For years, I’ve been putting off locating some kind of catalog system for my VHS cassettes. As the years passed, DVD has become pretty ubiquitous. Meanwhile, I still had not adopted a catalog system and the problem of what I have locally available remains. Finally, I decided to search the usual places, Freshmeat and SourceForge, for something to fill the bill. I eventually settled on VCD-db, which is the (only) Web based, platform agnostic cataloging system for media I could find that appears to be in active development. Another option was a Java based system still maintained, but given my dislike of Java and loading JDKs on all my systems, I decided to skip it.
Disappointingly, vcddb requires the absolute latest PHP, PHP5. However, I was plodding along quite happy with my ‘old’ PHP4 on Debian Sarge. PHP5 was released after Sarge froze, so there isn’t any possibility of upgrading. Thankfully, a version of PHP5 is available from backports.org which backports packages to the latest Debian Stable, now Sarge.
After installation, I came across a bug, either in PHP5, SquirrelMail 1.4.4, or Courier IMAP which prevented my copy of SquirrelMail from creating new messages. Copying worked fine, but composing a mail and then sending it resulted in an error when SquirrelMail tried to save the messages in the sent-mail directory on the IMAP server. Ultimately, after backporting a copy of the latest Courier IMAP from Debian Experimental, I tried a simpler approach of upgrading to the latest SquirrelMail from Sid. Worked.
VCD-db is remarkably easy to use and fairly intuitive. The Web based interface lets you add DVDs, VHS tapes, VCDs — obviously — and other media types. To add a new entry into your collection, you need only enter the title and the default IMDB source is used from which you select your title. All information is then populated into the local database for easy access. You can, of course, manually enter titles as well, if you prefer.
VCD-db includes a nifty loan system to track DVDs you’re lending to others, the ability to subscribe to various RSS feeds, including to friends’ VCD-db instances so you can keep up with who has what to watch, and a wish list that you can make public, to ease gifting obligations for birthdays and such. You can modify the existing categories and media types, adding your own or removing ones you don’t need. There is also support for user roles and permissions.
That said, I haven’t actually tested any of these features extensively, as having a catalog of my video metadata accessible anywhere is my primary goal. (Perhaps the next goal should be streaming my videos anywhere, but for that I need a much larger pipe.) Interestingly, there seems to be considerable support for adding any adult media you may own. I imagine that’s not something that would be available or so visible in a commercial offering. Sometimes you just have to love Open Source ™.
The only significant issue I encountered is downloading media covers is broken currently. There are a couple of files you can download to resolve this for the 0.981 release, and hopefully it will be fixed in a newer release. The resolution requires you download the file linked in this thread, then the files (except the Perl script unless you want it) in this thread. Once you’ve replaced the files, you can restart Apache and media covers should mostly work. Otherwise, they won’t work at all. If you have a release newer than 0.981, currently the latest, you likely need not care.
That said, if you’re not already running PHP5, Apache, and MySQL locally, it may be more of a chore to use this application versus a locally running GUI application. But since I already run Web mail via SquirrelMail and Gallery2 for photos, I already have the necessary infrastructure running.