Movie Explorer Puts Order Into Your Movie Collection

With hard drives and storage devices growing bigger by the year, it is only natural that computer users start to put more data on their computer systems. The shift from highly compressed movie formats to high definition formats takes its toll as well, as movies may now need Gigabytes of storage space instead of Megabytes.

If you have lots of movies on your computer you’d probably want a tool that provides you with an overview of your collection. Some of you may store all their movies in a neatly nested directory structure, while others have them stored on multiple drives and maybe even external hard drives or optical discs.

Movie Explorer is a new software that is currently under heavy development. The developers have just released a beta version of the program that offers only some of the functionality that its developers intent to ship the first stable version with.

When you first start the program – installation is not required – you will notice that it automatically crawls the My Videos folders on your hard drive. If you are storing your movies there you do not need to do anything else. The program takes care of everything, from identifying movies to retrieving movie covers and information from movie databases such as IMDB.

If you do not store your movies there, you need to point Movie Explorer into the right direction. Click on the wrench in the upper right corner of the screen and select options from the menu.

Switch to Categories here and add your custom folders to the program. Categories allow you to categorize movies. This may be useful if you want to create different movie groups, for instance movies appropriate for children and all other movies.



You may notice that some movies have not been identified correctly. The program will notify you about it with an error message in your movie listing. The beta version has no user interface options to select movies manually from one of the connected databases. The only option right now is to edit the database XML file in the program folder. Just hop over to IMDB, locate your movie manually and take note of the unique ID displayed in the title on the site. Copy the ID and paste it into the IMDB line of the XML file.

This is not the most comfortable option, and future versions will support those capabilities natively.

A search at the top allows you to search for a specific movie in various ways. You can naturally search for a specific title, but also for a director, year or genre among other things.

Movies can be played directly from the program interface. All you need to do is to click on the file name to play it in the default media player.

Movie Explorer is a promising program that could really simplify things for users who want to put order into their movie collection. The program is only available for Windows. Interested users can download the latest version from the official program website. (via Instant Fundas)