My Movie Finder for 7MC – Metadata Nirvana
by Michael Healy @ 8:45 am on May 2nd, 2009 in metadata, movie library, programs with 15 Comments
With the recent flurry of metadata retrieval tools available is there really a place for yet another one? With the introduction of My Movie Finder for 7MC you may find yourself asking if there’s room for those who came before. Not only does this tool slim down metadata retrieval to it’s simplest form but it often gets more accurate and complete metadata than any other tool I’ve used.
Most metadata tools are somewhat painful, forcing you to scour online databases for somewhat complete movie information and then edit them to your liking afterwards. Going through hundreds of movies is enough to give you carpal tunnel. This is what seperates My Movie Finder from the rest, you simply select the movies and press a button. Everything should be this easy!
I admit that I was skeptical at first as well but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t really that easy. After downloading My Movie Finder and extracting the zip file to your hard drive, launch the program and set your movie folder location. The list box at the bottom will populate with your movie collection with an indicator of the current status of a movie’s metadata.
Select any movies you want My Movie Finder to download metadata for and press the “Generate Movie Details” button. The program then goes out and downloads metadata that’s compatible with the built-in AMG functions of Media Center.
This is one of the best features of My Movie Finder, other services provide generated disk identifications that may return messy information and titles for your movies. My Movie Finder returns nice clean movie names which lets Media Center retrieve all that extra AMG data.
The results are much nicer than many of the other options out there and the work involved is a fraction of the amount required. There were a few results that returned movie titles with “[P&S]” or “[2 DISCS]” but this can be solved by right-clicking the listing in My Movie Finder and selecting “Manual Movie Lookup” which allows you to enter your own search string and once you’ve found the proper result press ”Use Search Result”. Using this option the program will scrape the current page for the movie listing instead of the one found automatically.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove (Antoine de Saint-Exupery). The sleek and simple interface of My Movie Finder for 7MC make it hard to beat for both the beginner and the experienced Media Center user because no one likes to waste their time searching for metadata content.
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