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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."
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).
You can admit it. Slashdot understands that you have a large *personal* media collection *AHEM*.
"I like it when the red water comes out.."
There's a little box at top-right of the file explorer window. You can type words there...
No sig today...
Maybe he got copies of commercial media from his friends. This is legal in some countries. For example in Germany it's perfectly fine to distribute up to 7 (rule of thumb) copies of an audio CD among your real-life friends. This copyright law exception not widely known though.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatkopie (no English article available)
Use data crow and make a container for every HDD. It works for music, movies(imdb details import) and software. http://www.datacrow.net/
Just use what the libraries use:
Fedora
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Digital_library_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_next-generation_library_catalogs
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I created my own, Completely searchable (by actor, director, genre and more) with data from IMDB, NetFlix and Amazon as each titles is added. Complete movie and tv episode sysnopsis as well.
/var/media/video/bondage/ ?
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
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?
I never used it because I don't have TB of content but XBMC seems to be be something that could get your attention.
Provided your media isn't too obscure I've noticed Boxee is actually able to associate a file name and minimal metadata with content on IMDB and you can use it's search function to look up local media.
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.
I use multipull links to the same file.
So you can pull files from different locations?
(Sorry. Couldn't resist)
Mostly harmless.
I'm likely going to be flamed and modded into purgatory for this, but I use iTunes for most of this-at least, for music and videos. Some PDFs are starting to go in there if I want access to them on the go on my iPhone or iPad.
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 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.
www.clarke.ca
Ridley Scott
I keep a database of my movie collection using a program called myMovies. http://www.mymovies.dk/ you get most of the important features in the free version. It interfaces well with Windows Media Center. It can also generate .nfo files that can be read by XBMC. I use XBMC for playback of nearly all my media on the big screen / stereo. I can search for media by almost any criteria I can think of and the User Interface is great for browsing with cover art, fan art banners an synopsis of movies and tv shows.
Well, I guess the key starting point is what operating system are you running on? But for my rather extensive movie and tv collection, on windows I've found Mediaportal: http://www.team-mediaportal.com to be fantastic with its range of plugins to cope very well with TV and movies. Specifically the MP-TVSeries plugin for TV, which interfaces with the TVDB and gets all the information you suggest you want about your shows, including actor information, fanart, banners, posters, thumbnails, and the list continues. You can also sync all these details with an online tracking website such as the relatively new trakt.tv so you and your buddies can see what you recently watched (all done automatically once you have an account at the website and configure the plugin). There is an equivalent for movies called movingpictures which does pretty much the same thing, and you can set up your own categories for sorting too. Mediaportal is a spin-off from XBMC, but is also opensource, and free, but only runs on windows (and makes a very good HTPC software on the whole). So if you're not running windows, maybe try XBMC instead. That is just my personal experience, your mileage may vary.
With so many files, I don't treat my system as a filesystem, and more like a Google-type search. I imported all my media into Drupal as page nodes and hotlinked to the backend files. Where possible, I had has much metadata as possible included about each file. Time/date, subject, type of media, keywords, where, descriptions if they were entered, and searchable text. Navigating is then done by media type, searching, and browsing through various keywords. Drupal then presents the media in the browser. If you wanted to get fancy you can reuse the metadata to present lists using the views module. For direct access via the application (like the audio player), that is when I go to the backend, but generally at that point I know what I want after going through the website.
you mean once you have downloaded it you need to sort it? .. I thought winning was having it?
While I have not had the opportunity to try the program beyond some minor playing around, you could try Moovida 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.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I've used videodb with good success. Takes the filename as the name of the tv program/movie, and there's an interface into IMDB and other media related search engines what allows you pull data into your videodb database.
http://www.videodb.net/blog/
It doesn't really cope with music, but from what you've said you can find all that without too much difficulty.
MetaBrowser grabs meta data for tv-shows and movies (cover art, banners, backgrounds, IMDB info, descriptions, actor images...) and MediaBrowser is a great add-on to Windows Media Center that replaces the (rubbish) built in movie library browser. Both are free and work really well for me - they allow browsing by genre, starring actor, rating and more.
Here in Canada, Libraries are being asked to repurchase eBooks they have bought and distributed after about 30 people have "checked it out". Its all a bit of a farce, all things considered.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
You meant Ridley Scott and not Scott Ridley, right?
Building Better Software
There should be a Fuse [user-space filesystem] plugin or two that can help you with organizing, although I don't know how well they work.
In theory when you mount a media folder you should see something like:
$ ls
by_author/
by_name/
by_genre/
etc..
It's a while I want to try them out but I never got the time.
This is one http://code.google.com/p/media-fs/ can't find the other at the moment.
google CMS
Honestly, if you don't mind relinquishing some control over the media (and risk that Netflix chooses not to carry some obscure cult classics) using those cloud based "delivery on demand" options makes a lot of sense. They're certainly attractive to non-techie types that have no interest in managing media servers or migrating storage mediums every decade.
Access DB. 30 minutes to write. No need to check.
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.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For books - Calibre, let it convert things to epub format and let it deal with the directory structure. For comics, "ComicRack" is the absolute best. It allows cover view, can convert cbr/cbz/pdfs (though it prefers cbz for metadata), and allows the importation/scraping of metadata and saving it directly to the file.
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.
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 as a huge waste of money or it's for people that just have to collect stuff.
Personally, I re-read/re-watch/re-listen all the media while transferring them from medium to medium. If I didn't re-watch/re-listen to it, I don't transfer it.
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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/
http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemFS
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/
http://blueslugs.com/2005/07/12/tag1-delicious-style-file-tagging/
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
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.
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.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I used to use Libra - seems like it's gone defunct now, but was great for what you are looking for. Anyone know the story on why it's gone now?
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 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 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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
What about GCstar http://www.gcstar.org/ ? It is specifically a collection manager for things like books, comics and movies. I have a collection of 1500 movies indexed with it and it even lets you specify a location, e.g. your hard drives, from which to open the file. It is free and cross platform and I have used it successfully for several years. It would seem to cover all the criteria that you have listed
I have 2 Media Center editions of Windows, XP MCE and Vista MCE. They continue media center support through Win 7 and plan to keep going. But, don't let Windows stop you if you don't like it. Try Myth or Boxee or whatever flavor-of-the-year media solution there is. My media center not only aggregates all of my media together into one interface, it helps me sort it, present it and play it. The music section (which catalogs all of my MP3s from a NAS), let's me sort by title, artist, album, etc. The Recorded TV section lets me sort by date recorded, series name, etc. There's also a section for pictures and videos, which I use less often. It automatically re-catalogs "watched folders" on a regular basis, so if I add another album to my MP3 collection, it will automatically find it in time (or on a reboot if I'm impatient). If you setup a PC just for the purpose of media, it is often referred to generically as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). You can use such a PC with or without TV tuners to record shows. I have one such PC that controls my TV. My entire TV watching experience comes from the PC. I personally use mine with 4 tuners, 2 HDTV to record broadcast TV and 2 analog to record from 2 cable boxes (2 of each helps with time conflicts when you want to record 2 shows at once). Without these PCs, I'd never be able to wade through my collection of music effectively, and it is bar none the best recorded TV solution I have found.
It really can't help you with books, games and comics, because media center specializes in audio/video solutions.
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
Bow-ties are cool.
And another hoarder modded it 'troll'...
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://www.voidtools.com/ As long as you use a descriptive filename or have your media in hierarchical folder structures you can find any file within seconds on any indexed hard drive. It only works on filenames and folders, not metadata.
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. 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 it is now - back in my day on a mac tagging was a command line argument, but that was several versions back) and enter Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman as metadata for Good Omens. Now when I use Spotlight, a search for either will bring up Good Omens. The tags go with the data, so if the files are copied they retain the tags.
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
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/7
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-future-file-systems.ars/7
If they don't exist already, someone needs to create a set of plug-ins for IMDB. A web-browser plug-in would let you go to IMDB, then add a "Play this" button for every movie/video that comes up in a search (it wouldn't really need to be limited to IMDB, in fact). A media player plug-in would add a IMDB search button that would go to IMDB and retrieve search results for you. You could have an Advanced Search button to be more precise. And of course, in addition to the "Play this" button, you could have "Rent this," "Buy this," "Add this to My NetFlix Queue," and "Find this on YouTube," buttons.
After all, why would you want to create your own database when someone has already done all the work for you?
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.
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...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Probably the best interface and organizer of movies, TV shows, etc., that I have seen. Add in the Moving Pictures an MP-TVSeries plugins and you are all set with an awesome interface.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Boxee does a lot of work automatically. With J River Media Center you can pretty much organize and tag anything how you want to, it's quite a bit of work though. Good luck.
I ended up in the same situation you did: multiple hard drives, that happened to all be internal ones, not plugged, which I used by means of an IDE/SATA => USB adapter. One day I got bored with it: plugging disks in/out whenever I needed an old file was a pain in the ass, and I decided to create a NAS out of all of these, without changing the storage format. /media/aggregateshares/ folder, linking the individual files/folders using very simple symlinks. I've made management a bit easier using a simple web interface that does it automatically for me, and it has been running for more than 6 month now.
I mounted all (8) of 'em in a linux box, and aggregated their contents to the system disk, in a
What makes this solution quite nice is that I can very easily add/remove disks, and that they don't have to match at all in terms of size/organization. The main drawback is data safety, as there is absolutely none. Live on the edge...
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 rips and the interface is just as fast if you only have 10.
Same deal for TV shows, it just grabs from a different source, although the caveat here is it must have a recognisable number structure in the filename in order to pull down the metadata. I ended up rolling my own set of regexps in advancedsettings.xml.
Of course, if you're looking for a purely desktop application I'm not sure - XBMC is pretty much only a "full screen" HTPC app, although you can run it windows. I've also have problems playing back some of my older XviD+Ogg+OGM rips, but other than that it's a great piece of software.
I used to use MythTV for movie/TV playback, but XBMC has a much nicer interface, not to mention a faster one - not only did Myth not have automated metadata lookup, but the movie browser didn't scale, and got slower and slower as my collection expanded. I also find the player much more fully featured. And, of course, XBMC runs everywhere very easily, giving it much higher WAF for people who want to use it on their laptops (windows) as well as on the TV (linux HTPC).
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
MediaPortal is the windows way to do it. GPL'ed and uses MySQL or MS Access (MySQL is preferred).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For music, audio books, podcasts, and most videos, I use MediaMonkey 4 (still in beta testing). It crashes quite a bit right now, but it has some great tagging abilities, which leads to great searching abilities. It also has a pretty powerful ability to organize files, which makes it easier to find stuff when you aren't in the software. It doesn't work great for full DVD rips though - by which I mean VIDEO_TS folders/ISOs. Those I just have in a folder. I don't have too many of those. MediaMonkey has a "VirtualCD" concept for media you don't have ripped but own in a physical form, and I hope they eventually extend this to video, because then it would be a great database to extend to my physical media collection as well (All of my music is ripped, but not most of my DVD/BluRay collection, so for now it depends more on my just knowing what I'm looking for, occasionally guided by an IMDB search if I'm looking for a specific episode of something) For ebooks I just use a directory structure. There's probably some metadata I could attatch to files if I really needed to in Windows to make it easier to use Windows to search, but it hasn't reaely come up yet. I don't have a photo collection, so I can't recommend anything there...
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.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
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....."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Translation: We have highlighted the limitations of your "magical" platform, therefore the user must be attacked.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For photos, its the best, in my opinion. Has a simple interface, can add tags easily, and organize them too, by tags or folders. You have both views available all the time. I use it for backup too, 'cause I can upload one group of photos (be it a folder or all the ones under a tag) to a SkyDrive folder, and set permissions there for only my family and/or friends to see.
And I love its import photo utility, when I put a memory card, etc. Want to copy all the photos or organize them by groups? You can do it right in the moment they're been imported. Always keep your photos organized and tagged from the beginning. You'll avoid painful search later.
So, if you look for easy and practical personal photo management, it's the best.
NOTE: Not to be confused with Windows Photo Gallery, the one that comes with Windows Vista. That one only have an import all your photos option. And you can only see your photos by tag, but no by folders, that doesn't work for me.
Watch out for those new laws kicking around congress, because it might soon become illegal to stream from a non authorized source.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Clearly, this calls for an access database. Back it up to Excel.
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 music-on-demand isn't highly regarded around here, but seriously, I don't miss keeping track of all that music. I do, however, enjoy finding new stuff to listen to and being able to hear it in its entirety.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
they have iTunes for Linux now? amazing.
what's the link for the repository to point APT at ?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sure. And I'm sure this is typical of Slashdot users, and he needs to know which of his home videos were directed by Ridley Scott, and has novels written about their children by Terry Pratchett.
But is it at all possible, just conceivably, that there are some Slashdot users who acquire media through downloading from the internet without permission from the copyright holder?
For movies and TV shows, even music, XBMC handles this well and lets me do various sorts of my library. I use Ember on Windows to look up and create NFO files for the media. Not perfect and obviously doesn't cover all needs but it's a start and is a good front-end.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Unibas has been written to manage large collections of documents ...) and their metadata.
(text, audio, video, images,
Disclaimer: I am its author, and it's alpha.
It has been tested on Debian and Ubuntu only.
Once upon a time there was a product that was awesome for this called iView, but then Microsoft bought it and it's soul was crushed and never heard from again. But that would have been a perfect solution for you...if it wasn't for the evil empire.
Yes, totally. But it's kind of redondant to ask about it whenever someone specify the size of the collection in GB.
Well, to perhaps help the original poster, I enter all the dvd/blu-ray I own on imdb. Their system is well integrated, and allows to search in your collection. My blu-ray & dvd collection is in a nice bookcase, ordered by blu-ray, then dvd, and by name. So it's pretty easy to get the one I want (and imdb keeps track of the dvd/bluray difference.)
rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play...
ever get the feeling sometimes that people that are supposed to check content for duplication just aren't doing their jobs....?
I did get a great utility to help me with this exact problem, seeing as this is note the first, second , third , fourth, or fifth time we talk about this...but i will let you go back into time to find the links, because i just don't want to waste another minute again on this topic.
but:
video and music: redundant server storage with cifs/smb access and a front end like Media Portal (i use a windows home server box with about 12 TB on it and Media Portal on a nearly silent media pc connected to my tv via hdmi and my A/V Reciever and to the server via HomePlug networking- and yeah, i know xbmc will run on linux, but i find MP easier to use and keep working and aesthetically pleasing - XBMC is running as a toy on my classic xbox). Just for fun, I have StreamtoMe set up on my server to allow me to watch stuff on the go with my iPad or iPod, but this doesn't really help with the organization part too much.
comics: redundant server storage and ComicRack
Photos: redundant server storage and either Picasa, Adobe Photoshop Elements or Media Portal
and books i keep on my iTunes (ipod and ipad) or Kindle.
Use the stuff that a lot of people have already put a lot of thought into before you try to innovate, at least until you determine that their solutions are inadequate for your needs.
essentially what you need is some kind of fault tolerant network storage and a robust purpose built, database based front-end to handle the organization, access and presentation.
Easy-peasy. The hard part is finding all this stuff, and buying the necessary hardware... Google is your friend here.
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
At work I use copernic Desktop Search. Relatively inexpensive and indexes network drives. It's like a personal miniGoogle. Good for searching the text associated with your multimedia files.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Just because some greedy bastard says you're stealing doesn't make it true.
In general, stuff only has to be bought once. Any more and it's the bastard that's stealing from you.
I have 3TB of TV recordings on my MythTV box.
300GB of steam games.
13GB of music.
It's really easy to accumulate lots of media without resorting to high seas plundering.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
You might want to check out Songbird. It is a lot like iTunes except it is open source.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
I have used XBMC for years as well, I love the fact that it can fetch a episode description from the internet most of the time. There are a few descriptions missing from where ever it gets the info for Star Trek DS9.
Fair enough. I'm not sure "Time Shifting" actually explicitly allows for indefinite archival, so you may well be acting outside the law in your case.
I only have about 300GB of video on my machine. I'd say pretty much all of it was downloaded from the internet. Also about 14GB of music which I'd say is a 50/50 split.
But my point is, it seems so odd, that a website like Slashdot, where it's generally considered that copyright restrictions are far too heavily weighted in the favour of the media cartels would be so defensive when accused of acting in a manner consistent with this position. There's no reason to be so. Where's the shame in breaking a law you disagree with?
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.
You want something that allows you to search upon semantic data, for example for authors, title or other content.
I use Tracker for that, and it works fine.
42.
Look at Dspace. Open source, free, yada yada
My wife did her thesis on digital repositories (link below) I helped setup the server and it is still online.
http://alexandria.cyberstreet.com/
Here thesis
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
Repost from my account, the earlier one posted without logging in seems to have been lost.
And isolating the 1% is a *lot* of work. I'm facing that problem with physical books, because it looks as if in the next few years I'm going to have to move into a smaller place. Which of my 9000 books are going to make the grade?
I've resolved not to buy any more paper books. Except for books that don't work well in electronic form, such as math books (where you have to page back and forth a lot, and ereaders just aren't as nimble as flipping through pages) and art books (spatial and colour space resolution problems).
If I had been able to collect my 9000 books in e-form, they would be easy to move. All 9000 books would fit on one hard drive, with maybe an extra one or two for on- and off-site backup.
Automatically indexing them from existing metatdata would be a lot easier than going through the shelves and picking out the few hundred I' really going to want to keep. Data storage is so much cheaper than paper storage these days.
But, unfortunately, I don't really have that option.
Anyone have an easy way to convert an existing paper library to a useful elibrary?
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. Organize movies with either Media Center Master or MyMovies. 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 a try.
Finding time to watch all of it.... that's the real kicker
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I have/had a similar problem with my media collection. My solution, at the end of the day, was to build something myself.
As one might guess from my handle, I used PERL, and made a few web applications that serve my purpose fairly well. I have a component that scans my media directories over night and add the data to a mysql database. Another component then uses to filename to check against http://www.themoviedb.org/ and http://www.imdb.com/. If a good match is found, a poster is downloaded, and the database is populated with the title, year, dirtector, plot summary, and a list of relevant genres. The main part of the application is a web based interface that lets me search by title or keyword, or browse by genre.
If the scrapping script find no matches, or multiple matches between which my script cannot decide, it is flagged for attention. There is a CGI script that shows me these items, gives me the possible matches, and allows me to modify the search by and a bit to get to the correct listing.
I'm betting there are some packages out there that would do this all for me, but I enjoyed the experience of building it myself. I suppose if there are not other such programs, maybe with more work, and some help I could make my home grown tool available under the GPL.
You might try adding meta-data to your hierarchy using a simple xml shema. Then use ExistDB to index the xml. Then you can use XQuery to query across the entire dataset. MySQL will also allow you to XQuery a field with xml. Forget the semantic stuff it is more trouble than it is worth. They can;'t decide on the standards. Another option is use CouchDB and store you meta-data as JSON which is pretty easy also.
Over kill. Mainly a repository for archiving digital material for large institutions.
I do understand all to well what you asking for, and you'd think that it would be a fairly commonly found need, but apparently it's slim to none of anyone creating an all-in-one media manager. I too have a pretty large media collection consisting over about 1.5 TB of video, 80 GB of music, 30 GB of pictures, 28 GB of books, and other misc media. How to keep any sanity with it all has proven to be tasking.
While I'd love to know if you do find a good solution for it all, maybe some of the better solutions I've found will help you out or point you in the right direction. All of the following are open source Linux solutions that are pretty commonly found. I use Gallery to manage all my photos and even my self shot video, which is a pretty powerful and easy to install web based system. Couldn't really ask much more for organizing, managing, and making your collection available from anywhere - but still protected if so desired.
For my movie collection the best thing I found was Griffith, which is far from perfect or ideal, but is still young and they are making great strides with it's development. You can use one of a pretty long list of sources, which automatically grabs the majority of any movie details, downloads the poster and whatnot, but more importantly makes the information cross-reference friendly. So you can search for movies by director, or actor, or key grip if you want. Nice too that it imports and exports, although not in an ideal format.
The finally for music I kind of jump around between Clementine, Banshee, and Rhythmbox. All three are excellent players that handle a wide range of searching and playing ease, as well as recommending similar styles, genre, downloading covers and lyrics, etc. One key thing I absolutely have to have it mapping to my "extra" keys, which all three do. The Erognomic 4000 keyboard by Microsoft is about the only thing I've really liked that came from Microsoft, and I love it - even though way over priced. LOL
Oh if there were only a way to smash these together. Maybe if I find some spare time I'll start on a project doing just that, although "extra" time is tricky to come by these days...months... well last few years. *sigh*
I'm starting to understand why he's having so much trouble finding his movies.
I don't organize my films. Any information I want can be found through IMDB, I'm nog going to replicate that at home. Titles are enough.
I've started a project aimed at addressing exactly this problem. It is still in early stages, but eventually I hope to turn it in to an all encapsulating media manager. It currently comes with a web interface, and the ability to extend and organize by any information cached in the database. But I plan to tie it in to an FTP server, WebDAV, and UPnP. There are some pretty neat scripts and more to come as soon as I find some times to work on it.
The project page is MonolithicMedia.org
Google code: http://code.google.com/p/monolithicmedia/
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/
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I suppose I should insert the obligatory ZFS reference here. I'm going to that for my huge collection of books and documents although I have been heading into video-land now. Given the fact that the versions I've been looking at here have inline de-duplication, who cares if something is filed under one, five, or two-hundred directories. The built-in RAID characteristics make it interesting as well, although it isn't going to be magically fast (without serious hardware).
For those of the Mac persuasion, I was over on Ars-Technica and came across a reference to a version for Mac in beta with a release target sometime around Summer. I don't do Mac, but the author has targeted it for media library use. Z-410
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Not sure if already suggested by someone else. I use XBMC which has a version for Linux, Windows, Mac. It also has a stand-alone (basic installation of Ubuntu with this APP over it) if you plan to use it as a Media Center computer.
It catalogs movies and TV shows by fetching information from IMDB, TVDB and a whole lot of other websites and not only allows you to browse by Genre, Year, Actor, etc. but also fetches cover images and synopsis for your movies.
As an added bonus it has a number of useful plugins which give you direct access to additional information (subtitles, YouTube access, movie trailers, song lyrics, etc.)
It's free. Give it a try.
I was really looking forward to WinFS. Having abandoned windows for my personal needs but still having to support it, I was really looking forward to having a database layer on the filesystem. Sure sucks that they gave it up, along with several other key features in Vista. *Hopefully* they get around to it some day though, because the indexing service sucks serious balls, and that whole framework is pretty inferior.
I'm a big fan of locate if only because of its speed compared to other tools, but unless you have all of your metadata stored in the folders and filenames it's not going to be much help. With any elegant solution to this problem, you couldn't "locate -i 'Bruce Willis'" and find a list of media that he was involved with.
That's easy. You'll just need a big paper cutter and a high volume scanner.
J River Media Center is BY FAR, the best commercial tagging software available. It does have its limits around HTPC use (its theater view is lacking). However, your tagging environment is fully customizable. You can create views based on custom metadata if needed. Most programs, tagging is contained within a box, with J River, there is NO box. It pairs nicely with XBMC for HTPC application. Tag in J River. Play in XBMC. (Get the android apps for both, you'll love it).
Once you have the ebook versions (how you get them is up to you) if they don't already have the metainfo you want, Calibre can look up metainfo given an ISBN number. For older stuff that may not have one (or not one that Calibre recognizes) I find trolling Amazon to find a different edition and using that ISBN works well. But there will always be issues of "These 5 are tagged 'Edward Elmer Smith, PhD.' but these are tagged 'E. E. "Doc" Smith'. Gotta go change half of them." At least it can do bulk setting for things like that...
You may be right, though it goes against the grain to destroy books.
-- hendrik
Calibre is great for my eBook collection - I have a lot to add!
WhereIsIt creates a great searchable catalog, and I have different databases for music, programs, shareware, etc
Or if he lives anywhere except the US and Canada (you insensitive clod).
Dilbert RSS feed
Use an open source integrated library system like koha http://koha.org/. These are designed precisely for organizing multiple types of media. While they generally are used at a larger scale, they easily scale down to smaller personal libraries like yours.
Since it's a personal, local library, you will only need to use a few of the available modules -- no need for circulation, acquisitions, etc. While some of your media does have the option for auto-retrieval in more limited media systems like iTunes, for the level of organization, access, and retrieval you want, you will need some manual review.
Your son isn't going to die if he sees some gore or some tits.
Having a 5-year old screen "Saw 4" WILL have an impact.
If he's too young to see something, he won't be interested in it at all.
You're arguing that children exhibit age-appropriate self-restraint. That is absurd.
If he's interested, it's your job to provide context, not censorship.
Ensuring that the son, regardless of his level of interest, does not have access to Mom & Dad's honeymoon video (i.e. censorship) IS the parent's job.
Parental controls are for lazy parents.
Parental controls are, simply, a tool. Parents who use tools are lazy?
Parenting is your job not the computer's.
Did you actually understand the excerpt you included? They want tools optimized for parenting. They ARE parenting, snotty insinuations aside.
Your son isn't going to die if he sees some gore or some tits.
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 difficult questions about death that he was probably only ready for 80% of ensuing discussion.
I'm currently 38 and I've had ready access to porn since I had my first 300 baud modem in 1986. I'm no prude and certainly don't think that children should be shielded from everything. But your speaking in absolutes that kids will either be ready to comprehend it or be disinterested in it just sounds pretty dumb.
I'm a big tall mofo.
There are only three categories in your list: music, video and books.
Just google it. There is more video / music management software out there than could hope to mention, both free and unfree. For books I use Calibre.
The problem I suppose is that while CDs and music files are mostly tagged correctly, the TV shows and comic books from, ahem, questionable sources, are less likely to have as useful metadata.
What you do miss though is the accessibility. My time is precious, so I want to be able to watch or read what I want without having to worry about how or where to get it. Large media collections help with that. I could never hope to consume all the media that I have. With the huge capacities and cheap prices of hard drives there's practically no downside.
Show me all films with a fastback Mustang chasing a '69 Dodge Charger.
Task Mangler
Pick a file name format and make sure you stick to it. Long file names are your friend because you can do simple file searches on a drive and find things.
The following is the directory and file name format that I've used over 12 years. The benefits are: albums are automatically sorted by the order of release, individual songs can be copied to other locations and you still know exact what it is.
\ \ _ \ ___.mp3
I have all my libraries on a home server running linux and samba.
Win7's desktop search refuses to index networked drives.
Anyone have an easy way to convert an existing paper library to a useful elibrary?
http://www.diybookscanner.org/
I haven't built one yet, but I want to. The open source software offerings in this space just keep getting better all the time; toolchains to invoke gocr, etc., and now someone's even running a service to OCR the pages for you, as long as it's OK for them keep a copy in the Internet Archive.
The claims are that you can scan a novel in 20 minutes or less. It might take you quite a few nights and weekends to get through 9000 books at that pace, but if you never start you'll never finish.
John
Not when the itunes software disables the dvd drive. In this day and age it is rude that software disables hardware in the manner that itunes disables dvd rom drives.
Yes, I know, there is an M$ fix to correct some of the problems. That still doesn't give me the hours back of my time trying to unscrew what itunes did.
Worse, Apple still hasn't fixed the basic problems with itunes. It is still as flaky as it was several versions ago. It is a *database*. Why can't it store duplicates? Why does it not remember previous file names? Why does it blat file names? Why can't you look up an existing file name? How on earth can it not use a singular point of reference for files - MD5 sum perhaps?
Worst of all, millions of people are now using itunes.. giving them the platform to say 'our software is great!'.
Anything but itunes.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Agreed. It doesn't gets much simpler than locate -i, when you have a detailed folder structure. Pair it with Emacs (M-x shell), and you can quickly search, filter, yank-rectangle to a script for mass renaming, query with Perl-eQL, whatever.
(on the downside, you *do* have to remember to quote the filenames for further processing...)
Except that Apple doesn't seem to believe in people holding media on a network mountable device and not local so any time I start iTunes it hangs the process for days doing the Gapless analysis on my mp3 library. iTunes is garbage for anything but the most simple configuration.
Hmmm. 20 minutes per book, that's about 24 books per 8-hour workday ... about 360 days for the complete set. When did I ever find time to read all that in my 64 years? (well, of course I didn't read all the nonfiction, the encyclopedias and such) Sounds like a culling job is still in order. But perhaps a less severe one.
-- hendrik
I'm not sure copyright explicitly allows for indefinite protection, but that doesn't seem to stop all the extensions.
As for the shame, it probably comes from the confusion of wanting to support the people who make the music you love, but not the evil industry middlemen who like to exploit everyone.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
"Opensource alternatives are preferred, but commercial software is fine as well."
Why open source alternatives? For me open source (or rather free software) is the default choice, commercial software can in some circumstances be an acceptable alternative.
thomasdamgaard.dk.
If you are OK with closed-source freeware, I've found MediaMonkey to be very good for music - handles a load of file formats, what I feel is a smooth and effective interface, et cetera. Easy multitagging, good integrated gathering of data on ripped CD's for the most part...
I thought my collection was large at ~9K tracks and ~100GB, but you've definitely got me beat
I organize the stuff into desired folder hierarchy (generally a variant of Genre\Artist\Album) before I import it into the program.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.