EMM was the best one on the market. I bought it, however I just don't have the time to process the sheer volume of movies and found that it takes too long to manage the database. It used to be very slow in terms of performance too, however its much quicker these days.
Something that takes so long is not acceptable for me anymore.
So i'd say EMM is the best on the market, however, every movie manager has the following set of flaws:
THE BIGGY
The database violates even basic normalisation and I have not seen a single db that follows the relational model. For people that aren't IT literate, the concept of a modern database was tied down to some key criteria and a BIGGY, and i mean a biggy, is that facts should be stored once and only once. No manager on the market that i have seen does this. This suggests that the applications just haven't been designed before being created in a way that really surprises me, or that they have been created to immediate store single entries and then bloated into commercial applications.
AUTOMATION
There is very few points of automation in any of the applications. I've not seen a single application that if i point it at a directory, say:
Title.1999.DVDrip.Xvid.cd1.avi
Title.1999.DVDrip.Xvid.cd1.srt
Title.1999.DVDrip.Xvid.cd1.avi
Title.1999.DVDrip.Xvid.cd2.srt
etc.
Will automatically add an entry for title, noting it is a dvdrip, import the specs from the avis, recognise the avis are from one release, go onto imdb and then search for not only title but then grep for the year(!!!!!) importing the result's information. Not one single cataloguer.
Now the managers are all prettier and have more functionality, but they all fail on a most base level of storage of data and this is major point of contention i have with them. I also think its a major failure.
What i started doing a few years ago but got sidelined because dead-donkey needed a site writing much more urgently, was actually start writing my own app in java with a proper backend database. Now in a very eerie state of affairs i dug up the code and have got some reuse out of it (mostly entity classes). Some of you might guess i work in a technical field, although its not directly programmatical, i work with the stuff all day. I decided i need to push my own 'reskilling' agenda and thought having a look see at this project that i desperately need to manage my movies. since its reskilling, and i've had years of reflection some of my original thoughts have been tuned. For example i had a lot of problems writing time consuming database access code; now i've decided i'll learn hibernate to do that stuff since its applicable to the software that's written at work. Anyway, i just thought it was a bit eerie you mentioned your annoyance at existing solutions, although your talking at a very reporty level and my huge concern is the sheer amount of trash data that's stored in such ineffective and basic solutions and the absense of automation. My idea stems around making life easier, managing data properally and efficiently, providing as much automation as possible because the application should be there to make things easier and not time consuming, and ultimately just adding features that would be neat to have, off the top of my head one of the use cases would be preventing duplicates (For example allowing something to sit in your system tray, intercept ed2k clicks and running a hash check before rejecting/passing through the link), etc. Things like generating screenshots automatically, and if an api was available checking for bad cropping and marking the entry as a nuke needing replacing.
To me stuff like posters aren't such a big deal as recording the movie efficiently, and since none of the cataloguers i could find were doing that i've kind of abandoned hope of finding a commercial cataloguer that's suitable for cataloguing in the way i need it to
), am going to be writing unit tests, am building the entities and some of the hibernate mappings. Its all on borrowed time though, i'm so busy all of the time at work i'm likely going to crash soon i fear (should be interesting).
