Adding a DVD or Blu-ray disc
With a DVD or a Blu-ray in the drive, the program can read the disc itself — its structure, its duration, its audio tracks and subtitles — and then look the film up online to complete the card.
- Put the disc in.
- Choose or press Shift+Ins.
- The program looks for a VIDEO_TS folder (DVD) or a BDMV folder (Blu-ray) on the drive set as Default DVD/Blu-ray drive in Preferences, then in any other optical drive. If there is no disc, a folder picker opens straight away — which is also how you catalog a disc that has been copied to the hard drive as a folder. The picker starts where the previous disc was, so the neighbouring discs are right there. The folder name supplies the year and the title to search for, with the media and the release group trimmed off: CONAN.THE.BARBARIAN.1982.Blu-Ray.HDCLUB becomes CONAN THE BARBARIAN, 1982.
- A movie card opens with the technical details already read from the disc. Type or correct the title and press Enter to fetch the rest from an online database, then click OK.
What is read from the disc
- Duration and structure. For a Blu-ray the program reads the playlists and picks the one that is the main feature, rather than assuming the largest file is the film — which on a disc full of extras it often is not.
- Video and audio. Resolution, aspect ratio, codecs, bitrate, frame rate, the audio tracks and their languages.
- Subtitles. The list of subtitle languages on the disc.
- The disc label, which goes into the Media label field. That is the field the program uses to tell you which disc to reach for, and the one lending can work on when a single disc holds several films.
A disc that holds several films: fill in the first one, then click Next media. The disc details stay, the film details clear, and you can enter the second title. All of them keep the same media label, so they stay recognizably one disc.
Disc images (.iso)
A DVD or a Blu-ray saved as an .iso image is added like a video file — Movie › Add From File, drag and drop, or the drive scanner. The program reads the disc structure from inside the image without mounting it, so images on a NAS or a network share work as well, and the card gets the same duration, tracks and subtitles as from the disc itself. Frames for screenshots are not grabbed from images automatically.
Discs on a shelf, not in the drive
Feeding a hundred discs through the drive one at a time is slow. If the boxes have barcodes, scan them instead — a few seconds each, and no disc changes.
Media location is where the disc physically lives — a shelf, a binder, a box. It is a separate field from the media label and it is worth filling in: without it, a large collection can tell you what you own but not where it is. See Media locations.
Free to try. Catalog up to 100 movies at no cost, forever.