What Does Seven Years of Movie-Watching Look Like?

I’ve finally organised my DVD collection with Plex, a Mac fork of the XMBC project. AdroboPro with a 2TB drive is acting as a media server (the droboPro is the most “Apple-like” product I’ve encountered in some time, in terms of packaging, aesthetics, and simplicity: there are literally only three steps to setting the device up). Plex itself has worked extremely well: aside from a few head-scratching movie mis-identifications (Timur Bekmambetov’s Nightwatch labelled as Street Kings? Romancing The Stone for Gilda? The hell?) the software has performed near-flawlessly. It uses simple sqlite tables for data, making global editing with SQL statements easy (for example, to flag the majority of movies as having been watched in the past) via SQLite Manager. Apple Remote is supported, and playback has one of the features I missed most from mPlayer: the ability to remember where you left off from a movie.

The next step will be working out a way to export Plex’s data to Delicious Library, so I can carry the list around with me at all times on my iPod Touch (I have, to my shame, occasionally re-purchased a movie I already have in my collection).