My Movie Manager

My Movie Manager is yet another movie collection managing software for windows that helps you catalogue your personal collection on your hard disk. My Movie Manager will scan your computer for movies, discover video files and attempt to identify them. Successfully identified movies will have their details downloaded from IMDB.com. The downloaded details includes a poster of the movie, the movie plot, year of release, movie rating on IMDB, director, cast, genre, runtime and a couple of others. At the end of the scan you will have a nice searchable database of your personal movie collection.

My Movie Manager can identify movies irrespective of the filenames, as it uses a unique hashing method, supported by www.opensubtitles.org to identify movies. The same hashing method is used by SubLight to match movies with subtitles and I can tell you that it works amazingly well.

The accuracy at which the software is able to identify movies is high and it works very fast too. It can go through hundreds of movies in just a couple of minutes and in the end have, maybe, only a handful of movies that it failed to identify or wrongly identified. In that case you can use the Edit button, enter the IMDB ID of the movie and correct the error.

The accuracy depends a lot on your movie source. My Movie Manager works flawless for movies downloaded from BitTorrent, because these files are public and their file hashes known. Movies you personally ripped/copied from DVDs, CDs and Blu-Ray have absolutely no chance of being identified, because their hashes are unknown and My Movie Manager happens to depend solely on file hashes to identify movies. I attempted to coax the software into identifying my personal rips with generous filenames but it failed. Filenames are apparently thrown out of the window.

All movies in your collection are displayed in a grid on the left and details of the selected movie is shown on the right. You can filter the movies by genre and sort them by date added, year, title, IMDB rating and your own rating. A search function lets you easily search for movies by director, cast, plot, year, language etc. Other features included with the software are the ability to set movies as watched, set favorites, view IMDB page of the movie, and play the movie in your default video player.

Other movie managers that I suggest: Movie Explorer and Movie Monkey.
Also see: 5 free movie organizers for managing your personal collection

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FlickChart: Rank Movies or Find New Ones to Watch

Can’t decide which movie you should watch next? Try FlickChart, a website that allows you to rank movies and create your own personal chart of favorites, browse movies ranked by others and discover new movies to watch. Flickchart offers a unique way to rate movies. Instead of rating movies in a scale of 1 to 10, two movies are pitted against each other. You pick the one you like the most, and two new movies go head-to-head. If you haven’t seen one of the movies, click a button and the movie is replaced by another movie. If you haven’t seen either of the movies, click another button and two new movies will lock horn.

As you rank movies, a list of your top 20 movies starts to take shape. The more movies you rank, the better the list starts reflecting your tastes. Eventually, you get recurring movies in new match-ups. Say you like The Terminator better than The Dark Knight, but you like Back to the Future more than The Terminator, then you like Back to the Future better than The Dark Knight too and so it appears ahead of both.

But what do you do when they pit Little Miss Sunshine against The Usual Suspect? Both are great movies but how does one choose between movies of two different genre? To avoid such conflict, you can filter the movies based on genre, release year, decade, actor/director, and studio or leave it open to compare any movie with any other.

Once you've ranked enough movies to create a list of movies you have seen, you also build up a complementary list of movies that you haven’t seen. This list contains movies that have been favorably ranked by the FlickChart community and it’s a pretty good place to start debating which to watch next.

FlickChart classifies movies by extremely narrow genre, which is one of the strongest feature of the website. Instead of board categories such as thriller, drama, action and romance, Flickchart uses very narrow genres. Some examples of genres used by Flickchart are: Action comedy, Adventure comedy, Apocalyptic film, Court room drama, Disaster film, Girls with guns, Glamorized spy film, Unglamorized spy film, Jungle movie, Road movie, Whodunit, Satire etc. Aside from genres, Flickchart also knows the actors, directors, and release dates of all the films, so you can further break down the list into any combination you choose.

Ranking movies in FlickChart is so addicting that it’s not uncommon for users to tirelessly continue ranking movies for hours at a time. The founders told Mashable that “10% of all site visitors come back more than 200 times, and 60% of all visitors are repeat customers. Better yet, they say, there’s a sizable chunk of Flickchart’s user base who have accumulated more than 300,000 rankings a piece.”

One of the drawbacks of the site is the lack of any meaningful information about the movies themselves, apart from the cast and director. So if you want to checkout why a movie is so loved (or hated) you’ll have to rely on another website like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes.

Also see other recommendation sites: FilmGator, HelloMovies, NanoCrowd

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Watch Tons of B-grade Troma Movies on YouTube

YouTube is no stranger to B-grade movies. Just head to Youtube.com/movies to see the marvelous collection of Indian movies that typically run on cheesy theaters and aired on late night “local” channels. But if you are lusting for some serious B-grade stuff, then you should have Troma Entertainment productions high on your list. This giant in the world of B-movies have just released more than 150 movies from their catalogue including classics like The Toxic Avenger, Redneck Zombies and the Bela Lugosi starrer The Corpse Vanishes on YouTube for full viewing.

Troma films are well known in the entertainment industry for shoddy film making. Their overtly sexual and intentionally sadistic, gory, and blatant graphic violence on screen is so typical that the term "Troma film" has become synonymous with these characteristics. Troma is known to reuse the same props, actors, and scenes repeatedly, sometimes to save money. At a certain point, this became another hallmark of Troma.

Incidentally, Troma Entertainment takes pride at either introducing or featuring several rising talents of Hollywood such as Carmen Electra (The Chosen One), Billy Bob Thornton (Chopper Chicks in Zombietown), Kevin Costner (Sizzle Beach, U.S.A.), Samuel L. Jackson (Def by Temptation), Marisa Tomei (The Toxic Avenger), and many others before they were discovered. Another Academy Award winning director, Oliver Stone, made his debut as an actor in The Battle of Love's Return. Their gleefully tasteless flicks have also influenced directors like Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, James Gunn, and Peter Jackson.

Troma Entertainment founder Lloyd Kaufman says the company is uploading these movies to YouTube to generate publicity to all their old films as well as their upcoming projects.

[via TechDirt]

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