14 DAY TRIAL // "You talkin' to me?" Nobody else can do it better than the way Robert De Niro did in the 1976’s Taxi Driver movie.
Motion pictures are an important part of our life. You don’t have to be a film addict to realize that. Each person has a favorite film or a particular genre that he / she can talk about for hours, given the chance. Griffith can be your personal assistant when it comes for organizing your movies.
So you have a movie collection and you are looking for a piece of software to help you keep track of it. Why not share it with your friends? Commenting on various aspects of films can get you to understand them better. The main topics regard actors, directors, producers, script writers, soundtrack, visual effects or filming locations.
The industry collects new adepts every year and keeps them quite entertained. From action-packed titles to heart-breaking love stories, there really isn’t any fictional or non-fictional theme that hasn’t been touched. Sometimes, they are complete masterpieces. On the other hand, as years pass, an exorbitant number of flukes enter the scene and deprive viewers of any entertainment at all.
Griffith is a GPL licensed application from developer Vasco Nunes. This makes it free for both private and commercial use. The software will provide its users comprehensive management of their movie collection.
This tedious task is made simple by fetching film information from the Internet using a plugin system. Therefore, you’ll automatically fill in information such as plot, cast, director, country, screenplay cameraman, genre, studio or classification from renowned websites like IMDb, Amazon, CineMovies, Clubedevideos, DVDEmpire or MovieMeter.
Griffith’s main window draws a classic, clean interface with everything you need in plain sight. At the top users will find the menu bar with the common items as well as a Loans menu for quick access to Loan, Return, Email Reminder and the list of People that borrowed the films.
The button bar comes in very handy for adding, deleting and modifying movies from database. You will also be provided with buttons linked to the official website, the movie webpage that you fetched the information from and the respective trailer. In order to look up films in the database, you can use the Search button and the Filter option.
The first time you run the application, it will display an empty movie list that requires you to fill it up. Just press the Add button and you’re ready to go. This will bring up a new window and that's where your adventure starts. Griffith does not require users to enter the exact title of the movie, as it will display several results either way.
Type in the title of the motion picture, select the website to fetch data from (default is IMDb) and click on the Get from web button. In just a few seconds you will be choosing the most appropriate result and the software will populate the database entry with various data, ratings and even the movie poster.
You will also inspect the Details tab of the window where will meet the crew behind the camera and several other aspects such as the year it was released, runtime in minutes and a very important option – Seen it. This will differentiate the movies you’ve seen from the other by changing the stylized eye icon in the main window from red to green.
Next stop, we have the Technical information tab. If you own a copy of a specific movie, this is where you will fill in data like Medium, number of Discs, Condition, Region, number of Layers. More experienced users can dig deeper and will provide the Video Codec and the Resolution of the film. Still, there are no presets when it comes to the resolution, thus you will have to enter it manually.
What if your movie packs additional subtitles and commentaries in different languages? No problem with that either. The program wraps this under the Languages tab. There is no button to add these items, so you will have to use the right-click mouse button to create a new subtitle, commentary, dubbing or lector. Since it can also be an audio track, users will select the Codec and the number of channels it is mapped to. The last field allows you to choose from widely known subtitle formats: DVD VOB, SUB (MicroDVD), SRT (SubRip) or SSA (Sub Station Alpha).
The Tags section is pretty basic; however it can be easily customized from the Options window of the program. For starters, you’ll get the Favorite and Buy me tags that you can tick. Progressing through the window’s tabs, we will find ourselves in the Plot of the film, fetched from the movie database previously selected.
Some motion pictures will be accompanied by several plot variations, whereas others may not have a single one – in both cases, you’re welcomed to share your point of view. The stars of the show are listed in the next tab, the Cast. If you can get past the looks, you will have a hard time finding the actors and their role names and that’s because of the complete lack of any text formatting. The last tab of the window will round up the detailed information with further notes on the original language, audio, color or tagline.
The implemented loan system is very helpful and it only requires a SMTP server for the Email Reminder option. The Preferences window will provide users with Main list default settings, shown columns selection capabilities and Search results limitation. You can choose from Meter and Stars as the default Rating image and further set the Media, Condition, Region and other medium aspects to start with when adding new entries to the database.
The Favorite Movie Plugin menu will scroll the available Internet websites and what exactly to search for within the provided information. Setting up the SMTP server is just a short stop with easily customizable settings.
Adding and managing Tags, Media formats and Video codecs is yet another simple job as well as setting the preferred type of database to-be-used (internal SQLite3, PostgreSQL, MySQL or Microsoft SQL). For improved accuracy and clean descriptions, Griffith also comes with a built-in Spellchecker for the Notes and Plot fields.
The Good
This movie collection software combines great functionality with powerful and comprehensive Internet databases wrapped up in one neat and intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface). The abundance of details and customization levels bring Griffith to higher grounds, therefore users will feel that they are working with a truly well-built application.
The Bad
With its sturdy framework already set in place, this program lacks some graphical elements such as text formatting in film descriptions and a more diverse spectrum of links to the chosen Internet movie database (actors, directors and even genres).
The Truth
Griffith has the makings of a really promising application. It looks good, it works great and it delivers nice results. You will be able to easily set up your movie collection and then add your purchased titles along the way. Keeping all your favorite motion pictures in one place is almost a utopia? Then you should really try this simple yet extensive piece of software.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
