Movie Catalogs

I have turned out to be a movie freak during the past couple of months. With my DVDs piling up, I needed some cataloging software that can help me keep a record of all my precious DVDs while at the same time can compile the necessary movie information from the internet. I usually rely on IMDB for movie ratings and I actually enjoy user comments there, so downloading all this data would be a big plus with any movie catalog I needed.

So I turned up to Google, and the very first link showed this freeware (of course, I also don’t want to pay for it!) - antp.be > Software > Ant Movie Catalog. I must say, Google did come out with the best result at the top. Though visually the interface is not very appealing (though this is taken care of by … – well read on) but all the relevant information about the movie is captured.


Another nice thing is that its a no-nonsense tool when downloading movie information from the net. It can get information from a huge number of web movie databases and the best part is that it offered me source code of scripts it uses to get information from imdb, amazon and other sites. As I am a coder by profession I found it a very useful feature it allows me to practically do whatever customizations are possible in the information I need.

The program has usual import/export features, a unique statistics menu that shows bar charts (whew!) for a lot of stats viz number of movies, movies by countries, genre, language etc. Ant also has a Group by feature though with a lot many by fields (practically all it knows).

Now, about visual – priyatana.org provides Ant Viewer that is a pretty nice user interface to display ant movies catalog (*.amc) files. I find the display it provides the best when compared to other free/paid tools; check out its screenshot for yourself. You will simply love the softness and the simplicity.