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."

Comments

Nope

[Anrego]

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

[metrometro]

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

Re:iTunes

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ?

[Compaqt]

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/

One thing it's not really designed for is to record TV. For that, use MythTV.

MediaTomb

[gregthebunny]

I use MediaTomb for my digital media library. It manages all my music, videos, and photos and is quite extensible through scripting if you are familiar with JavaScript. Then I use XBMC or my PS3 as the front-end to MediaTomb. I'm currently managing over 1 TB of data without issue. I cannot speak for other media, such as books, as all my books are still in dead tree format.

re: iTunes (another option)

[King_TJ]

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:That's alright

[hairyfeet]

Or he could just work at Best Buy, as when I filled in there for a few days for a friend I found damned near all the guys in the back had USB drives with .bat files to rip every tune, video, and naughty pics that crossed their desks.

As for TFA the AMD Fusion Media Explorer is free and pretty nice, or you can create all kinds of custom libraries in Windows 7 pretty easy. That said it would be a royal PITA to fill in all the blanks but it sounds like what you are wanting is a media DB. Making your own DB isn't hard (just the filling in the shitload of data is hard) and with your own DB you can add as much or little info as you like and sort any way you want.

So there are several ways you can go about it and none are more "right" than another, it is more of a personal preference thing really. I use WMP 12 for my tunes and Windows 7 MC software for my video, works for me, but it may be too much or too little for you just depending on how deep you want to go here.