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What is the Best Movie Collection Organizer Program
skwire:
FWIW, I use and like Boxee. :D
JavaJones:
That's a good vote of confidence. :D What is your particular setup? Physical media or file-based (or both)? Going through a large TV? PC-based or Boxee hardware? What other options have you tried?
- Oshyan
skwire:
I use Boxee on a stand-alone media PC connected to a 42" plasma. All media is retrieved over the network from my Windows Home Server file server. Physical media such as Blu-ray and DVDs is played from a PlayStation 3.
However, I also use Boxee on my regular PC for a single-purpose which will take a bit of explaining. I buy the MLB.TV baseball package every year but, over the past few years, they switched from using normal streaming video to a hulking, CPU-sucking, Flash-driven video player travesty. It is terrible. Simply trying to watch a baseball game in that drives my CPU to 100% and is pretty much unwatchable since the video is so jittery. However...queue in Boxee. It has the ability to tap into the regular h.264 feeds for the MLB games so I just run Boxee in windowed mode on my computer while I work. The CPU usage is MUCH less and the video is silky-smooth. Plus, I can resize the game window to whatever size I want. Does that make sense?
JavaJones:
Makes total sense. Go Boxee! Hehe.
Some further commentary on Media Companion:
This one looks promising, but as I said it's kind of in transition, moving to open source. That in itself may be promising, or may not be. ;)
Feature-wise it's decent, but the UI is a bit clunky. I'm also seeing some crashes/errors (running Win7 x64 here). I think they might be permissions issues, but none of the other apps I've tested seem to have such problems, and what issues they have run into generally don't throw "stop" type errors (more like "error accessing file" or whatever).
Media Companion has also had trouble identifying a number of my files just in my test directory. Worse, it seems hard to really correct. I guess just changing the title of the file is what I have to do (rather than the title "alias" that it scans for, which other apps let you do).
Finally, perhaps the biggest irritation is that it dumped a bunch of files all over my media directory. This may well be configurable, and for some people would actually be great (in fact I think this is why it works with XBMC fairly well, because that app reads the files it puts in the media folders), but personally I want my folders uncluttered. It adds not only NFO files for all films, but also a bunch of other files for actors and other things, along with fan art and cover art. All of it in the source folder of the media it represents. If that works for you then Media Companion may be worth a look in a few months once things stabilize, but for now I'd say it's a pass vs. other more mature free options.
I'll get back to Boxee with more detail soon. Still looking good...
- Oshyan
superboyac:
Man, Oshyan is really doing us a big service here. This is a lot of legwork and analysis. Thanks dude.
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