Product Review: Movie Collector

Review by Robert Wurth

::Movie review

Being a DVD reviewer, you can probably imagine that I have a ton of discs in my collection. The biggest problem I run into (other than finding the time to watch everything) is organizing my collection.

Generally, I have a pretty decent memory. If someone asks me if I have a particular movie, I can usually answer “yes” or “no” without too much difficulty. A bigger problem is when someone asks, “what movies do you have?” Even if my memory was perfect, trying to list the contents of a collection that literally spans 2 full walls of my theater room would be impossible – if not ridiculously time consuming.

It eventually became clear to me that I was going to need some kind of solution for cataloging all of my titles.

Initially I thought about doing something myself. A spreadsheet seemed the most straightforward way to go. I tend to be a pretty picky person about how my things are organized, so something I created had the appeal of being exactly what I wanted. The trouble was that I very quickly realized that creating exactly what I wanted was simply going to be too time consuming – and very likely beyond the scope of my database skills.

So I began looking for existing options.

What I discovered were essentially two different solutions: Option 1 was an online database, where I could enter my collection and edit it online. Option 2 was a local program.

I quickly ruled out Option 1. While I'm not opposed to storing the contents of my collection online (after all, I run a review site for the specific purpose of people learning about the movies I own and have watched), what I didn't want was to be tied to an online application. Because of the scope of my collection, I wanted to be able to take my database to my movies, not the other way around.

That's about the time that I stumbled upon Movie Collector from Collectorz.com.

The first thing I noticed when I went to their site is that these guys seemed to be serious. They had Movie Collector, Book Collector, Comic Collector, MP3 Collector, etc. Now this was something I could get into. You wouldn't know it from looking at my desk, but I like my things to be organized. I want to know what I have, where it is, and what order it's in. If you have 5 CD's and you alphabetize them, that's anal. If you have 500 CD's and you don't alphabetize them, that's stupid. How can you find anything?

So I downloaded the free trial and began to play with it.

The first thing I noticed was that the interface was fairly intuitive. At its heart, Movie Collector is a database of your collection, so it has the appearance of a database, but with added bells and whistles. The main window shows columns divided into categories such as Title, Release Year, Director, Genre, etc., and these columns are customizable to show the information you want to see.

To the right of the main window is a preview window of whichever movie you've selected. It's within this preview window that Movie Collector really shines – and this is what sold me. But first I need to back up a step…

Movie Collector is designed to work in tandem with several online DVD sources, including the Internet Movie Database, Amazon.com, DVDEmpire.com and so on. When you enter a new movie into the system you can input a title, or a barcode. Movie Collector will then connect to the internet and scour movie and DVD sources for information about the title. It will then download an image of the box art, plot summaries, director, actors, and just about every other possible detail you could ever want to know about the film.

Now, going back to that preview window, all of this information is displayed for you. Furthermore, if there are details that can't be downloaded for some reason, Movie Collector gives you the option of manually inputting whatever information you want.

A lot of the features contained in Movie Collector are powerful and nice, but also expected for software such as this. What really sets the program apart for me are the other little details. For instance, you can select whether or not you've actually seen the film. This might seem pointless for some people, who obviously have seen all of the movies they own, but for me, this is a great little touch. I get new movies all the time and there is no way I have time to watch them all right when they come in. So this feature is great way for me to quickly note what I've seen and what I haven't.

In fact, there are a ton of things you can do with this software. When viewing the details of the film, there is a “personal” section where you can even go so far as to input the date you purchased it, where you purchased it from and what condition it was in. I could easily see something like this being used by someone running a small used DVD store. The software even has the capacity to handle loaning or renting out your discs. You can track who has which movies and even set due dates for their return.

Movie Collector also works with barcode scanners, which make entering your new DVDs lightning fast – no typing in titles or product numbers. This is another useful functionality that would make this program a viable solution for a small business looking to sell or rent discs.

The best part about this software, however, has to be the people behind it. After downloading the free trial, I very quickly made the decision to purchase the pro version and it was 100% worth the $39.95 price tag. I've been running it for a couple of years now, and although I have never once had any major problems with the software, I have had a few technical questions and feature requests. I've always gotten a quick and helpful reply, and more than that, these guys really listen. Some of the feature requests I've made have since been included in updates.

Speaking of updates, the purchase price includes free upgrades. With some companies, this might be a dubious value at best, but not in this case. These guys are literally constantly tweaking the program to add features or fix bugs (that are inevitable in any piece of software). Also, I've never once had any issues whatsoever with upgrades – every one of them has gone smooth as silk, and all of my data was instantly updated to the new version. Furthermore, I can honestly say that every one of their updates has made the software better than it was before.

I know that I'm gushing here, so I do want to stress that this is a completely unsolicited review of the Movie Collector product. Normally I'm fairly jaded and extremely critical of software, seeing most of it as a necessary evil at best. So it would be fair to say that it takes a lot to impress me and Movie Collector has definitely done that.

For anyone with a large DVD collection, I just can't recommend Movie Collector enough. Not only is it useful, but it's also tons of fun to play around with. Head on over to Collectorz.com and download a trial – and if Movie Collector is any indication, I'm willing to bet their other products are just as good.

Buy Movie Collector From Collectorz.com

Overall		5 / 5
As a professional DVD reviewer, this is my recommendation for movie cataloging software. Admittedly, I haven't tried every option available, but honstely, after using Movie Collector, I don't have any desire or need to look elsewhere.