History Behind the Movie Manager

 

Cinema Premiere evolved because several years ago I built a PC to connect to my big screen TV. I wanted an easy way for my young kids to play movies without handling and scratching our DVDs. That led to backing up our DVDs to DivX and storing them on our media PC. (Is that a crime? I definitely do not advise backing up movies that are rented or borrowed.) Since my 8 year old daughter was a computer whiz, I figured it would be pretty easy for her to locate the movies in the Windows folders and click on the movie name to play it. Her younger brother, on the other hand, was still learning to read and was not quite as computer savvy as she was. However, both of them still preferred to look through the DVD cases to pick out a movie and my daughter still struggled to find the movie on the PC and often wanted to know what the movie was about.

This led me in the search of a movie manager I could install on my PC and view on my TV. I must have tried at least a dozen and they all came up short. Many of them were just not readable on the TV screen or did not display correctly at a screen resolution of 800x600 with the font size set to large. Others did not have the capability of playing a movie from the movie manager. Some made it difficult to add movies and had limited search capabilities. I finally decided to write down everything I wanted and implement it myself, after all, I had been a programmer for many years before the call of motherhood.

Thus, came Cinema Premiere. I wrote the movie manager in HTML, PHP, JavaScript and MySQL to initially just run on my local web server on my media PC. It was very simple to setup Windows XP Pro as a web server and PHP and MySQL were free to download and pretty straight forward to install once I got past a few simple hurdles. I had no intention on releasing the movie manager to the public when I was creating it. I was only trying to set up a nice media center for my kids, so a lot of love went into developing this program.

However, after investing so much time and adding so many features to the movie manager and since it was written in HTML, I got the crazy idea that it might work well in a multi-user environment on the web. I didn't realize how much work it would be to go public with it, but after hours of programming, I am very pleased how it all came together.

Cinema Premiere went live on the web February, 2005.

I created two free versions of the movie manager to give people a chance to try it out with no obligation to purchase anything. There is a free basic membership version that is limited to 100 movies in the database that will never expire and a free trial version that has no limit to the number of movies in the database but will expire after one month. I am hoping that this site will take off and enough people will upgrade to the unlimited membership or purchase the Personal Server to at least pay for the cost of my web hosting.