Coollector Movie Database

Movie lovers usually end up with big video collections, not to mention big trivia collections. Coollector Movie Database can help you manage both your collection and your obsession. Its Movie Encyclopedia is an ever-growing database of tens of thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows, including credits. There's also a personal Owned Videos database, as well as an Existing Videos feature that automatically scans various merchants and displays video titles in print in various formats; it even computes and displays the best price for each. It's free, too.

Coollector's interface is split into side-by-side panels, with the program's three databases displayed in tabs on the left side with individual entries and search results on the right. Drop-down menus for Movies and Persons let us filter search results by various criteria. The Tools and Help entries were fairly typical; most options involved choosing which video formats to display and where best prices should appear. We were surprised not to see a search box but quickly learned that search strings appear automatically with rotated results when you start typing, which is great when you're not quite sure of a title or name. However, you must still be in either the Movies or Persons section to search either category, and there seems to be no global search. The database itself is pretty comprehensive and easy to use. Nearly every film has a cover shot, and many actors have head shots. The credits we checked were fairly complete, with the most notable absence being TV show credits for performers. Adding videos to our Owned Video database was as easy as clicking on the right title and format; pop-ups made editing the data easy, too. One thing sets Coollector Movie Database above all others, in our opinion: When you click on an actor's page, it displays either his or her birth date and current age; or birth and death dates, age at death, and number of years since they died. Call it Morbid Movie Mania; we just love that stuff.

While its film database offers a lot of easily accessible information, Coollector Movie Database probably won't supplant the Internet Movie Database as the database of record for the motion picture arts, but it doesn't try to be comprehensive, just useful, especially to collectors. That's a part it plays well.