I am a big fan of watching and collecting movies. This hobby started when I was a kid and used VHS recorder to tape everything I could get into my fingers. I had a huge collection of tapes and I had labeled them all properly and ordered them in my private archives. Today, 30 years later, I haven’t changed a bit when it comes to movies. Except that I stopped caring about common physical storages like VHS, DVD or Blu-Ray catching dust. Instead I specialized on 100% digital archive copies and in this article, I want to share with you how to create a stunning movie collection for your PC (if you have a MAC you are not welcome here – no joke, klick away!).
Creating Back-ups from your DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s
This is the most boring part of the process and I will not go into details about how you can achieve this. There are tons of tools out there that allow you to create digital copies out of your physical discs. In fact, this is recommended since all discs will stop working sooner or later. Is it legal to make a back-up? I am not a lawyer and I don’t give a FUCK! But some quick search will show that chances are good that no SWAT team will raid you tomorrow for doing that.
Use Movie Posters for Previews
Having your movie collection on your computer has a huge disadvantage: It looks ugly by default! And I am not talking about the quality of the movie. I am meaning the preview icon. On Windows this is usually a snapshot from the movie with fake film tape holes on the side. That is the opposite of nice. I wanted to have all my videos with the original poster as a preview.
With Google image search you can quickly find high quality posters for most movies. But to be honest, that wasn’t good enough for me. Usually these posters are cluttered with tons of text and I don’t like that. Luckily I found the wonderful website Fanart.tv where you get the greatest fan-made posters you can possibly hope for. Most of them are just the original ones without any extra text. Sometimes you even got some jewels that look much better than the original.
Convert your movies to MP4
After you got the poster you will have to include it into the movie file itself. This only works with MP4 files and doesn’t support MKV at all. If you are one of those fanatic MKV fans please join the MAC users now. If you think MP4 is just good enough then you can continue with downloading the free Handbrake. This is an awesome tool to convert your MKV’s and other formats. It will also allow you to reduce the file size from gigantic blu-ray back-ups to whatever you prefer instead.
Add the poster to the movie meta data
Now you can insert the poster into the movies meta data. For that you need another free tool called Media Monkey. Open the movie with it, right-click the movie in the play-list and select “properties”. Here you’ll find a tab called “Artwork” where you add your movie poster. When you are finished you can already see the new file preview icon in form of the poster. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Get a proper file browser
Finally, you might want to have a better way to browse through your files. The windows Explorer has tiny preview icons. The largest size is 256x256px which doesn’t work well on high-res screens and wastes tons of space because they are always square. After going through many tools, I found the XYplorer. It is a premium tool, but you might find an older version for free somewhere. It has many functions, but I was initially only interested in one: Giant preview icons!
You can set up your own preferences for the size. I am currently running two views with 200x300px and 300x450px. Although this wasn’t the reason the get XYplorer, another cool feature is the ability to tag files. This way I can now filter for categories like a watchlist or genres.
That's it! How do you like your new movie library? Are you using other tools? or do you prefer looking at the plastic boxes?
Woooooowww!!!!
Keep shares informations to others Good movies and awesome post @flauwy!!
Sweet, gonna try this out! How much time would it take to insert / configure 1500 films?
That depends: Are your files already all or mostly in MP4? Then you just need to search for the posters and add them. One movie takes less than 30 seconds when you know what you are doing. if you still need to convert tons of movies, well, that will take much much longer.
Most of these files are in .mp4 and .mkv format. Luckily they're already labeled nicely!
I just tested Kodi and I must say for somebody who hasn't done any effort before this is ideal. It will do all the work for you. Sadly it only works within Kodi but it has many skins to create nice libraries. I guess I have to do another post about it. ;)
i use kodi much faster these days ;)
I remember to have tested Kodi as well. But I didn't like it because it was more made for TV and doesn't work well for very large libraries at least that was how I felt about it. Also the automatic thumbnails were often not what I wanted. But that was three years ago. Maybe I should give it another try. What do you like about it?
convience. i grab torrents, stick them on a 3tb drive, it auto scans for cover art, simple, fast, addons for twitch so i can watch my fav streamers. makes everything simple.
Yeah, I tested it now. Looks 100% different to 3 years ago. Kind of depressing that I spend two years for my library every single day and now Kodi does that in 10 minutes. However, I don't like Kodi since it is made for TV and not for PC's. I prefer a proper file browser and files that always look the same and not just with one program. And how do I close Kodi? I always have to do alt+F4 and force it to close.
ah you run on pc, i don't do that. i have a raspberry pi 3 connected to a dedicated screen seperate connected via gigabit internet to my main machine and a 3tb networked drive. it's all super easy ftp sends across the network and then it auto searches. it's simple. no messing, i just plugin and turn on and off as i need it -- i do all the file browsing via ftp.
But how do you browse your files then? What program? If you still use Kodi for that then there is no difference to where you store the files and how you receive them if you still look at them the same way.
so i have a 3tb drive with all my movies and music on, it's all organized via ftp from my desktop machine on that NAS drive --- i don't watch them on the desktop machine where i often download my content from, i just send it across to that NAS, the movies tab/tv tab scans folders on the NAS drive for updates and auto searches for the cover images so when i get to watch later on in the night it's ready to go -- did i answer ya question don't thin i did - i use yummy ftp on mac to do the uploading, organzing of the files to put them in the right auto detecting folders.
i have kodi running on the pi3 as a booting sd card but my files are on a NAS and my pi goes into a switch, the raspberry pi is on my local network so it's easy to send files across to it, i have setup folders to search on the pi across the network.
Totally informative! As a movie junky, I appreciate the great resource u created here! upvoted and following!
@dakini5d
This seems like a lot of work but looks nice and clean
It is a lot of work. Took ne a year to create it all in the first place, then I lost everything when my harddrive broke and then it took me another year to do it again.
Wow looks awasome! Defenitely gonna try it! Thank you!
I use handbrake on my recorded files before I edit them (reduces loading times in editors) and after I finished rendering them (reduces size).
Without handbrake it would take twice as long to upload a video.
Oh yeah, another good use for it. Great free alternative to Adobe Media Encoder but since I have the CC subscription already I use that instead.
A really clear setup guide! Thanks! Upvoted & followed!
Thanks for the help!
I really need to learn how to create a Stunning Movie Library For Your PC
keep it up!!!! thanks! bye...
I STILL have not seen the original Star Wars. I'm way behind! :)
I love movies but I've only seen just 1 movie this year Because of how busy I get.
Very Good post..
I also like to watch and collect movies..
beautiful article ! great info ! thanks for sharing nice infos with us !
img credz: pixabay.com
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Nice movie list... Still in love with Ted 2 and ninja turtles♥♥
For a person like me, who only keeps digital prints, this sounds like lot of work, lol the lazy me. But i am pretty sure it is something interesting to do when you start. All i do is create separate folders for my movies based on their languages and that's all.
I like to scroll through the videos and just look at the covers.