You buy a DVD or two for yourself, you get some for your birthday, you borrow a few and lend a few, and soon enough, you have a wall...or two or three...filled with DVDs. You can't remember which you own, which you don't, and most important, which you loaned to your "friends". And what was that movie with, you know, that guy who was in that other movie? You know, that guy? In that movie? EMDB to the rescue!

EMDB is a freeware program which you can use to catalog your DVDs. This does not make it special. What does make it special is that it will hook up to IMDB.com and get directors, actors, and even box art, making adding movies to the database a delightfully simple process. Type in the name, pick the right match--there are, for example, a few dozen films and games which pop up when you type in "star wars"--and presto, there you go. Most of the fields are filled in; time to add the next movie!

Once you've added movies, you can easily search your database by actor, director, or genre. Searching is pretty simple, with no 'or' or 'and' constructs, but most people will have small enough collections that this is not vital. One oddity is that while you can rate movies, there doesn't seem to be a way to sort or search by rating--so you can't quickly find your top-rated films in the list.

The other nifty feature of EMDB is that it will track to whom you've loaned your DVDs....a feature whose utility is in direct proportion to how many mooching friends you have. (Perhaps a future enhancement will include automatically emailing the suspect after a deadline has passed.)

EMDB is a free program and still hasn't reached Version 1.0. There are some incomplete or slightly buggy features, but nothing really show-stopping, and development is active and ongoing. As with all database programs, though, back up often just in case.

Note: This program is donationware. It is free to try, but the author accepts and encourages donations towards further development.

--Ian Harac