Access DVD is movie database software for Windows that makes managing your movie collection easy and fun. It's perfect for any size movie collection, and has lot's of great features. You can find the movie you're looking for in seconds with advanced search, filter, and sorting capabilities. Movies can be played using your favorite playback program with the click of a button. Access DVD can even retrieve detailed movie information from the Internet.
Best movie collector software I've tried out of many.
adamata
Pros
Access DVD has an awesome very clean user interface. It looks like something that would have shipped with Windows 7. It has the same ribbon menu as Windows 7 Paint and Wordpad. It also has tons of features and retrieve movie information online.
Cons
Access DVD isn't the best title for this program since it catalogs way more than just DVD's. It does pretty much everything as far as I can see. It does lot's of file types on my computer and can do Blu-ray, VHS, MiniDV, pretty much anything.
Summary
I've tried a bunch of similar programs such as Collectorz Movie Collector, Movie Label, some other free ones, and THIS WAS MY FAVORITE.
It seems to have way more USEFUL features, and yet it seemed easier to use with a less cluttered user interface than some other programs. It also allows the choice of the Windows 7 Ribbon menu or a plain menu and toolbars like classic windows programs.
Among the many useful features including being able to easily enter movies by scanning your PC or entering titles, it can retrieve tons of information and images for your movies from the internet. It couldn't be easier to add movies to your collection. You can also edit movie information manually, or completely manually enter a movie and all it's information. This is another great feature I like for my camcorder movies. It also seems capable of handling every video file type I have on my computer, and you can manage your actual discs too.
Another cool feature is it can rename an unlimited number of pictures/images for a movie with the click of a button. So if you're not happy with the image that was downloaded for whatever reason (dimensions too small or preferred DVD instead of Blu-ray art) you can download high-quality images from the internet, save them, then let Access DVD rename them all for you. This is not only nice for managing your images but Access DVD also renames them in a way that it recognizes all of them and you can cycle through all the different images you have for a specific movie from within the program. It's really cool.
It will also automatically create thumbnail images at specific sizes for the Thumbnails View feature so it'll use less memory and run much faster by loading all your thumbnail images into memory at once giving you much better performance without constantly reloading images like in Windows Explorer. It's much better than the way Windows Explorer does it. Windows Explorer just loads the original images however big they are then if you scroll down new images load and the ones that fall off the screen unload, so if you scroll up and down in a folder with lots of high-quality/high-resolution images you constantly have to wait for images to reload all the time. This is more of a problem with slower computers, but either way not a problem at all with Access DVD.
Thumbnails view is awesome. It supports sizes from I believe 64x64 to 512x512 pixels which means as soon as I get my first 2160p display monitor I'll still be able to make out what the actual images are. Plus it's just nice have a full range of flexibility over the size.
Searching is really easy, simply start typing and the auto-complete feature will find the movie you want before you even finish typing it. It's so cool. You can also set filters. So if you want to choose a movie to watch with your kids and just want to see movies rated "G", and "PG", it couldn't be easier. One click to open the filters window and simply click on "G" and "PG" in the MPAA Ratings box, and boom, only "G" and "PG" movies are shown. You can also simply click a column heading to sort any column you want by ascending or descending order, and it's fast no matter how many movies it seems. A couple of programs I've tried get really slow with lots of movies, but not this one.
Playing movies is awesome too, especially if you like playing your movies with VLC media player. You can set Access DVD to automatically play in full-screen and/or skip menus if it's a DVD folder you're playing. For all other programs, you just get straight playback. I've tested it with Windows Media Player, Cyberlink PowerDVD, and Media Player Classic that came with the K-Lite Codec Pack. They all work with Access DVD no problem.
Yet another cool feature, you can have as many hard drives or folders filled with movies and Access DVD can handle all of them. THIS IS WHY I NEEDED A MOVIE ORGANIZER PROGRAM IN THE FIRST PLACE. It was way too hard to keep track of movies. Having multiple hard rives filled with movies, if I wanted to watch a certain movie I knew I had, I had know idea which hard drive it was on. So I would have to perform a search on each drive one at a time using Windows Explorer which is horribly slow by the way. Now with Access DVD, I do one extremely fast search and it knows exactly where the movie is and I can even play it without even leaving Access DVD. This reminds me, the only feature it seems to be missing is it doesn't have a "movies on loan" feature but again, if you're like me, all my movies are on my hard drive and therefore don't get lent out anyway. So it's not a feature I care to have anyway. But I'm sure we'll see this feature get added sooner than later.
I'm sure I'm leaving something out. This program has so many features, but take my word for it, it's awesome and worth every penny. Reading over the company website, the developers seem pretty determined to keep building on it too. I'm sure Access DVD is here to stay. Enjoy!<br /><br /><span class='notifyMsg'> Updated </span>on Jul 22, 2011<p/>One problem I had that I forgot to mention is I couldn't find the Setup Password for the demo download on here (on cnet), but it's actually listed on the company's product page at www.AccessDVD.info. The password is "download.cnet.com.demo" without the quotes of course.