Thank you, DVDpedia.

I have been using DVDpedia for over half a decade to catalog my burgeoning movie collection. Because all my movies are stored on hard drives, the discs discarded, DVDpedia also has a priceless feature which not only looks up a new movie in Amazon, returning all the details of actors, director, dates, cover art, etc. it also allows links to the file on the harddrive to be made with ease. Thereafter, any movie is one click away, with all the search and sift benefits denied those who store discs on bookshelves. Try finding all the discs starring James Stewart under Alfred Hitchock’s direction, or finding all the Suspense genre movies on your bookshelf in 5 seconds. Indeed, the number of DVDs chez Pindelski is exactly one, a remsastered Blu Ray version of Lawrence of Arabia which I am using to get a new Blu Ray reader installed in the HackMini to work over HDMI. More of that later.

DVDpedia permits the user to set up ‘Smart Collections’ and I have done this for favorite Actors, Directors and Genres. Now my voice controlled TV (“Winston, pull up all the Hitchcoks, please”) system is complete.

Anyway, when I upgraded the TV from a 720p 42″ to a 1080p 55″ the other day, it immediately became obvious that the grid view font was now so small as to be unreadable:

So I dropped Conor at Bruji, the author of the app, a line with a screenshot.

Two days later he sent me a re-coded and recompiled version which, with the addition of a couple of simple Terminal commands which he provided, delivered this:

Now all is readable again at my preferred 10 feet viewing distance. I even saw the typo in the left bar at last!

This is the sort of thing which makes it so great to have independent developers around. Truly bespoke customer service. Thank you Conor.

You can buy DVDpedia for a very modest sum by clicking the image below and I recommend the app without reservation. Variants for Books (which is what you see when you click on Books on Photography at the base of this page), CDs and Games are also available, and the iPad/iPhone version is wonderful when you want to quickly check whether you have a movie or not, as it syncs your Mac with the mobile device.

Click the picture to go to the Bruji site.

Movies are a huge source of inspiration to any photographer and you simply cannot have enough. Online services tend to see movies come and go so it makes a lot of sense to keep local copies for home viewing for those occasions when they are not available elsewhere. Mine reside on two Mediasonic hard drive enclosures, holding four 3TB drives each.

I understand from Conor at Bruji that he hopes to add the extra large font option in future releases of his application.

Update May 10, 2013: The Extra Large font feature has been added and you can download the enhanced application here. You don’t even have to do any additional code input with this version.