It always makes me chuckle when we watch a movie, and see that notice at the beginning that it “has been formatted to fit your screen.” Nowadays most televisions are wide-screen, and those movies have not been formatted to fit them; they’ve been formatted to not fit them!

Speaking of movies, I found a movie database program I really like. We have hundreds of DVD’s. I have a hard time keeping track of them all. Moreover, most of our DVD’s are in a single, several-hundred-disc changer. That makes it easier to “get one out” to play it, but harder to browse them to decide what we want. (We have to keep a list.) The other movie information isn’t available this way, either: playing time, rating, etc.

To solve these (admittedly minor) problems, I went looking for some movie database software, and found All My Movies. This is sooo easy to use. It utilizes several online databases, so it can auto-fill the information for you for most movies. You can enter either the title or (in the case of most DVD’s) the UPC bar code numbers and the program will look the movie up. It provides you with the title, actors’ names, producers’ names, rating (and reason for the rating), cover image, playing time, description, etc. (I did find that it seemed to want to keep looking, even after it had filled in the information. I just exited out of the search box and moved on.)

There are a couple other features in this software that I found particularly handy. One is a lending field. If you lend a movie out, it lets you enter the name of the person to whom it is on loan, as well as a “due date.” You can even search for “overdue” movies. The second is even better. When the user enters a season of a television show on DVD, it lists all of the episodes, with names and descriptions! We have a good handful of “seasons,” (including three consecutive seasons of NCIS) so this is a tremendous help.

The completed list can be exported to text, HTML (for posting on the web), or an Excel spreadsheet.