Welcome to the Videophile II Forum

As VideoPhile II is so versatile, I would like to hear from you guys and gals what kind of collections are managed with it.
And what your experiances are in this context.


I personaly needed a good videomanager to manage family footage, you know, kids grow up, first teeth, first steps, parties, school degrees, holidays,...

Before you know it, you have many gigabytes on footage that can not longer be managed with windows.
And thats where VideoPhile II saved the day for me
Now i can find anything i want very fast.


So what do you guys and gals use it for?

I use Videophile II to manage quite a large library of sports, film and documentary videos. For sports videos this includes boxing, NFL and NBA games. For films I have both oldies and the latest films which have been ripped from DVDs and encoded to xvid/divx files.

I originally burned all of my files to DVDs for backup purposes and cataloged them in MS Access with basic details. Once the prices of large drives started to drop though I moved these files onto a HDD.

Whilst I still cataloged my files in MS Access I searched for a more versatile solution dedicated to videos and found Videophile II. It's been great so far and obviously has a great deal of further potential. It takes a while to tag files if you have an existing large collection of videos, but it's well worth it when you can easily retrieve the files that you're looking for and have the bonus of creating segments, making screenshots, ratings etc.

Hi Ironsmith,

thanks for the feedback - you're right in saying that tagging is the most onerous task! You are aware, I trust, that you can tag many files at once by making multiple selections in the Browser? Just in case you didn't know (documentation is currently very poor )

In a later version I'll add an option to automatically create tags from folder names since it seems that most users will have some semblance of order on an HDD....

Hi Ironsmith !
welcome on board

nice feedback, that will make big boss feel happy

flashmedia and storage devices are the future, the new version supports network devices and servers and such ...

do you use all the categories into one library? or do you make a library for each separate type of video files.

the tagging takes up a lot of time if you want to do it right, but thats with any cataloguing application i think. the idea is to build it up over time and having only the huge effort at start when the first files are added.

and i think i can tell u that there are some handy features in the make to make tagging go a lot faster in the future.

I've currently arranged everything into into a single library, as I wasn't sure if there would be any benefit in splitting them up. I was aware of the multiple file tagging feature, and remember reading about it somewhere on this forum which makes the cataloging process a little easier. I think it would also be helpful to be able to select more than one tag and to drop them on on the relevant file/s. Right now I only seem to be able to select one tag at a time. The auto-tagging feature based on criteria such as filename, folder or file extension would also be a great idea for some quick and simple tagging.

For some files I'm also now using the "description" field to add details such as names of actors/actresses, directors, plot summary etc.. Tagging every single film detail would obviously be quite an arduous process, which is why I've been using the description field in such instances. A nice feature for the future would be the automatic retrieval of such information from IMDB and perhaps also creating tags based on the retrieved information.

In some cases I also have games, documentaries or films which are split into 2 or 3 parts, so it would be useful to manually or automatically have these recognised as one sports game or movie.

I think for the "find" feature it would also be nice to be able to search tags. In some cases one might try and find a file linked to two or more separate tags and I'm not sure if it's currently possible to find files in such a way. I can only seem to drag and drop one tag at a time into the file view window.

Well, that's about all I can think of right now. Looking forward to Videophile II getting better and better and I'll be glad to do all I can to help.

oo that are a lot of requests in one go
we love that

multitagging in one go sound interesting, ill forward this to the developers corner.

i think about imdb, hmm, interesting, but remember VP is specialised into managing video files that are not plain movies, more like footage, tv shows, .... things that do not have an entry at imdb.
but lets see what big boss thinks about it

the logical merging of files is into the queue but not for the 1.4.0 release

searching tags is something interesting too, lets see what big boss says about it first

now, if you want to combine tags in a search, we use to build up the queury in this way:

start with a base view, made on file search, or storage device or a tag
then apply filters to the results
you can use add filter, substract, and add source (just drag anything from the lib tree onto the file browser view using CTRL (positive filter) ALT (negative filter) or SHIFT (add) key while you drop onto the target.

Yes, but I'd prefer requests to be separated out into distinct threads and posted in the Requests area. Easier to discuss them separately and more visible to other forum users that way....



I've added a speed-tagginf feature that will be in 1.4.0 - I'll update the documentation section in order to describe it for the benefit of all....


Not really VP2's field, I'm afraid. It's purpose is for the management of files that don't have centralised repositories of meta-data. As such, this will probably not get done. IMHO, there are many excellent movie managers that do this kind of thing - in fact they exclusively do this, for the most part. VP2 fills in for all the files not covered in this way. It's a niche tool in that respect...


I'll give it some thought but I suspect you were coming from the angle of your next point which TextOmaX has explained below...



To clarify this description read here:
creating-and-saving-views-t17.html

im not a big fan of imdb either, the problem is that all these sites that do contain movie info, are more and more blocking content to be grabbed and used into offline managers.

imdb as an example blocked users capturing movie displays, or dvd covers from the site.
(there is a way around this though, but this is not simple

on the other hand, the developer-wishlist is very long with new features that still need to be coded and tested. some of them will make tagging more easy, and make extracting info from the video files a lot better too.

btw Ironsmith, try to do some excersises with that "build-up-a-view" .
it is extremely powerfull once you get used to it.

im sometimes amazed what info i get back from complex filters in combination with the cloud!