History Behind
the
Movie Manager
Cinema Premiere evolved because many years ago I built a PC to connect to my big screen TV. I wanted an easy way for my young kids to play movies without handling and scratching our DVDs. That led to backing up our DVDs to DivX and storing them on our media PC. (Now that the MPA (Motion Picture Association) has made such a big to do about backing up DVDs, I would advise against backing up your DVD collection and to protect my butt, I have since deleted those Divx movies.) Since my 8 year old daughter was a computer whiz, I figured it would be pretty easy for her to locate the movies in the Windows folders and click on the movie name to play it. Her younger brother, on the other hand, was still learning to read and was not quite as computer savvy as she was. However, both of them still preferred to look through the DVD cases to pick out a movie and my daughter still struggled to find the movie on the PC and often wanted to know what the movie was about.
This led me in the search of a movie manager I could install on my PC and view on my TV. I must have tried at least a dozen and they all came up short. Many of them were just not readable on the TV screen or did not display correctly at a screen resolution of 800x600 with the font size set to large. Now that big screen LCD and Plasma TVs are readily available, screen resolution is not a problem, but at the time it was a big problem. Some movie managers did not have the capability of playing a movie from the movie manager. Some made it difficult to add movies and had limited search capabilities. I finally decided to write down everything I wanted and implement it myself, after all, I had been a programmer for many years before the call of motherhood.
Thus, came Cinema Premiere. I have a shortcut to the Cinema Premiere Browser in my Programs>Startup folder on my media PC so when it boots up, it automatically goes to the Movie screen and shows the thumbnail view of all the movies rated G and PG so my kids can easily browse the DVD cover images. If they want to know what the movie is about, they just click the title and the plot pops up in nice large print. If they want to play the movie, they just click on the picture. I have my DivX player set to automatically turn off the PC when the movie is over (unless you cancel within 30 seconds). For our movies that are still on DVD or VHS, the movie manager tells us where they are located so we can easily find and play them.