Battleangel

First of all I would like to, once again, promote the wonderful ICQ clone Miranda. Don’t go for the official version though but rather NIGHTLY BUILDS. They are far more advanced and useful than the old 1.2.2.0 version that is posted on the front page. Trust me, once you get the hang of Miranda and all the possible cutomizations and plugins, you will never go back to Mirabilis/AOL.

OPEN SOURCE / FREEWARE

Tracking the growing collection of DVDs has become quite a concern for me. As you might have noticed the media-list on this site is more or less defunct, I just got fed up editing the pages manually. Regardless of what solution I eventually choose for displaying DVD data (online) I will also need an offline DVD tracker. After trying out a couple of software solutions I got fondly attached to DVD Profiler. Why? Generally it is far more thought through than the competition, it has more features and more things that you can do. Every other tool I’ve tried so far relies on IMDB for disc information, or should I say movie information since IMDB is a movie database. DVD Profiler on the other hand has a central server with specialized DVD information, which is accessible through criteria like UPC and Title and Disc ID. Very neat indeed. When you install the program you get a local version of the database (only titles/UPC/ID) and discs can then be easily identified and and imported from the master server.
The registration is a bit silly though. Unless you have a premium registration you can only get low-res covers from the server. The s/n is of course checked by the server as well so illegal s/n:s are pretty much useless, they only enable you to remove the banner - and only as long as you don’t communicate with the server.
I might also mention that DVD Profiler supplies ONLINE profiles for its users. Haven’t tried it though because I don’t want to display my collection like that. I want a SCRIPT that does this on battleangel.org.
The other possible downside is the weak export option. A lot of the competing programs can create html web pages .. DVD profiler creates XML or CSV. Not entirely useful? The reason for this might be the software concept with the central database .. information in this database kind of belongs to the authors. Weird but thats the way I interpret the EULA.
Also I would like to see more AND BETTER statistics options and being able to include them (customized of course) into reports, skins and exports. A Php script that can steal information from the DVD Profiler database (or import data from local profiles) would also be greatly appreciated.

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Upon realizing there was no way to export a personal disc database so that people in general could access it, I came to think of PDF Printer Drivers. I had a faint concept of actually having used something like this in the past. So, I scavenged the net for FREE pdf export printer drivers .. and found none. Gee. Times have changed I suppose.
Well, at least I made an effort to be honest but ended up with the harsh reality of modern greed. The best commercial tool seemed to be Fineprint PDFfactory Pro and efter installing this I didn’t feel like I needed to look further.
PDFfactory does an admirable job indeed. It integrates into Windows as a normal printer and is able to fool all applications that I’ve tried so far. All pages pop up in a preview where the estimated filesize is visible. The Pro version can even encrypt pdf contents using the new 128bit keys of Acrobat 5. Now, together with the various report designs from DVD Profiler I can produce portable reports like this SAMPLE. Neat.

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