Video Collection Managers

I was looking for something to help me manage my movies collection. Ubuntu comes with many collection manager applications. In this post I will talk about three of them.

GCstar

Predecessor of Gcfilms which is not developed any more. GCstar is not just a movie manager. Basically it is a collection manager to manage your movies, music, games, books, etc. It is a GTK/Perl application and blends well with in Ubuntu. It has many features that you would want from your personal collection manager and then a few more. For example:

• When you add a new item to your collection you can search and retrieve information about that item from the internet with just one click.
• You can import your collection data from other catalog or collection managers such as Alexander, DVD Profiler, Ant Video Manager, tellico, etc.
• GCstar also allows you to export your data in CSV, HTML, LATEX, SQL, .tar.gz, tellico and XML formats. I particularly loved the way it exports the in HTML format. The default templates are quite good and the page generated is good enough to be uploaded to a web server. See my sample list.
• You can locate the video file on your hard disk and play it.

Griffith

Griffith is a simple media collection manager. It does not have as many features as GCstar but it is good enough to maintain a list of your collection. Just like GCstar it can fetch information from the internet, retrieve thumbnail posters from the web. Griffith can export the collection in PDF, HTML, iPOD, CSV and XML formats. I didn’t like the PDF it generated which was just a simple list with the title of the movies. I liked the HTML page it generated which had the links to the imdb pages for the movies, poster thumbnails and a few other details. See my sample list

There were a few little things that I didn’t like about Griffith. First of all Griffith does not have a play button. Which means if I have my collection of movies saved on my hard disk there is no way I can play the movie from inside the Griffith. Secondly, I can not understand how to add my own tags to the movies.

Tellico

Tellico is a collection manager for KDE. It has all the features of GCstar and then some more. It can be used to manage your collections of books, games, movies, coins, stamps, wine, files, etc. You can import GCstar and Griffith data into tellico. You can also import and export data in various other formats (See my tellico sample list). Tellico beats GCstar with the “Search and Add” option. Using this option you can search the web for an item, fetch the information, add it, and then keep searching for other items to be added. This makes adding items to tellico faster than GCstar.

Definitely Tellico wins with a clear margin for its intutive approach to manage, display, import, export, search, retrieve and manipulate data. But since I use Ubuntu with Gnome Desktop environment I would stick to GCstar.

Noumaan Yaqoob

I am a full-time WordPress blogger, I write tutorials about using WordPress, WordPress themes and plugins. Need help with your website? Feel free to contact me.

See Full Bio