A Librarian for Your Video Collection

This is a standalone Windows app that will automatically download information for all the videos in your video folders and present it to you in a searchable fashion in order to select a video to watch. This app is designed to be viewed on your TV via an HDMI connection (or other means) to your laptop (e.g. larger fonts).

Note: All this information is also available in the application about box.

Prerequisites

VideoLibrarian uses .NET Framework 4.8. If you are using a version of Windows prior to Windows 10, then you must first install .NET 4.8. If you attempt to run this utility and .NET Framework 4.8 is NOT installed, this application will fail to run.

You may download and install .NET 4.8 from:
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework

Installation

Copy VideoLibrarian.exe to any new or existing writable directory. Copy the optional companion utilities VideoOrganizer.exe, VideoValidator.exe, and UpdateXml.exe to the same folder. That's it!

Upon execution, VideoLibrarian.exe will create additional files in the same directory as the executable.

• VideoLibrarian.log – Text file contains status messages. It may be informational, warnings, and errors.
• VideoLibrarian.SavedState.xml – This file contains all the current configuration values.
• RegexLib.dll - Used for pre-compiled regex patterns (speed).
• NReco.VideoInfo.dll – Used to extract information from the video file.
• ffprobe.exe – Used to extract information from the video file.

Note: Upon first run, Norton Antivirus (or any other AV app) may block VideoLibrarian and VideoOrganizer for suspicious activity as they both query IMDB.com for movie info. Be sure to allow these within your antivirus app. Malicious hackers make it so difficult these days...

Video Folder Setup

Within your root video folder, each movie/episode video must be in a separate folder with a matching IMDB movie shortcut (.url). A TV series root folder contains only the main IMDB TV series shortcut as it just refers to all the episodes. The folders may be arranged in any way you see fit so long as the full directory path (not filenames) does not exceed 245 characters (This is a Windows limitation). Any additional files in these folders are ignored. Upon startup, this application will add additional cache files to these folders. See File->Status Log for details.

As an example, your folders may be arranged as follows:

    videosRoot
    ├── video1
    │   ├── anyname.mp4 – The video file. May be any video format.
    │   └── anyname.url – The IMDB movie shortcut.
    ├── video2
    ├── videoN
    ├── tvSeries1
    │   ├── anyname.url – The IMDB movie shortcut.
    │   ├── episode1
    │   │   ├── anyname.mp4 – The video file. May be any video format.
    │   │   └── anyname.url – The IMDB movie shortcut.
    │   ├── episode2
    │   └── episodeN
    ├── tvSeries2
    └── tvSeriesN

Semi-automatic Video Layout Configurator

The utility VideoOrganizer.exe may be used to set up the movie and TV series folders for you. It is not perfect because it attempts to discern the true movie name from the video file name and may occasionally get it wrong. VideoOrganizer.exe must reside in the same folder as VideoLibrarian.exe. VideoOrganizer.exe will automatically create or update the video folder tree described above. It also includes a movie information editor to customize the information retrieved from IMDB. Click on About for additional documentation on how to use it.

Video Anti-Corruption Verification

Because hard drives are not infallible, video files may get corrupted over time. VideoValidator.exe will go through all your VideoLibrarian videos and validate that they are not corrupted. It does not fix them but it does help you identify them. VideoValidator.exe is a console application. Run the application with the '/?' argument to get a more comprehensive description regarding usage.

Movie Properties Refresh

Movie descriptions, ratings, and other properties may change over time, so in order to get the latest information from IMDB, UpdateXML.exe will update all the xml movie property files in an entire movie folder tree. It will not modify the movie poster images or the Watch flag. All other properties are updated including video validation information. If you are unsure that all the videos are not corrupted, run VideoValidator.exe first. UpdateXML.exe is a console application. Run the application with the '/?' argument to get a more comprehensive description regarding usage. As always, everything that is displayed, is also written to UpdateXML.log.

Generated Cache Files

These cache files reside in the same folders as the shortcut files. They are unique to each shortcut.

• tt1234567.jpg – downloaded movie poster.
• tt1234567.xml – extracted movie information.
• tt1234567S.png – cached UI movie information tile.
• tt1234567M.png – cached UI movie information tile.
• tt1234567L.png – cached UI movie information tile.

If any of these files are deleted, they will be recreated. Note: "tt1234567" also happens to be the IMDB movie code.

Manually Retrieving IMDB Movie Internet Shortcut

If one does not use VideoOrganizer or VideoOrganizer fails to identify the movie, the shortcut must be manually retrieved from IMDB.

Go to https://www.imdb.com/find?s=tt

In the web page search box, enter the name of the movie. The results may find more than one entry. Verify by opening the relevant page. Click and drag the link from the browser address bar to the folder with the matching movie.

First Time VideoLibrarian Startup

When starting VideoLibrarian for the first time, the root folder(s) containing the videos has not yet been set in VideoLibrarian.

Open the File->Settings dialog to enter your root video folders (you may have more than one root video folder).

When OK is pressed, the movie information will start to be downloaded from the internet. Depending on the number of movies you have, this may take from minutes to hours. Be patient. This cached information for each movie is stored in the same folder as the video. These files are named tt1234567.xxx. If these files are deleted, they will automatically be regenerated. Once these cached files have been generated, startup will be a whole lot faster. This is the only time the internet is accessed.

Note: Any folder names bracketed by any of the characters ~`'!@#$%^&*(){}[].,;+_=- are ignored (e.g. “C:\Users\User\Videos\[FamilyMovies]\2005\TimmysFirstTooth.mp4”). Any folders that do not contain an IMDB internet shortcut are also ignored.

Review File->Status Log or the VideoLibrarian.log for any possible errors in file generation.

Movie Tile View Modes

Each UI movie information item is called a ‘tile’. These tiles just fill the window, wrapping from left to right.

The tiles come in 3 sizes, small, medium, and large. ‘Large’ displays all the information available, and ‘Small’ contains a subset because all the information will not fit. However, many more small tiles will fit on a single page than large tiles. That is the trade-off.

Adding/Changing/Removing/Reorganizing Movies

Because VideoLibrarian is based directly on the files within a hierarchy of folders, the video folders may be added, moved, renamed, or deleted at any time from Windows Explorer without any ill effect.

Manually Changing/Correcting Movie Information

The movie information is all stored in the xml file, tt1234567.xml. Most of the elements are descriptive and can be changed as necessary. If you make any changes, you must delete the tt*.png cache files so these files can be regenerated with your new changes. If you do not want to manually edit this xml file, use VideoOrganizer.exe. It will allow you to safely update the file without fear of corrupting it.

Changing the Default Movie Poster Image

When this application gathers the information from the url shortcut you specified, it downloads the first poster image it finds. This image may not be the best poster image. The IMDB movie page actually has many poster images (some in foreign languages). You can manually download a poster image from IMDB or elsewhere and replace the one that VideoLibrarian downloaded. If you do, you must delete the tt*.png cache files so they can be regenerated with your new image embedded. Also for backup, you should also update the poster url in the XML file. The ideal image ratio is 250x365 pixels. Larger images are better so they can be scaled without any loss of image quality.

Special notes:

If element EpisodeCount is greater than zero, the movie information refers to a TV series. A video in this folder is ignored. Child episode subfolders contain the video files.

If element Season is greater than zero, the movie information refers to a TV series episode.

Element Episode may be any integer but must be unique within the series.

The episode MovieName element consists of 2 parts, the series name and episode name (ex. <MovieName>Eureka - Pilot</MovieName>). The two names are delimited by a soft-hyphen '\xAD', not a regular minus-hyphen ‘-‘ character. They look alike. If necessary, just copy the ‘dash’ from another episode or the soft-hyphen be entered in the text editor via keypad keystroke: Alt+0173. This was done to distinguish between regular dashes as part of the movie or episode names. In some editors the soft-hyphen is not visible. If so, use another text editor like Notepad.

Features

• Wherever you left off when you exit the app is the same when you restart the app. This includes the size and position of the app window, sort and filter states as well as the last scroll position.

• Movie tiles flow from left to right, top to bottom.

• Multiple root media folders may be defined. Available through menu File->Settings

• Automatically downloads missing movie information from the internet and caches it for faster startup.

• Error/status text log. Available through menu File->Status Log… The viewer to use may be defined in File->Settings. The default is Notepad.

• 3 different video info item (aka UI ‘tile’) sizes (small, medium, & large). Available through the View menu.

• Sort tiles by multiple properties.

• Filter tiles by multiple properties.

• When sorting and filtering, all effort is made to keep the current tile in visible in the window.

• Maximum supported videos is 3200. Additional movies are quietly ignored and a warning is written to the log. Note that each entire TV-Series count as one ‘movie’.

• Scrolling is supported by clicking and dragging on the scrollbar, mouse wheel, and keyboard arrow keys, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown and Alt-arrow keys. Arrow keys scroll by 1/10 height (or width) of the current tile. Alt-arrow keys scroll by 1 pixel.

• Managing your movies is straightforward where one folder = one movie. This makes adding/removing/property-editing easy.

• This is not a Web App. Movies must reside on a local drive/usb drive/network drive.

• This App only runs on Windows 7 thru Windows 11.

• Executable is not 'installed'. Just copy app (and 2 optional companion apps) to the folder of your choice. The Windows registry is not used, nor any other folders (except movie source folders) so uninstalling is as simple as deleting the executables.

• Only supports movies and home/personal video clips. No audio or image files.

• Clicking on title opens the video in your video player (as defined in File->Settings).

• Clicking on the description (or small tile body), opens the full summary in a popup window.

• Clicking on the location opens containing folder in Windows Explorer.

• Clicking on the “IMDB” icon, opens the IMDB movie page in your browser (as defined in File->Settings).

• Clicking on the “Watched” checkbox, marks the video as ‘previously viewed’ and also shows date viewed. One can also filter and sort on this property.

• Clicking on the poster will blow up the tile so it fits the full screen (Large tiles only). Click anywhere on the full screen image exits the fullscreen mode. Useful when sitting on the couch.

Screenshots

Filter dialog values are computed from the enumerated videos. Sorting may be performed using multiple keys.

Recommended Tools

These are 3rd party tools that enhance the video management experience. They are not required, but they are sure helpful.

Video Player

In short, any video player will do. However, if you want a better viewing experience, VideoLAN VLC video player supports all video formats and is open source freeware actively supported by the VideoLAN community. See: https://www.videolan.org/

Windows Explorer Video Properties Extension

When it comes to video properties, Windows Explorer only supports a handful of video formats. Most notably, it doesn’t  support the popular mkv format! Icaros Shell Extensions (freeware) will support nearly all video and audio formats not supported by Windows Explorer. See: https://www.videohelp.com/software/Icaros

Video Conversion

Invariably, movie videos are extremely large. With the right tool, one can compress a video by 50% without any noticeable differences. There are many video conversion tools out there. Good (and not so good) tools cost money, but the best one that does not require you to be a video expert is the Divx Video Converter (freeware). It may be found at https://www.divx.com/en/software/divx. It includes a video player but it is not as flexible or comprehensive as the VLC video player.

If you run into conversion problems, K-Lite Codec Pack contains the most comprehensive set of codecs http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

Video Properties Viewer

The popular MediaInfo viewer displays all the info/properties in any video or audio file. See: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo.

MKV Properties Editor

MKVToolNix allows one to add/remove/edit properties and components of a video and save it as an MKV format. It does not perform any video conversion. Most other video formats do not have editable properties. That’s why the MKV video container format is so popular. See: https://mkvtoolnix.download.

Developer

With the following exceptions, no 3rd-party source code was used. It was entirely hand-crafted and optimized. It was developed entirely within .Net Framework 4.8 Forms on Visual Studio 2019.

3rd Party Code

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/624997/Enhanced-Scrollbar

This is used (and slightly modified) because VideoLibrarian is a gallery of tiles that vastly exceeds the maximum size of the default virtual window. As a result, the default windows scroll bars are woefully inadequate.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/NReco.VideoInfo/

This is used to extract media info directly from the video files. It is only used during movie information download.

Design Considerations

The UI design was inspired by SimpleMovieCatalog and various torrent servers.

Requirements

• Organize videos on computer by various properties (view, sort and filter).
• View on gallery on a TV via HDMI. Must be large enough to see from the couch but also small enough to view a number of them on a single screen.
• Must support a LOT of videos (>1000) and be fast.
• Must consist of a single executable. No "installation".
• Properties must include things like name, description, genre, movie ratings, release date, etc.
• Must be able to retrieve this information from the internet by itself.
• Target audience is a normal computer user. Not a developer or computer expert.

High-level Design Choices

• As a web page/javascript? Requires many files. No robust means to gather properties. Not user-friendly installation. Subject to vagaries of browsers.

• Target OS? Microsoft Windows. Just because it is what I know and what my laptop runs.

• Client-Server (irrespective of language)? Again, not average-user-friendly, higher complexity, and lower maintainability. Does your average user really want a server running all the time?

• As a standalone app? Easy to run, just drop into folder and execute.

• Language

  • C++ - Workable, but unnecessary complexity and more difficult to maintain.
  • C# - Faster and easier to maintain. There are no performance bottlenecks that low-level C++ needs to overcome. Supporting Win7+. Natively supports requisite https and regex.

• Frameworks

  • C#/WinForms?
  • C#/WPF?
  • C#/Blazor (new) sounds great, but it is a client-server model and with browser sandboxing substantially increases the complexity. May as well give up and use the Plex media server.

  Note: Any any framework that uses underlying Win32 is automatically constrained as the size of a virtual gallery window can only scroll up to 65535 pixels. However as I am intimately familiar with both Win32 and WinForms, I can simulate true 32bit scrolling with WinForms.

• Build Environment

  • .NET Core - Must include requisite .NET assemblies with installation. Ugh!
  • .NET Framework - .NET 4.8 must be installed on Win 7. Already included on Win 8 and Win 10. May create monolithic executable. Our goal.

  Resulting decision - .net Framework Winforms

• Storage - Database vs Folder Hierarchy

  • One or more folder hierarchies.
    Video folders may be added, moved, renamed, or deleted at any time without any ill effect. Data and video are always synchronized because videos and data are kept together. Additional files may be may exist in the folder like subtitle image, or text files. This is easily maintainable at the expense of a little speed (more on network drives).
  • Database with local single monolithic data folder (videos referenced/stored elsewhere)
    Adding, moving, renaming, or deleting videos is very difficult while maintaining synchronicity. This would require a number maintenance utilities. Synchronization between movies and data are not automatic. This storage choice should be a little faster at the expense of maintainability.

  Both cases, are very I/O bound. For 5000 videos (we are assuming only 3200 movies and many of which are TV series) we are talking about roughly 40Gb of data and 9TB of videos on various local and remote drives. Ultimately, I chose the folder hierarchy because of less code and synchronization headaches despite performance on network drives. I would suggest SDD and USB hard disk drives.

Low-level Design

• Enumerate folder tree by IMDB shortcuts (not movies).
  • TV Series folder does not have a video even though episode folders do.
  • Folders bracketed by '!' are ignored. Useful for unformatted folders that may have IMDB shortcuts for other purposes.
  • Shortcuts in the root folders are ignored.
  • IMDB shortcuts are the definitive files needed to retrieve and cache the movie properties. Video file names cannot be reliably parsed and used to find the movie on IMDB. See VideoOrganizer.exe.
• Created custom FlowLayoutPanel because winforms built-in FlowLayoutPanel control is not designed for galleries.
  • Does not support virtual windows > 32768 pixels because Win32 scrollbars do not support scrolling > 32768.
  • Does not support child panels (e.g. tiles)
  • Does not support large number of controls (very very slow).
• Cannot have large number of repeating panels with many controls (gallery) due to limited limited number of windows handles (an OS resource) allowed per application. For efficiency, created panels/tiles consisting of background image containing no more than 2 real controls. As a result, VideoLibrarian can support up to 3200 movies (TV Series count as one movie).