Lately I have been reviewing a lot of different movie managers cum organizers. The trouble with the majority of them with the exception of My Movie Library, to a certain degree, is that the preparation of the library consumes too much time. If your collection consist of hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of movies, manually entering the title of each movie is a logistical nightmare.
With My Movie Library I was kind of relieved because this software can automatically detect movies in a folder. But even My Movie Library has trouble recognizing the titles of more than half of the movies I have. Then I discovered Movie Monkey.
Movie Monkey too can automatically detect movies in a folder. All you have to do is point to your hard drive partition or folders where you have your collection saved and Movie Monkey will intelligently recognize the titles of movies from the file names and classify them according to their genres, download posters and plot-line from the internet. But what makes Movie Monkey unquestionably awesome is the almost human like intelligence it displays when it comes to recognizing the title of the movie.
For example, if you have a movie, the file name of which is There.Will.Be.Blood.[2007]Dvd-rip.[ENG].piratebay.org.avi, rest assured, Movie Monkey will know the movie is There Will Be Blood. Movie Monkey correctly recognized basically all the movies in my collection without any help. The only ones that the software was clueless about were those that were saved with generic names such as movie1.avi and avseq01.dat. I did encounter a small glitch where occasionally the program appears to stall when adding a movie. Reselecting the folder seems to clear that.
Now let us turn to the program’s interface. The panel on the left lists the different genres and the bigger panel on the right shows the movies in the entire library or movies of the selected genre as poster thumbnails. Clicking a movie thumbnail shows a bigger poster, short movie plot-line and IMDB rating. This is the area where Movie Monkey disappoints. The information provided is too less – no cast names, no names of director, no release date. Curiously, the program actually retrieves these data from IMDB because it is possible to search by an actor or director name. I have no idea why the program author chose to hide these information if it’s already been downloaded and available for search.
Movie Monkey can also be used to keep track of the movies you watched. On the movie details page, there is a “Watched” button that lets you tag movies that you have already seen. You can also quickly tag watched movies by going to File > Set Watched Films and check the boxes against the movies you have seen.
The movie detail page also sports a “Play” button clicking on which launches the movie in your default video player.
Movie Monkey is a free software and currently in private beta. If you wish to try out this fine program, use the invite code instantfundas to download.
how about xbmc's media companion?
Never heard of XBMC media companion before. Will take a look. Thanks for the heads up.