Collectorz Movie Database - anyone use it?

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

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I really need to organise my film collection. I have loads of DVDs and Blu-rays and it has got to the stage where I am forgetting what I own and I have even bought duplicates and only realised later that I already own it.

I found Collectorz Movie Database which looks perfect for my needs. Does anyone have any feedback on it for organising a large collection?

I also saw it comes with an Android app for reading barcodes. The problem is that I can't seem to connect my Nexus 4 mobile phone with my Windows 10 PC via Bluetooth. The PC shows up on my phone but it says it can't connect.

The solutions seems to be to get a more up-to-date mobile phone but that is a big expense and I want to see what new phones come out this year I want to wait a bit. In the mean time I was looking at USB barcode scanners which I can plug into my PC to do the same job.

Does anyone have any recommendations at all? I'd like to keep the price under £30 if possible.

Also if anyone knows of any better software I'd be really keen to hear about it. I guess I could spend up to £50 on film database software. I do NOT want any mobile apps though. It needs to run on my Windows 10 PC.

Thanks for any help :).
 
Looks pretty interesting. Unlike you I'd be more keen to use a mobile app to scan barcodes, and preferably just stores in the cloud somewhere. I'm not a big collector but I get a lot through work so the number is slowly growing..

Are there any free apps out there?

To answer your questions I don't know why you need to connect your phone to your PC? Surely you can with your phone and it updates the cloud account? Under the phone version ($14) it says the following;

Backup your collection data in the free CLZ Cloud
Sync data between devices, e.g. Android Tablet and Android Phone
Browse your list online on the free CLZ Cloud site
Share your public cloud link with friends & family
Click to expand...
Or do you really want the desktop software? :confused:
 
Scam said:
Looks pretty interesting. Unlike you I'd be more keen to use a mobile app to scan barcodes, and preferably just stores in the cloud somewhere. I'm not a big collector but I get a lot through work so the number is slowly growing..

Are there any free apps out there?

To answer your questions I don't know why you need to connect your phone to your PC? Surely you can with your phone and it updates the cloud account? Under the phone version ($14) it says the following;

Or do you really want the desktop software? :confused:
Click to expand...

I really hate mobile phone apps. Much nicer to have it on the PC. Plus I hardly ever use my mobile phone so that really isn't an option.

I'll try again to get Bluetooth working. Maybe I'm just doing something wrong.
 
But do you really need to connect your phone to your PC? My understanding is that you can scan with your phone through the app and it uploads it to your database in the cloud. Hence your PC software is updated. I might be wrong though, that's from just a glance at the website.
 
Personally I use DVD Profiler (have done for 15 years or so), I did try collectorz at one point but didn't get along with it, it's also more expensive than DVD profiler which is a one time purchase for PC, and again for mobile, IIRC about £15 and £5 respectively with free updates*.
The profiler app can use the phone camera to read bacodes from memory, although I use a proper barcode reader** because it's faster (and easier to enter things like purchase date and cost on the PC).

http://www.invelos.com/ have the free trial version (100 entries I think) to give you an idea of what it's like to use.
If you click the disc in my sig you'll see how the collection looks online.


*When the original company behind it broke up the guy who did the programming etc started his own and basically gave anyone with a registered version a free key to the new (now current) version.

**You can buy them from about a tenner, I went nuts and bought a bluetooth laser model for about £30 as it could connect to the phone/tablet or store the barcodes as well as work directly with the PC when you are doing a batch.
 
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Scam said:
But do you really need to connect your phone to your PC? My understanding is that you can scan with your phone through the app and it uploads it to your database in the cloud. Hence your PC software is updated. I might be wrong though, that's from just a glance at the website.
Click to expand...

The app I am talking about is the free CLZ Barry app which is just a barcode scanner not the paid Android app which does, as you say, sync with the cloud. So, yes I do need to connect my phone to the computer via Bluetooth in order to get the data from the barcode scanner to the desktop application.

If I can't get Bluetooth to work I guess I'll just buy a USB barcode scanner and use that instead. It is just another £30 spent which I'd rather not do.

Edit: OK. I was totally wrong and you were right. It does indeed sync over the internet. My bad. But that solves the major problem I was having and basically makes this software an instant purchase for me. Plus by signing up to the trial to test it out I got a £4 off voucher code. Can't complain.

Now I'm just dreading the long and boring task of scanning all of my DVDs and Blu-rays.

VincentHanna said:
I use the 'stop buying more movies until you've watched the ones you have' rule.

Then you dont waste money on duplicates :)
Click to expand...

That works fine in theory. But when you've seen as many films and TV series as I have then you even start to forget what you have seen. It gets even more confusing when you have a standard edition Blu-ray or DVD and you want to get the special edition or the limited edition or the extended edition. Which edition do I own again? Oh well, better go through my whole collection to make sure I haven't bought one of the other editions by accident.

Thankfully I don't have many duplicates but I have made that mistake 3 or 4 times in the past. Hence my desire to finally get around to cataloguing my collection so I can just do a simple search.
 
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VincentHanna said:
I use the 'stop buying more movies until you've watched the ones you have' rule.

Then you dont waste money on duplicates :)
Click to expand...

I have got over 500 dvds, and watched them all. Trust me its not hard to forget some of the dvds i have purchased and then buy it again
 
I used to be like you, many years ago. I had 1000+ DVD's. Probably watched 90% of them as well.

Then HD screens and blu-rays came out and I got a lot more picky about what I bought.

Then UHD screens and 4k blu-rays came out and I got even more picky about what I bought.
 
VincentHanna said:
I used to be like you, many years ago. I had 1000+ DVD's. Probably watched 90% of them as well.

Then HD screens and blu-rays came out and I got a lot more picky about what I bought.

Then UHD screens and 4k blu-rays came out and I got even more picky about what I bought.
Click to expand...

I don't even have a 4k Blu-ray player and have no intention of getting one anytime soon. The cost of 4k Blu-rays is absurd. I like owning films and TV series but I don't buy them for quality as such (I'm perfectly happy watching a DVD on my 4k TV) I just do it because I like to collect them and own something physical that I can actually take off the shelf and look at.

Maybe when the next generation consoles come out (I don't count the Xbox One X as next gen) I'll end up with one as a side effect of getting a new console. But at the moment I'm perfectly happy with my original Xbox One and Playstation 4 for watching DVDs and Blu-rays.
 
Google Sheet. Syncs across all devices and is free. :D
1 tab for Blurays, 1 tab for DVDs, 1 tab for audio cds, 1 tab for vinyl, 1 tab for hidef audio (SACD, DVD-A, HFPA)

Works a treat for me. Simple as hell to update and search through too. That said, I do still have some duplicates where someone has bought discs for me that I've already got.
 
Flibster said:
Google Sheet. Syncs across all devices and is free. :D
1 tab for Blurays, 1 tab for DVDs, 1 tab for audio cds, 1 tab for vinyl, 1 tab for hidef audio (SACD, DVD-A, HFPA)

Works a treat for me. Simple as hell to update and search through too. That said, I do still have some duplicates where someone has bought discs for me that I've already got.
Click to expand...

Unless I am missing something though you can't use a barcode scanner with Google Sheets? Or can you? If I were to use a spreadsheet program though I'd use Excel since I have Office 365 and it works the same as Google with syncing across all devices.

I dread to think how long it would take me to do without a barcode scanner.
 
If all you want is the barcode then any barcode app/device should be able to do data entry into something like excel (they mimic a keyboard).

However a barcode scanner won't get the information for the disc and that takes a long time to do by hand:)

One of the reasons I bought my first barcode scanner was because even just entering themwas time consuming and error prone, let along the actual names (at the time I only had about 200 dvd's).
 
Werewolf said:
If all you want is the barcode then any barcode app/device should be able to do data entry into something like excel (they mimic a keyboard).

However a barcode scanner won't get the information for the disc and that takes a long time to do by hand:)

One of the reasons I bought my first barcode scanner was because even just entering themwas time consuming and error prone, let along the actual names (at the time I only had about 200 dvd's).
Click to expand...

I think I'll just get this Movie Database software and use the Android barcode scanner app which now works since I've tested it with a couple of DVDs. I mean at the end of the day it is only £40 and it'll save me quite a bit of cash in the long run.
 
Cromulent said:
Unless I am missing something though you can't use a barcode scanner with Google Sheets? Or can you? If I were to use a spreadsheet program though I'd use Excel since I have Office 365 and it works the same as Google with syncing across all devices.

I dread to think how long it would take me to do without a barcode scanner.
Click to expand...

My collection is reasonably large, especially when you get to the CD's and Vinyl. Took a few evenings while watching stuff of flipping through and typing them in. But once it's all in, just adding new ones takes seconds. I'd rather type them in myself than rely on information downloaded from the internet that I'd then have to check anyway.

Quick check - 492 bluray, 1677 DVD's, 3105 Audio CDs, 722 vinyl, and 67 hidef. That's not all my CD's either, still got a load in storage that I haven't brought across yet.
 
Cromulent said:
I think I'll just get this Movie Database software and use the Android barcode scanner app which now works since I've tested it with a couple of DVDs. I mean at the end of the day it is only £40 and it'll save me quite a bit of cash in the long run.
Click to expand...
If you can do the trial for collectorz and dvd profiler :)

They do basically the same thing but with different interfaces (and IIRC collectors has a sub model, whilst profiler is one off)

Flibster, I just checked my collection and I had not realised it but I'm at 900+ BD's now :eek: I hadn't realised I'd got that many (the 1900 DVD's isn't too surprising).
 
I've been using the trial version of this for a couple of days (you get to store 50 items in the database for free) and I have to say it really is very good. Just scan the disc on your phone and it automatically updates the database. When I get some more money at the end of the month I think I'm going to go with the full version. It'll just take me a long time to scan all of my discs so I tend to rip them and scan them at the same time (I'm putting them on my NAS so I can play them via PLEX on the TV).
 
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