If you didnt know, I happen to have a huge media collection. Everybody has Giga bytes of music and maybe a few episodes of their favorite tv shows. I have that and about 80 unwatched movies on my comp at any given time :P

For me one of the biggest problem was to decide which movie to watch next. Normally what happens is that, I read a review of a movie or someone recommends one to me… I get my hands on the movie and forget about it. Months later I browse thru the names and wont recognize the movie… I am too lazy to lookup IMDB each time so that basically means I wont watch it for the next few months as well.

Recently I found a super solution for this problem, A media center called XBMC. All I need to do with XBMC is point it to the folder containing my movies/tv shows/music and it loads them to its library. It picks up the names in the background and automatically downloads all the relevant info about the movie/tv show. After a while you have the entire details of you collection – IMBD ratings, actor info, genre info ect. Now you can search the library based on Genre, Actor, Director… hell even the production house!

So lets say, one fine day… I decide to watch a movie, my mood tells me ‘comedy’… I can simply go to Movies->By Genre->Comedy and check out what movies I already have that are good comedies.

To add to the features, XBMC even gets you the short plot description which you can check to confirm you want to watch this movie right now!

What I love about XBMC is its Eye-Candiness… One look at how it handles TV Shows and I was totally fida over it. Anyway here are some screenshots of it.

If you store all your media in your comp and want an awesome way to catalog and seach it, give XBMC a try… its totally worth it :)

Ps: Its open source, and available for Win, Linux and MAC