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.
