I'm looking for a video catalog app which I can use to manage all my videos. These consist of dvd rips, downloads, web videos etc.

What I want -

• scan a directory of files, show video thumbnails
• fetch imdb/amazon data based on title. A lot of catalog apps can get imdb, but they require me to input the title manually for each movie. Almost all the movie catalog apps have this limitation but I guess they are designed for dvd's and not dvd's ripped to a media server in avi format.
• be able to use an external player. Don't care about this if builtin player is good enough (uses ffdshow and has good controls)
• search by actor/genre/title type of metadata
• smart playlists - e.g. play all movies with Al Pacino which I haven't seen. You get the idea.

Some nice to have features -

• bookmarks in the video with thumbnails for each point - like chapters in dvd movie but definable by user. So I can then then got a favorite scene in a movie by just looking at it.
• search for duplicates
• tagging for video files and then search by tag, play counts etc - the nice things mp3 has
• video format conversion

Some really nice and even more specialized features -

• manage, search and download online videos from sites such as youtube
• get movie trailers, link trailer to the actual movie if I have it
• dvd conversion, ripping and burning

I am not aware of any such apps. I think it would be quite useful esp since I have built a media server and ripped all my movies and tv dvds to it, as well as downloaded content.

I've decided to dump Vista and go back to XP :( I didn't make this decision lightly since there are a lot of things about Vista I like, but I don't think I have a choice.

After a lot of research, I built a new pc in mid August (after Intel's July 22 price cuts), It has really good components - P35 motherboard, 2GB Ram, quad core Q6600. I expected Vista to fly on this. Unfortunately, I have had nothing but problems. From constant blue screens which have reduced as I installed every hotfix and patch I could find, to application crashes and inexplicable behaviour, I never quite feel in control of the machine. I've run all sorts of hardware stress tests, memory diagnostics etc and everything is fine.

It had gotten to the point where it was unusable and I do all my computing on my laptop. So I'm going to backup all my data, do a clean format and its back to good old XP. I'll miss the search feature the most I think, and the UI but its just not worth the hassle.

I'm quite impressed with Leopard's usability features such as QuickLook and TimeMachine. Yet, I am also dissapointed that all of these are possible today in Windows (and specifically Vista), yet Microsoft and 3rd party vendors seem to lack the ability/desire to use them.

TimeMachine
.. is one of Leopard's most hyped features, and with good reason. It finally offers normal users a simple, consistent and powerful way to do backup and system recovery. But if you look under the hood, Vista has had this technology since long, ever since the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) debuted in Windows 2003 server.

VSS is technically better and much more powerful than TimeMachine - it can offload the copies to hardware if present, it works on a block rather than file level, its districubted and extensible. But in typical Microsoft fashion, the UI (previous versions tab and System restore) is not nearly as easy to use, and much of the features are hidden since apps don't make use of them. e.g. in Leopard AddreessBook is aware of system snapshots and can search them. In Windows the only apps that seem to use VSS are imaging and backup programs.

I don't care for the starry backgrounds, but why can't this be implemented on Windows fairly quickly?


QuickLook
More than anything else, this is the one thing that stands out most in daily use. Yet most reviews never mention that Vista already has this too! Its called the preview pane and any app can register handlers for it, much like in OSX. So why don't we use it more - because the UI is clunky, its only in explorer and and once again, other apps don't take advantage of it.

Stacks, Spotlight etc
To me, these are not sufficiently different from the equivalent in Windows or that useful, so I won't discuss them.