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The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Life of a Geek Admin - The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Tag Archives: collections

Data Crow for Collection Cataloging

Recently I took on the task to catalog my video and music collection. This need was driven by the fact that I was purchasing duplicate movies. The criteria was simple. It had to be able to use a barcode scanner, handle movie and audio collections, more if possible and have connections to access IMDB, Amazon and others if possible and able to run on different OS’s. And lastly the cost had to be reasonable or free. If free then a donation to the developer was in order.

After searching I found several options to try but ended up on looking at Data Crow. Data Crow is the ultimate media cataloger and media organizer. Always wanted to manage all your collections in one product? You want a product you can customize to your needs? Your search ends here! Using Data Crow allows you to create a huge database containing all your collected items. You can use the excellent online services to retrieve the information instead of typing all the information yourself.

A few features:

  • Platform independent and completely portable
  • Highly customizable and feature rich.
  • Audio, software, book, movie and photo collection cataloger
  • Retrieve information from services like Amazon.com, Imdb.com, Softpedia and MusicBrainz.
  • Optional internal web server and web GUI.
  • Import file information (mp3, divx, xvid, ..)
  • Loan registration.
  • PDF and HTML reporting.
  • Create new modules to, for example, maintain your stamp collection.
  • Available translations: Italian, German, Dutch, English, Spanish and French.

Data Crow is 100% free and 100% free of ads, viruses and spyware. Data Crow runs on any system where Java 1.6 (or higher) from Sun is installed.

The barcode scanner is an Adesso Nuscan 1000u which is a low cost USB scanner that will work well for the job and is supported by Data Crow. The nice thing about the Adesso barcode scanner is that you plug it in and it works, no drivers needed.

Installation is simple for Windows just download , unzip it and run the installer. One note for the Windows installation is to change the installation directory to c:\Data Crow instead of c:\program files\data crow.  the reason for the change is due to an issue with directory and file restrictions that can cause issues with Data Crow.

Installation on Linux and MAC is just as easy. Download and unzip the program. To start the program change to the extracted directory and run datacrow.sh.

Now that we are installed lets start it up and get started adding movies! Start up Data Crow and you will be greeted by a simple interface.

At start up you will be ask to select the modules. For my choice I selected all and after a few quick moments I was on my way. Select the module you want to add, in this case I am adding a DVD using the barcode scanner.

Click on Item Wizard and you will have several selections to choose from to search in the drop down next to Search For window. If you do not have a barcode scanner you can type in what you are looking for and select the appropriate category to select from in the drop down. If you do have a barcode scanner select UPC barcode and scan the barcode of the movie.

At this point you can select a different server to search from or accept the default of Amazon and click on the Find button.

Select from one of the search findings and click on Next. At this point Data Crow will connect and download any information retrived from the search. Click Finish to add the data into your collection.

Not to bad, easy to use and with a barcode scanner it will take little time to add the collection.

I have only covered the basic of this powerful collection application. Please download and try the application and hopefully you as I can quickly and easily add your collection. Look for future posts on more you can do with Data Crow.

Install OpenDb on CentOS 5.5

The Open Media Collectors Database (OpenDb) is a PHP and MySQL based inventory application that allows you to easily catalog and lend out your stuff. Its primary purpose is to catalog media related items, such as DVD’s, Books, CD’s etc, but its so flexible you can use it to catalog pretty much anything.

Opendb ships with many media related (DVD, VCD, CD, VHS, games, books, and laser discs.) item type definitions, or you can download a user contributed item type or create your own. Currently the application is at version 1.5.0.7 and there is active development in the SVN.

Requirements

To install the Open Media Collectors Database (OpenDb) on your site, you will need the following:

  • WebServer (Apache 1.3, 2.x, IIS,…) – Apache is recommended, but IIS should work too.
  • PHP 4.3.0+, 5.X
    • track_vars must be enabled.
    • register_globals can be enabled/disabled. You should really have this disabled for security reasons anyway!
    • php-mysql or php-mysqli module must be installed, so that PHP can access MySQL.
    • php-gd module for image thumbnail generation.
  • MySQL Database 4.X, 5.X
  • SMTP server or PHP email configured. If this is not possible, be sure to set the email configuration Mailer to ‘none’. The borrower functionality is severely restricted without email functionality.

Installation

The current version for OpenDB is 1.5.0.7 and can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/opendb/. Download the file to your server. The downloaded file is in zipned format which will require unzip to open. Our destination for the files is /var/www/html/opendb, for which we will need to create the directory and unzip the file contents.

$ sudo mkdir /var/www/html/opendb

$ sudo unzip OpenDb-1.5.0.7.zip -d /var/www/html/opendb

Change a few directory permissions for the installer to be able to work correctly.

$ cd /var/www/html/opendb

$ sudo chmod ugo+w ./log ./include ./importcache ./itemcache ./upload ./httpcache

Now that the files are in their final destination we can run the OpenDb installer. Run the OpenDb installer, by opening the install.php in your browser. Use a URL something like http://<your_server>/opendb/install.php

I attached an OpenOffice Doc with more detail OpenDb Installation

Tracking Movie Collection with Griffith

Have you ever had one of those times that you were looking for a movie  and didn’t know if you had it or just had no idea what movies you had? Well in comes a nice little application called Griffith.

Griffith is a media collection manager application. Adding items to the collection is as quick and easy as typing the film title and selecting a supported source. Griffith will then try to fetch all the related information from the Web. Griffith is a cross-platform application and is known to run on GNU Linux, Microsoft Windows and MacOS X systems.

In  this post we will cover installing Griffith and configuring it to use MySQL for the database back end.

Install / Configure Griffith on the server
Griffith is in the repositories for Ubuntu and Fedora / CentOS, so installation is easy from the terminal.

Ubuntu
$ sudo apt-get install griffith

Fedora / CentOS
$ sudo yum install griffith

MySQL Database Creation
Now that the hard part is over we can create the MySQL database using the terminal. Once the database has been created and permissions set there is nothing to do but connect a client to the database and it will create the tables and fields it requires.

Open a terminal and connect to the MySQL database.

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE `griffith` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
mysql> CREATE USER 'griffith'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'gRiFiTh';
mysql> CREATE USER 'griffith'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'gRiFiTh';
mysql> GRANT ALL ON `griffith` . * TO 'griffith'@'localhost';
mysql> GRANT ALL ON `griffith` . * TO 'griffith'@'%';
mysql> exit

The commands created the database and user griffith on localhost and remote hosts to the database griffith. The password used is the default password created by the application, which you can use a different password (most advisable).

Edit /etc/my.cnf and comment out bind-address, this will allow remote connections to the database. If it is left to 127.0.0.1 then only the local host will be able to connect to the databases being hosted. Once the change has been made restart mysqld service.

$ sudo service mysqld restart

Client Installation and Configuration
Linux
Now that the server is configured and working, the clients need to be installed and configured. For Fedora and Ubuntu distributions use the same installation method as was done with the server. For Windows you will need to download and install Griffith from the website. Once you have installed the program we can move on to the configuration.
Next we need to open Griffith, click  Applications > Sound and Video > Griffith. Click File > Select Database. Use the following settings for this dialog.

Type: MySQL
Host: Your Servername or ip
Database: griffith
Username: Your username for database access or root
Password: Password associated to the selected user.

Click Save and if all is good you will login and connect to the database. If this is the first connection to the blank database the program will create the structure for you.

Windows Clients
For Windows systems the installation is as simple as downloading the self installing executable and double-clicking to install. Download the latest client from http://griffith.cc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=39 and click on the link for the Windows installer. The current version at this writing is 0.12.1.

Once the installation is complete open Griffith and configure the database connection to your server. Click File > Select Database. Use the following settings for this dialog.

Type: MySQL
Host: Your Servername or ip
Database: griffith
Username: Your username for database access or root
Password: Password associated to the selected user.

Now you are ready to add movies. You can do this one by one or if you have the movies in a spreadsheet you can export to csv and import into Griffith.

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