The name is DVD Metabase. Its reason for being started for my wife who is disabled and stays home and in bed most of the time. Early in the thread I mentioned having some 3000 DVDs; that was no boast nor exaggeration. I wanted to keep her entertained all day while I am off at work. Even with a 5-DVD changer, she had to get up and work her way through the collection which was hard on her. So I built a NAS with some spare hardware and Linux and ripped content to that box, then built another setup box with a remote that mounted the NAS and turned the directory structure into a menu she could navigate.
Going through the above process, ripping the tracks, naming the files, using the right settings for the right types of video (movies vs TV vs animation for example) all got to be too much and when the NAS melted down 5 years ago (literally; heatwave in California) I had to rerip, rename every stinking file and extra feature. Taking a cue from CDDB I wrote software in Python to wrap the excellent HandBrake software to analyze discs, uses a basic rule-based system to sort out if it looks like a movie, a TV series disc, cartoon (a la Family Guy, South Park, XMen cartoons, etc). On foreign language discs it would seek out the english language track and if that did not exist it would fall back and seek out english subtitles. All of this was nice and helpful but the process of naming TV episodes, etc was a major PITA. So I wrote a server-side DB of DVD metadata so now when you stick a disc into a drive to rip, it hashes the disc and connects to my server; if that title is in the database it rips all titles and extra features with proper names, putting it all into proper folders. Currently our collection translates into 5.5 terabytes of data so with the touch of a remote we can watch any episode of any show we have ever seen or liked, any movie, anything.
Anyhow that's basically it; python running on both ends with some bits of libdvdread to assist. I basically wrote it for us but some other p
eople have been interested in expanding the system to do other things and I work with them on that. Link is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdmetabase/
Back on topic...