If you care to think about it, the complex intricacies of the internet can be summed up in one word: awesome. Luckily for everyone, this all-consuming adjective also applies to the hobby of collecting and watching DVDs. This week’s Disc-ussion will focus on a few websites that the collector or mild-enthusiast may find useful in their expensive and unhealthily obsessive hobby.
A new, though vindictively exclusive, program called Delicious Library recently became available for Mac OSX users to catalog their collections of DVDs, CDs, games, and most surprisingly, books. The program’s interface is remarkably familiar to users of iTunes, and uses the Apple iSight personal web-camera to take a picture of the barcode. Then the program magically reads this barcode and pulls up all available information on the product from Amazon.com’s database. Instantly, the cover or album art appears on a small shelf in the middle of the operating window, and the product is recorded into your user database.
The program also has a small feature in the bottom left-hand corner that allows the user to create “borrower” profiles (friends, relatives, coworkers, etc.) that can be tagged with movies they’ve borrowed from you. Delicious Library keeps track of which titles the person has, how long they’ve had it, and when it thinks too much time has passed since they borrowed your only copy of Happiness.
A free, though limited, demo of Delicious Library is available from http://delicious-monster.com, and a license for full use costs a cool $40.
For the poorer of us, or the PC users, a free web-based cataloging service is DVD Aficionado, available at http://dvdaficionado.com/. Despite its ugly interface, the website is useful for keeping track of what users own, and gives them the ability to create wish lists and show off what they already have. It also finds cover art and product information automatically.
An interesting tool attached to the “wish list” function of the site is the “Price Search Engine,” which compares the sale cost of a particular title against four of five retailers. Users also have the ability to alter their purchases, without going to the retailers’ websites, to save time and multiple shipping costs. DVD Aficionado claims their “price search engine can save [an active user] hundreds of dollars over just a few months.”
Although not specifically focused on the DVD market, the very popular Internet Movie Database has earned itself a reputation as the most comprehensive movie catalog on the internet. A simple visit to http://imdb.com/ can quickly turn into a link-clicking festival, as users dive further and further into the abyss of trivial movie (and television) minutia.
The website serves a useful research function, and can rapidly confirm discrepancies in the bitter after-movie arguments we all have with our loved ones. Visitors to the site can find out almost anything they need to know about a certain title, including its original theatrical release, and any subsequent home-theater releases the title may have enjoyed.
Registered users have the ability to post incredibly useless and frustrating comments about movies, including whatever accidental blunders a cast member may have made. To be fair, these discussion forums can be useful if one is interested in finding movies or television shows similar to one they already enjoy.
As a former member, until the cash got tight, of http://netflix.com, I can somewhat vouch a first hand account of the usefulness of the online rental service. The popular three-DVDs-at-a-time for $17.99 is a good value, and usually the limit a single person can watch in their dorm-room at one time. A variety of deals are available, ranging from one to five, with unlimited rentals per month. However, the term “unlimited” should be taken with a grain of salt. Netflix hides mention of its alleged “throttling” practice, wherein users’ rentals are held an extra day or three so that the company doesn’t lose money in its free shipping policy.
Googling the acronym DVD turns up too many useless results that require more effort than their worth to find anything useful, so hopefully these few recommendations can save you some trouble and get you to the good stuff. Don’t forget to search for my catalog on DVD Aficionado, I’m somewhere in the “borderline fanatical” category.
