Kristina and I purchase a fair amount of DVDs in the second market (used). Usually we get pretty good deals on them, for example, last weekend we bought 8 DVDs from Hollywood video for about $50. One consequence of our DVD buying habit is that our friends like to borrow DVDs from us. Then I usually forget who we’ve loaned the DVDs to, and next thing you know they go missing like my copy of Enemy of the State.
If we had a Mac, there’s a killer program called Delicious Library that does an amazing job of cataloging materials. I sought out a similar thing for Linux, and found a few nascent projects – all of which had bugs. The one that seemed the best designed, and fit most with my current computing experience was MCatalog. However, it appears that its web hosting isn’t overly stable because the web page is frequently down, and that it’s been more or less abandoned for the last nine months. Thankfully the code was in the GNOME CVS archive, so I pulled down the latest version and started hacking on it.
Like any good OSS programmer, I’ve tried to contact the original author to see if he is accepting patches (bug reports are handled through GNOME’s bugzilla) – but I have yet to get a response. It’s getting to the point where I need revision history on my files in case I do something stupid, and also where I think that other people may find my improvments useful. So, I’ve put a subversion repository that everyone can check out the newest code from. Just check stuff out from https://secure.wagstrom.net/svn/mcatalog and start playing around with it. So far I’ve updated it to stop throwing deprecation errors, fixed a bug with it deleting covers for everything, and made it show icons if the media is actually checked out at that time. More fun will ensue I’m sure.
In the mean time, if you use it and have feature requests of bug reports, shoot me an email. I’ll handle my stuff informally until I get more feedback from the original author.