Problem: I\'ve got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I\'ve
ID: 661235 • Letter: P
Question
Problem: I've got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I've found my available tools to be too low-leverage on managing this anymore. Hence, I turn to the nice community of StackExchange to kindly recommend a local Media Browser application for windows: specifically, an app which allows:
thumbnailed preview of all videos & images
Automagically categorized based on all online, or within-file available meta-information
With a built-in search
To perform the following operations:
Preview a thumbnail on video files (similar to file explorer)
Display categorized lists of all media available locally on my drives
Channelsurf, similar to youtube: be able to start from one movie file, and have "similar" videos around it
Double-clicking on the file to start mplayer
typing the first 2-4 letters of the movie/image to instantly bring up the list of media with that part in it
While specifically not doing:
Anything that requires me to touch any of the files in any way shape or form whatsoever
Any upsale (I'm looking at you, windows 8 "personal videos"), advertising, or introduce any friction during interaction
Bringing up any browsers: solution must be windows-native, and responsive (<20ms results)
Specific things I've tried so far:
The closest thing I can wave towards "want" is apple's itunes, and JRiver's media center; they both share the same weakness of not being able to use mplayer as playback engine
Banshee on windows is unable to show video previews, have multiple stability issues, and can't use mplayer for double-click
Explanation / Answer
It may not fulfill all your requests, but consider Adobe Bridge. Bridge can use all of the files' metadata for categorization, provide thumbnail previews of media, and comes with powerful search functionality. Double-clicking a file will cause it to launch in the default Windows application.
Bridge comes packaged with any other Adobe Creative Suite product. So Bridge isn't really free, but there are also no upsells. I also don't think you'll be able to "channelsurf." Bridge will show you all files that match certain search parameters, but won't organically recommend other "similar" media from your collection.
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