Conclusion

CeeMedia is a small program that is in the early stages of its development. Nevertheless, I have found that it is a useful tool to catalogue my movie collection. It is quick to add movies to the database, and there is an extensive number of fields to store information about your DVDs. You can also flag individual movies to indicate that they have been lent out, ones that you have watched (handy if you buy lots of DVDs but never seem to get round to watching them all), or if the film is a particular favourite.

However, I would prefer that more of these fields would be automatically populated, as manually typing in lots of information is no fun! None of the information sources that CeeMedia use would populate the "Plot" field, which is one of the most essential fields. Only the IMDb source populates the Review box with a detailed review of the film. This is no doubt due to copyright issues, as database sources are not particularly keen on allowing third party software to collate and store their information, without prior agreement. Even though Collectorz.com (developers of the Movie Collector software for Windows) has negotiated licenses with some of the various information sources, they had to remove The All Movie Guide as a source due to legal reasons. So clearly there is a limit to how far GPL software can go in this regard.

I would love to see a few of the following features added to CeeMedia, which would help it to become (for me) an essential Linux program:

• Printing support - so that I can print out a particular movie, or the collection (handy for insurance purposes).
• Export entries to HTML.
• Barcode support.
• Wizards to allow multiple movies to be added in one go, rather than individually adding entries.

I will be closely tracking the development of CeeMedia. If you would like to do the same, or to download the software, you can visit the website at http://ceemedia.sosdg.org/.

Back to Introduction

1. Introduction
2. In operation
3. Conclusion