Article Preview

REVIEW

DVD Database X 1.4.1

Issue: 3.3 (January/February 2005)
Author: Scott Griebel
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,187
Starting Page Number: 8
Article Number: 3302
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.valencio.com/

Full text of article...

DVD Database X from Valencio Productions is a DVD movie cataloging system for Mac OS X. It presents the user with a very intuitive interface for creating and viewing a list of movies. By default, each movie can be given the following pieces of information: Title, Year, Genre, Video format (e.g., 16:9 vs. 4:3), Audio format (e.g., stereo vs. DTS), Director, Cast, Borrower, Date, Path to video data, Runtime (movie length), My Rating, MPAA Rating, Trailer 1, Trailer 2, and Trailer 3. The Borrower field is used to store the name of the person you lent a movie to so you don't forget to retrieve it. There is even an option to automatically list names from your address book as a starting point for possible borrowers. The Trailer columns allow you to store links for up to 3 different movie trailers stored on your hard drive. In addition to these built-in fields, the user can define new data columns such as a Last Viewed date or a Roger Ebert Rating column.

Although you can enter movies and their information manually, the best feature of this software is that you can look up titles in the online Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which returns a list of movies containing your search string. After selecting one of the search results, you can view the Title, Genre, Year, Director, Runtime, MPAA rating (and reason for the rating), Cast, Plot description, and a movie picture suitable for a DVD case or label. You can then choose to add this movie and its information to your database. If you select a preference to check for new IMDB scripts, the software will go to the DVD Database X website and automatically download script updates that might be required for extracting DVD information should IMDB change the format of their website.

Multiple movies can be selected for updating, deletion, tagging them with borrowers, or printing. You can also print customizable summaries of your collection, DVD labels, and jackets.

When searching for specific titles in your collection, you can search for info in any of the collection's data columns (e.g., Title, Year, etc.). It would have been nice if you could create more advanced searches such as one that looks for all movies starring Marlon Brando that were made in the 1970s.

Another feature is the ability to export your catalog as a text file or a web page, where the latter includes DVD cover art and plot descriptions along with summarizing database information.

You can also point to the VIDEO_TS folder for a movie and then clicking the play button will start playing the movie in Apple's DVD Player.

Finally, you can insert movies via text files, though when importing in this way, any repeated items show up as duplicates in the DVD database -- a surprising and unfortunate result.

Overall, this is a very well designed, intuitive, and useful product that makes keeping track of your DVD library both fun and easy.

You can download a trial version of DVD Database X which allows you to store up to 10 movies in your collection. For $20, you can obtain a registration key that removes this limitation.

End of article.