MyMovieDB

MyMovieDB is a database tool dedicated to personal video file management.

Once you compressed all your DVDs into video divx, mkv, iso, avi whatever, and have them stored on some disk, you may want to sit down and be able to choose in a friendly way the movie you are going to watch.

Since you have nearly a thousand video files on the disk, you do not want to skim through all files, all directories, determine what movie is in a given file, find the critics for this movie, see if it fits your co-watchers, etc...

What you want to do is search your movies by title keywords, by movie genre, by actor, or by custom tags, see the poster, see the internet critics, and launch the movie with one click. That's what I wanted to do , and I was not satisfied by the free software I found, so I wrote this small DB management system.

It can be used also as a demonstration of various java Spring techniques I learned recently.

Pre requisites

Install MySQL server

MyMovieDB uses a MySQL server as a local database.

If you do not already have a MySQL server installed, download and install a MySQL server. You can for example download MySQL Community Server from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/

Create a database named mymoviedb. You can use another name, in which case you must use that name in the configuration below (see "Install from source" below)

Get the application

Two solutions:

• install the provided package at ...
• compile and install from the github source (experienced users)

####Install from bundle

• download and unzip the package where you want it
• Tell MyMovieDB where your MySQL server is by editing the MyMovieDB-x.x.x.bat file.

####Install from sources use maven: mvn package -DskipTests=true -Ddatasource.username=<your mysql user> -Ddatasource.password=<your pass word> -Ddatasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mymoviedb

(I have no tests, I just use it)

Install it by hand where you want it.

You can create a shortcut to the .bat script.

Getting Started

Fill the local DB

The longest part is in filling in your own local DB:

• scan a directory with your movie files in it
• MyMovieDB finds the video files in the directory and its sub directories,
• for each video file it finds, MyMovieDB tries to determine title keywords from the file name (not always easy)
• First MyMovieDB searches the local DB for these keywords, and you can point it to the movie if it is in the local DB,
• if the movie is not in the local DB, MyMovieDB searches a famous internet movie database for the given movie (namely themoviedatabase).
• It will ask for confirmation once it found a movie,
• or it will ask for help if it does not find it. In that case, you search for yourself and enter in MyMovieDB just the "themoviedatabase" URL

You can interrupt the process any time and come back to it later.

Enjoy

Once the local DB is filled, you can browse the DB, search, and play movies.

Getting help

Mail me: gandji at free dot fr

File a bug report on github

Programming techniques

I started implementing this database as an exercise for various techniques I learned recently, and other techniques I learned along the way. It can been seen as a demonstrator for :

• Maven inheritance of modules. the project now has three modules, I tried to end up with more or less clean pom files.

• Spring usage:

  • I do all I can to use annotation based configurations rather than file wise configurations.
  • spring boot
  • spring beans, singletons and prototypes
  • spring data with jpa and hibernate, annotation based configurations

• Data management Architecture:

  • DAO layer
  • the underneath database can be mysql or h2 (I am less at ease with H2, so everything does not work with h2). I did this as an exercise to configure the data access bean through spring profiles. Spring profile "mysql" activates the use of MySQL database (the default), profile "h2" uses an h2 database.

• REST api

• Web app with thymeleaf renderer. I did this because I wanted a nice carousel for the movie selection. I did not pursue because I want to be able to launch a movie from the app, and this is "forbidden" from a web app, for obvious security reasons.

• so I turned to a JavaFX GUI. I could integrate the JavaFX app with spring, thanks to the web. At launch time, you can choose between JavaFX app or Swing app. For services that depend on being swing or javafx, I internally define a spring profile 'javafx' in case we launch JavaFX, and profile 'swing' in case we launch swing app.

• In the JavaFX app, I use an embedded JavaFX browser. I use an embedded JavaFX browser because I want to reuse the thymeleaf rendering I made, and I still wanted the nice "material" carousel. Unfortunately, the carousel does not render as nicely in the JavaFX web browser (:sigh:).

• For the browser:

  • I can call java from javascript
  • I can call javascript from java through the webEngine
  • all this thanks to various web tutos.