DVD Profiler - List 'Em Or Lose 'Em! (DVD profiler)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	DVD profiler
Date:	06/02/07 (1048 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free version. Simple to input when all is going smoothly

Disadvantages: More fiddly when you have to resort to less automated input methods

I’ve got a pretty big DVD collection, somewhere around 400 disks, but before anyone starts trying to tot-up the cost, many of these are ex-rental disks bought from Blockbuster after the initial rush to rent them has died down, for example, when they are running one of their 3 for £18 or even 4 for £20 offers.

Any that prove to be only worth one showing (amongst 4 of us) are then passed onto the local Oxfam shop, where, hopefully, my modest attempts at recycling will do some good elsewhere. After all, a couple of quid each is reasonable compared to the cinema, even if we give it away afterwards.

This, along with lending them to friends, leads to an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing in my collection, making it doubly important to keep track of what I’ve got, if only so I don’t go and buy them or rent them all over again – this has happened.

DVD PROFILER

This is where a cataloguing utility like DVD Profiler comes in very handy.

Downloadable from the www.intervocative.com website, the free version 2.4 is a 3.9 megabyte download file. It’s notable that this free version hasn’t altered since 2005.

It’s also important to register with Intervocative, using your e-mail address and a password. This does not imply that you will be hounded for money later, just that you can take advantage of artwork and the extra detail concerning each disk as you input them to your own personal collection.

Your collection can not only be held and backed-up on your own drive, but can also be sent to the web, both as a quick way of letting faraway friends know what your list is looking like these days and as a further back-up. You can use the latter to reinstate your local list if you have to, for example, after a reformat of your hard drive or on buying a new PC.

Having a list could also help with insurance claims if, God forbid, you are burgled. We had a similar experience over ten years ago with a sizeable CD collection and were very grateful of our catalogue when it came to claiming.

There’s nothing odd about the initial installation, but if you’re running a firewall, if may ask you to ‘OK’ the fact that this software needs to commune with the Internet.

ADDING DISKS

This can be quite a long slog when starting from scratch, even though DVD Profiler does ‘most’ of the work for you.

For your very first disk, you will click on the ‘DVD>Add To Collection’ menu item, to find yourself prompted to ‘Refresh online profiles – yes or no’ This time round, choose ‘yes’ otherwise your local copy of DVD Profiler won’t recognise any disks you try to input, which would be VERY laborious to say the least.

Once over this hurdle, you are presented with 3 ways to add a DVD to your collection, these being ‘Add By UPC’, ‘Add By Title’ and ‘Add By Disk ID’.

There is a further option for those who’ve paid the $29.95 for the deluxe version, but it relates to the listing of forthcoming releases. Paying for this software isn’t too necessary if you don’t want news of releases, higher-grade artwork for each DVD and if you don’t mind a banner ad at the top of your screen.

ADDING BY UPC (Universal Product Code?)

Basically, you enter the digits under the bar code on the back of the box. If DVD Profiler has already ‘heard’ of it, the film title drops into place as you enter the last digit. Then all you have to do is add such details as where you bought it from, how much it cost and in what currency unit. If this sounds a bit intrusive, think how organised you’ll appear when making a future insurance claim!

Of course, if DVD Profiler doesn’t recognise your UPC, you can donate the details for upload to the DVD Profiler web-site, but be prepared for it to get fussy, needing other details like Production Date and Region.

This happens to me a lot, since the ex-rental version is frequently not listed – come to think of it, why would it be?

Another way of entering a disk onto the database is by:-

ADDING BY TITLE

As you’d expect, DVD Profiler starts making its best guess at what you’re typing as soon as you start. Of course, you need to get past ‘The’ before any drop down list starts to make any sense, as rather a lot of movie titles begin with ‘The’.

Once you’ve completed your entry, you’ll hopefully be confronted with a daunting array of likely options, but once you wade your way through the US Region 1 versions and the ‘Director’s Cuts’, you may find one that fits your description. Then the previous process of stating where it was bought and for how much takes over again.

This method is less accurate, and I only use it for stubborn missing versions. Normally, even if the UPC method doesn’t come up trumps, I supply THEM with the details including the bar code – this way the database gets the benefit of my extra information and, if accepted, it means that someone else will benefit.

ADDING BY DISK ID

This is woefully inadequate and a lot of the time doesn’t work; the idea being that you insert the disk in your DVD-ROM drive and let the disc ID do the talking. This might work fine for CD music databases 95% of the time, but DVDs just don’t seem to be labelled with any degree of consistency. I don’t use it unless all else fails. After all, there are two manual means of adding disks without resorting to this.

IF DVD PROFILER HAS HEARD OF YOUR DISK

If it has, all is fine and dandy. Not only do you get basic details as keyed in by you, but you get the benefit of a lot of other ner…..errr……enthusiasts’ efforts. Most of the time, a scan of the disks artwork adds itself to your entry, plus a full cast list and many other minutiae.

PROTECTING YOUR INVESTMENT IN TIME

There are two ways to back up your work. You can export your collection in comma-separated-value format as a .csv file to a designated directory and drive. These can be read by MS Excel amongst other things. These files can also be sucked back in through the import facility if you’re ever to start again from scratch.

Secondly, you can upload your collection to the Intervocative web-site, from whence it can be downloaded again if disaster strikes. This is also useful to give your collection a ‘web presence’. If you’d like to see my current collection, go to http://www.intervocative.com/DVDCollection.aspx/bi llynibbles where you can sort my listing alphabetically or by collection serial number, which is useful if you want to see what I’ve added recently.

This latter facility isn’t dead accurate, since, if I delete say number 250 in my list of 397, it seems to save 250 as the next spare number to be used and slots my next acquisition in there.

OTHER USES

Quite apart from helping you keep an up-to-date list, you can run your affairs like a library, since one of the local amendments you can make is to take a note of to whom you have lent a disk. Of course, you have to remove the note when you get it back, but it’s better than forgetting altogether.

Likewise, you can run database queries, for instance listing all your movies with a particular actor in them. As I’ve just found though, it only does this if the actor is mentioned in the ‘Notes’ and ‘Overview’ fields. Why they couldn’t include the Cast List in the search escapes me.

QUIRKS AND NIGGLES

I’ve two movies that steadfastly refuse to concur with either the UPC code or the Disk ID modes. One is L.A Confidential, which according to both methods is the Italian version or should I say, Edizione Speziale, complete with Italian notes and overview, and the other is my copy of Catch Me If You Can which insists on renaming itself ‘Arrêtes-moi, si tu peux’ every time I upload my collection to the web. The only way around this is to delete the offending records and use the more manual ‘Add By Title’ method, and put up with the fact that there’s no UK version listed, leaving you to opt for the US version which will then show incorrectly that you have a Region 1 disk.

To be fair, this is freeware, but I’d be a bit annoyed if the same applies to the $30 job too, and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t.

Summary: DVD databasing software with a freeware/paid for option

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