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. (Now that the MPA (Motion Picture Association) has made such a big to do about backing up DVDs, I would advise against backing up your DVD collection and to protect my butt, I have since deleted those Divx movies.)
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 have a shortcut to the Cinema
Premiere Browser in my Programs>Startup folder on my media
PC so when it boots up, it automatically goes to the Movie screen
and shows the thumbnail view of all the movies rated G and PG
so my kids can easily browse the DVD cover images. If they want
to know what the movie is about, they just click the title and
the plot pops up in nice large print. If they want to play the
movie, they just click on the picture. I have my DivX player
set to automatically turn off the PC when the movie is over (unless
you cancel within 30 seconds). For our movies that are still
on DVD or VHS, the movie manager tells us where they are located
so we can easily find and play them.
This is what I believe to be a very easy to use and feature
rich movie manager.
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