Med’s Movie Manager is a free utility that lets you catalog your movie collection easily. This is a new version that has been released over the last couple of days. 

Once you add a film, you can see the DVD cover, cast, plot, rating and much more. You are only limited by the data available at IMDB. If you don’t like the data, you are able to edit any aspect of it.

MeD’s Movie Manager also lets you add movies that are on your computer. You can set it to scan a selected folder for films, and then you can proceed through the usual IMDB hookup.

It took me around 2 hours to input 380 disks movies into the catalog. I listed all my DVD’s as plain text (imported from Ant’s Movie Catalog) and then MeD’s Movie Manager scanned IMDB to fill out all the available information for each film. It was a little repetitive, but that is the way it has to be to get good results.

While it doesn’t look as flash as some of the commercial options, you can change the “Look and Feel” of the program in so many ways. There are more themes and appearance options than I cared to count.

There is also great import and export functionality, allowing you to easily transfer the list to a mobile phone, so that you know what you own while you are shopping.

MeD’s Movie Manager runs on any system that is supported by Java Standard Edition. This includes Windows, Mac and Linux. I had it running in Vista without any problems at all.

There are many movie catalog programs available, but there are not many which are free. I have also had a go at using Ant’s Movie Catalog and found that to be quite good. There is not much between them as they both have their strong points.

MeD’s Movie Manager is available for free from SourceForge.

Watching a film on a small screen is never ideal, but it is a good way to pass some time if that is your will.

DivX has become a very popular video format for movies and online videos. Most full length DVD backups are converted to DivX as the file size can be fairly small in comparison to other formats, and it still plays the video in reasonably high quality video and audio.

DivX has released their player to the public for free, only this time it is for mobile devices.

The player itself is very simple and efficient. I installed it on my Windows Mobile device and copied a few Vodcasts onto my phone. The DivX player handled them without any problems. My Ipaq rw6828 is aging a little but still was not troubled by the videos I tested. It is lightweight and it played the videos in full screen mode.

DivX recommends that your device runs at 200Mhz or faster. If your device struggles, the DivX player will drop frames to recover. This is not likely to be picked up by your eyes very easily.

DivX Mobile Player is available for a bunch of Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. This is a great program for showing off how powerful these devices are. You never know, but you may find a time that playing a movie on your phone is a worthwhile thing to do. I wish I had this on long trips in the past. You can only play so much Kevtris.

DivX Mobile Player is available for free from DivX.

The best Vodcast (Video Podcast) software I have used was Democracy Player. It was easy enough to use and it looked great. I could subscribe to Vodcasts, and the Democracy Player would automatically download new episodes of my favourite shows. It seemed like a perfect application to me apart from finding it unstable when playing back movies, and that the interface was a little slow.

There is now a new version which has been rebranded as Miro. It appears to be the same program, only this time it is much more stable, and the media player component works a dream. I am comfortable saying that this is the best Vodcast software I have ever used. I have already subscribed to some of my favourite shows, which then get downloaded as new episodes become available. I can then watch the Episodes in full screen.

Miro also allows you to search YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo video and many more for just about any video you could ever want. Miro offers an extensive collection of options and it has playlist support. A must for anyone who loves their Vodcasts. The phenomenon can only grow.

Unlike many other video download programs available on the web, Miro does not restrict you by forcing you to download only the content they offer. This is open to you to add your own vodcast sources.

Available for free from Getmiro.com.

There are many ways to replicate a signal across multiple monitors. Some methods work much better than others. The price difference varies greatly as well. The more money you spend, the more control you will have and the better your results will be.

Generally, there are not a great deal of consumer reasons for wanting to do this. It is much more suited for commercial trade shows where you have multiple screens all around a stall. The reason I looked into this was because I needed to split my signal between my TV and a second monitor.  

This article will explain some hardware options you can use to get from one video source, to multiple screens, replicating the same image on each screen. This is not a true dual screen setup.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most applications are best run at a high resolution to ensure you have plenty of screen space, however some games require you to change your screen resolution to a setting which the game supports.

To change your screen resolution, you would generally need to go into your display properties and tinker with a few settings. While this is easy enough to do occasionally, if it is something you want to do regularly, it becomes quite an annoying process. It gets even worse if you require low resolutions, as they are not always made available to you here. You would need to go further and enter into the advanced section of your display properties to switch between the resolutions.

I constantly need to switch between 1280×1024 and 640×480, as my CRT TV only supports the lower resolution. I used ResChange to setup some desktop shortcuts to make the job much quicker and easier. I can also see this being useful for a range of scenarios such as wide-screen laptops connecting to 16:9 projectors on a regular basis.

ResChange is a command line utility which will do as the name suggests, change your resolution. You can apply a whole range of switches such as height, width, frequency, as well as telling ResChange which monitor to do the change to if you have dual screen setup (defaults to monitor 1).

Once installed, I made shortcuts with the following switches:

For 640×480 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=640 -height=480 -refresh=60

For 1280×1024 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=1280 -height=1024 -refresh=max

While compatibility mode would allow me to run some things at the lower resolution, not all programs support it, so changing the resolution of Windows was best. This has worked flawlessly for me in both XP and Vista. If you need a range of resolutions, you could make a start menu group with multiple shortcuts for various resolutions in there.

(Update 4/8/08: This is now called Display Changer. There are some new features whcih make it even more handy.)

Available for free from Softpedia.