Movie Explorer 1.8.6 - A must have app for movie lovers

[Betamagic]

We at Betamagic have just released a new update of Movie Explorer. We would like to use this opportunity to introduce the app to the MacRumors forum user group.

Movie Explorer is a native Mac app that turns your digital cinema movie collection into an attractive, informative and handy media catalog.

Movie Explorer scans all your internal, external and network drives for digital movie files like mkv, m4v, avi, mp4 and many other formats, and maps them to cinema movie titles using smart filename analysis and with data provided by The Movie Database. The resulting catalog with nicely rendered thumbnails is your starting point to play your movies, get info, enjoy art work, open IMDb and much more.

Movie Explorer also scans your files for technical data like encoding format, bit rate, video format, resolution, bit depth and audio specifications using the powerful MediaInfo library of MediaArea.

Movie Explorer can be downloaded for free on the Mac App Store:
Download on the Mac App Store

Movie Explorer contains a TV Shows Add-on that can be activated via an in-app purchase. This adds some very useful features to Movie Explorer, like a dedicated view and scan engine for TV shows, watched status and watchlist support for movies and TV shows including synchronisation with Trakt.tv, and much more.

Movie Explorer product page
TV Shows Add-on product page

Enjoy

Update 06 October, 2018:
Movie Explorer 1.8.6 has been released. See post #21.

 

[YatBob]

I installed this last night and really like it, creates a helpful playlist that identifies title by genre, rating, and country of origin, although I find the country of origin gets confused with countries and subject matter

 

[Betamagic]

Hi YatBob, the countries displayed in Movie Explorer are in fact production countries. With other words, countries where the money came from to produce the movie.

 

[YatBob]

Understand, thought countries referred to subject matter

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer 1.7.3 has been released!

This is a small maintenance update with the following new features and fixes:
• New option to set an image in the Gallery viewer as Desktop wallpaper.
• Prevents a crash when a four digit number is used as start of a filename followed by an episode indicator.
• Improved title matching of filenames containing phrase 'x265'.
• Fixed real-time update of the 'Recently Added' and 'HD Video' filters when changing preferences.

More info on the product page.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer 1.7.4 has been released!

This release contains the following changes:

• Several compatibility fixes for macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
• The MediaInfo library, that's being used to retrieve technical file metadata, has been updated in order to detect Dolby Atmos® and DTS:X® audio streams. We have made a custom version of this library, because the original unmodified library resulted in extremely slow scanning times.
• The Files panel in the sidebar of the Movies and TV Shows views do now show the runtime of the files. Which will be more reliable than the runtime showed in the Movies panel, which is based on data of TMDb.
• The 'Encoded by' field in the Files view does now show the app that was being used to produce the file. Unless the person's name of the encoder is available, which is often not the case.
• Hitting the Spacebar will now open the Info window. This is an addition to the existing ways of opening this window.
• By default, the Gallery now displays images maximized within the window.
• And a lot of other invisible improvements plus a few visible tweaks, like the animated TV Show sidebar.

More info on the product page.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer 1.7.5 has been released!

This release contains the following changes:

• Version 1.7.5 of Movie Explorer fixes an activation problem with the TV Shows Add-on. This problem was caused by a small change on how Apple generates so called 'receipt' files. The change made by Apple is the addition of a cancellation date to the receipt file. A misinterpretation of this date in the previous version of Movie Explorer resulted in not showing the TV Shows Add-on. This has been fixed in this new release.
• The view settings are extended with a new setting 'Show numeric ratings'. When enabled, numeric rating values are displayed under the thumbnails, instead of the usual stars.
• Disabling the usage of a second localization language was ignored by the scan module in the previous version, resulting in several French media descriptions, if the first set language didn't have this data.

More info on the product page.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer 1.8 has been released!

This release contains the following changes:

• The Cast, Crew and Studios views are completely redesigned. These views do now have a sidebar on the left side, where you can browse for persons or studios. The rest of the view shows the related movies, plus an inspector view with more details of the selected person or studio. On top of the sidebar and movies view, you see a small settings icon. When you click on it, a settings panel pops up. In this panel you can set a filter on the persons in the sidebar, customize the sorting of the movies, and set the visibility of some other user interface elements. In the Crew view you can now, for example, easily filter on directors or producers.
• The MediaInfoLib library has been updated again, and even more important, the implementation of this library within the Movie Explorer app has been improved. During scanning only the file metadata that is actually being used by Movie Explorer is now being extracted. This will lead in most cases to shorter scanning time and fewer crashes.
• A new iTunes metadata scanning engine has been added. This engine is being used with .mp4, .m4v and .mov files, to extract movie and episode information plus technical metadata. This will lead to better matching results, especially when you scan unaltered iTunes media files. You can disable or fine tune the use of this engine in the Advanced section of the Preferences panel.

More info on the product page.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer has been updated to version 1.8.1.

The following new features are added:

• New options to delete Internet and image cache. These options can be found in the Advanced tab of the Movie Explorer Preferences.
• New option to delete a TV show and all related data from the database. To do this, right-click on the TV show in the TV Shows sidebar in the TV Shows view, and click on the 'Delete from Catalog' menu item.
• You can now add multiple drives with the same volume name. If you do this, you still get a warning, but you can now choose to ignore this warning.
• TV show and season poster can now be adjusted. To do this, open the Gallery viewer after selecting the correct TV show or season, and right click on an image of your liking, and choose the 'Use Image as Thumbnail' menu item.

The following has been improved or fixed:

• Use of cache during TV shows scanning has been improved. All detected files in a location are now alphabetically sorted, before the actual indexing starts. This results in longer reuse of the same cache information, and less Internet traffic.
• Improved image download logic. When an image download action times out, an automatic retry is being performed, with a maximum of 10.
• Several other improvements and fixes, mostly related to better handling of updated or removed media data, especially in the new updated Cast, Crew and Studios views.

More info on the product page.

 

[seb.wagner]

[deleted]

Sorry, I shouldn't have used a posting to this thread as a support request. Your support staff is very helpful and working with them makes it seem a solution is on the horizon …

 

[Betamagic]

@seb.wagner: thanks a lot for contacting support!

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer has been updated to version 1.8.2.

The following new features are added:

• New Use lightweight shadow setting in the View settings of the Movies and TV Shows views.
• You can now sort on Original Title in all views.
• You can now display a Released column in the Files view.

The following has been improved or fixed:

• Scrolling of the Movies view is much smoother now, especially under macOS 11.13.
• Recognition of ‘Over Under’ 3D files has been improved.
• A bug causing a crash with some movie titles in the Cast and Crew views, has been solved.
• A bug causing a crash with some filenames when indexing using the new 'Used embedded metadata', has been solved.

More details about this update can be found on the change blog.

Info about the app can be found on the Movie Explorer product page.

 

[max2]

Is Movie Explorer ever coming to iOS ? Curious

 

[Betamagic]

We have some special plans, including ideas around iOS. That's all I can say at this moment

 

[max2]

We have some special plans, including ideas around iOS. That's all I can say at this moment

Thanks no problem!

Excited! If it doesn't happen though no big deal.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer has been updated to version 1.8.3.

The following new features are added:

• All settings related to files are moved to a new tab page Files in the Preferences panel.
• A new setting Auto correct file paths of remounted volumes is part of the said new tab page. With this setting, which is enabled by default, Movie Explorer automatically correct volume names when you mount multiple network share with the same share name. More info here.
• A new setting Inspector poster image quality has been added to the Advanced tab of the Preferences panel. With this you can fine tune how large the poster image should be that's being used in the right side inspector panel of the Movies and TV Shows views.

The following has been improved or fixed:

• A visual glitch with the Preferences panel in macOS 10.12 has been fixed.
• The iTunes button in the Touch Bar has been updated, plus some other small details are improved.
• Deleting the search text in the Studios view will no longer result in a crash.

More info on the dedicated update page, and on the product page.

 

[Kamran1990]

Its really good software to catalog movies but have one problem and that is the rating. The rating is not from IMDB. Kindly add option to select from which source user wants to get rating from. Other then that its PERFECT. Recommended to all. Thanks

 

[Betamagic]

Its really good software to catalog movies but have one problem and that is the rating. The rating is not from IMDB. Kindly add option to select from which source user wants to get rating from. Other then that its PERFECT. Recommended to all. Thanks

This is already planned for a future version. Our data source TMDb doesn't contain IMDb ratings, and IMDb doesn't have a free public (and usable) data service. We must therefore become 'inventive' to retrieve alternative ratings.

 

[Kamran1990]

This is already planned for a future version. Our data source TMDb doesn't contain IMDb ratings, and IMDb doesn't have a free public (and usable) data service. We must therefore become 'inventive' to retrieve alternative assessments.

Okay .... That would be great ... I support your efforts for making it more better.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer has been updated to version 1.8.4.

The following features are new or improved:

• New option Use folder name for TV show matching. If you enable this option, the folder name will be used to extract the TV show name when you scan a source location with TV show files. This option can be found in the Files section of the Movie Explorer preferences.
• Improved support for the system Sidebar icon setting. This setting is part of the General settings in the System Preferences of your Mac.
• The original title is now included in the search query when you search for movies or TV shows. So if you search for a French movie for example, you can find it by either the original French or the translated English title.
• Long file names and paths are now fully displayed in the inspector of the Files view, without any truncation or clipping.

Fixed and solved
The following bugs and problems have been fixed:

• Fixed a crash caused by incomplete TMDb data. During a ~72 hour time window in early April, a bug in TMDb caused problems with all TV shows that were edited in that period. Since then a large part of the affected data has been fixed, but to prevent any further crashes in Movie Explorer related to this issue, a workaround has been implemented. This may result in TV show data with incomplete cast or crew data.
• The Match dialog doesn't show non-existent episodes anymore.
• Solved some crashes related to changing views in the app after updating data.

More info can be found on the dedicated update page, and on the product page.

 

[Betamagic]

Movie Explorer has been updated to version 1.8.6.

This update contains the following changes:

• Full support for Mojave Dark Mode, part of macOS 10.14.
• Multiple fixes to keep the app compatible with Mojave.
• Improved support for media titles with Cyrillic and other non-ascii characters.

More info can be found on the product page.