondage/pornucopia.25.divx
That would work but it's a pain in the ass, there must be a better way.
Don't forget /var/media/video/your.mom/pornucopia.25.divx
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And another hoarder modded it 'troll'...
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I hope someone mods you up, because nailed it! The OS _itself_ should support better meta-data support -- live queries and tagging.
I can't find the main arstechnica review that goes in depth about meta-data but this might help the OP.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/7 [arstechnica.com]
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-future-file-systems.ars/7 [arstechnica.com]
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Translation: We have highlighted the limitations of your "magical" platform, therefore the user must be attacked.