I have a ton of movies (non-copyrighted) all in avi and xvid format. what would be a aesthetically pleasing way to organize these maybe pull the dvd cover from imdb?
Surefuly if the DVD cover is on IMDB then they are copyrighted? Generally the most aesthetically pleasing solution is to buy the original DVDs
there are plenty of old movies that have fallen out of copyright,....like allot of Bella Lugosi movies. I have far to many movies to have physical DVD cases for, that's like saying all my cds should be in jewel cases
If you put each in a folder along with an image of the cover, will windows put a thumb of the cover on the folder icon like it does for folders in My Pictures? That would work quite well if it does so, you'd have each film in an appropriately named folder with the cover on it.
You could look into Media Jukebox - it gives a ton of control, custom fields, and such. It's not the greatest player in the world though. I would see if there are any projects that provide a backend for VLC. Another choice would be to look into HTPC software as quite a bit of that has organization built into it. Let us know what you find.
have a look at this video, it's using this software (meedio ultimate download link on the right), with the 'Chrome' theme. Currently using/playing around with it, and it's great so far. The database skims IMDB and downloads the info, summary, star rating, etc... (called scraping) or XBMC, had a play, really good as well, and fluid navigation, but not as customizable (video here) if you just want place to download dvd covers or fanart, there's loads of places...but not to sure about getting really old/obscure covers. such as here or here
thanks for the input, meedio seems cool. I tried it before I posted and I was having some issues with the plug-ins, guess I will give it another shot.
I suggest using Movienizer, you can organize your movies very easily and get all the information and pictures of the movie from IMDB and other on-line databases. I've been using it for over a year and am very satisfied with the fucnctionality of this tool.
I use a combination of media browser plugin for Media center, Media scout to retrieve all the movie data, and Stark Covers to make it all look pretty. EDIT: all that ^^ looks something like this
generally the standard way of sorting movies is Movies\ Movie name \ Movie name.ext Movies\ Movie name2 \ Movie name2.ext etc then use something like metabrowser to grab the data for each file (you'll be amazed how easy this bit is) personally i Use XBMC (installed onto a win7 box see below) as i find it a little sharper than mediabrowser XBMC then processes your files and adds them to your library (every so often i would try to export the library)