How do I Input my Video Collection?
The beauty of DVDpedia is that it is so simple to use yet so powerful. To add a video to your collection you click on the Add button and type in the keywords or UPC code you are looking for. Pushing the search button will search the internet for cover images, descriptions, stars, genre, rating and more to complete your video collection entry. The DVDpedia search capability provides an enormous amount of information about your video that will be saved to your database when you add your video. You can then access this information when viewing your collection using DVDpedia. I had created my own video database using Filemaker but DVDpedia blows it away with its automatic data entry capability along with large images of the movie cover art. Look at the data returned by a search on Lion King in the image below. All of this data is added automatically to your collection when you push the Add button on the window below. The search shows that 10 titles were found and you can click through them to find the video that you want to add. I put 165 movies into my collection so far and less than 5 videos were not found using DVDpedia's internet search engine. I simply added them manually. You keep adding your videos until all of your collection is in DVDpedia. This gives you a video collection database that is very informative and easy to search.



Multiple Collections
DVDpedia allows you to add multiple video collections, import and export collections and even create a smart collection that is a subset of your original collection. If your family or friends are also using DVDpedia you can import their collections and view them as well. You can track borrowed videos, listing who borrowed them and on what date using available fields in the advanced tab of DVDpedia. The credits tab even lists the actors and the role they played. Sharing videos and tracking where they are is a very nice feature of DVDpedia.

Info Drawer
The image on the right shows you the Info Drawer feature of DVDpedia. This image comes out of the side of your DVDpedia database by simply selecting it under the window menu or typing command-i. It can be set to come out of the right or left side and provides a nice scrollable window full of information on any video selected in your collection. You can see this information by pushing the edit button too but it is so much nicer to just touch on a video and have the Info Drawer display all of the video information. The image on the right shows you a small view of what to expect from the Info Drawer. It includes a summary and lots of information plus links for purchasing and similar videos you may be interested in.

More DVDpedia Uses
While DVDpedia is primarily designed for DVD and VHS collections you can also use it for other videos as well. For instance, I use EyeTV USB to record TV shows and movies that I am interested in. The videos I want to save are recorded to DVD using Toast. Then I use DVDpedia to track what disk number each recording is on. If I want to go back and view an earlier recording DVDpedia can tell me what disk it is on. You will find that many TV movies have DVD information available on the internet that can be imported into your DVDpedia collection. In addition, you can always add entries manually for any original videos like home movies, family vacations, weddings. You can have them listed in a special collection or in one large video collection. I am sure you will find other uses for DVDpedia too. Some other uses I can see DVDpedia might be helpful with are suggesting other movies you might want to see or using it as a video guide. If you like movies, DVDpedia is a very nice video information tool worth looking at.

Pros

Cons
NONE

System requirements
Requires MacOS X 10.2 or higher.


DVDpedia gets 5 AMUGs out of 5!
DVDpedia gives you the tools to create an awesome video database. It automatically fills in a large amount of data about your videos that it discovers on the internet along with cover art. Nora from Bruji stated that a future version of DVDpedia will include Rendevouz support for network viewing. Bruji is also working on two new products called Bookpedia and Cdpedia. Can you guess what they do? A demo version of DVDpedia limited to 10 entries is available. Once you try DVDpedia you will wonder how you organized your videos without it. You can purchase it for $18 or download the demo version at http://www.bruji.com/dvdpedia/.

Contact Information:
email dvdpedia@bruji.com
web http://www.bruji.com/

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Arizona Macintosh Users Group, Inc. (AMUG)
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