Problem: I've got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I've found my available tools to be too low-leverage on managing this anymore.
Context: about 2 years ago, I've stopped the directory structure madness, and embraced search as first-order link for media files. As a byproduct of this, I notice I don't have a clear mental structure of what videos/music is downloaded to my computer anymore, and to where (good riddance!). Neither do I want it to; instead, I'd like to have a "youtube for local hard drive":
Basically, I'm looking for a local Media Browser application for windows: specifically, an app which allows:
* thumbnailed preview of all videos & images
* Automagically categorized based on all online, or within-file available meta-information
* With a built-in search
To perform the following operations:
* Preview a thumbnail on video files (similar to file explorer)
* Display categorized lists of all media available locally on my drives
* Channelsurf, similar to youtube: be able to start from one movie file, and have "similar" videos around it
* Double-clicking on the file to start mplayer
* typing the first 2-4 letters of the movie/image to instantly bring up the list of media with that part in it
While specifically not doing:
* Anything that requires me to touch any of the files in any way shape or form whatsoever
* Any upsale (I'm looking at you, windows 8 "personal videos"), advertising, or introduce any friction during interaction
* Bringing up any browsers: solution must be windows-native, and responsive (<20ms results)
Specific things I've tried so far:
* The closest thing I can wave towards "want" is apple's itunes, and JRiver's media center; they both share the same weakness of not being able to use mplayer as playback engine
* Banshee on windows is unable to show video previews, have multiple stability issues, and can't use mplayer for double-click
(I've posted full details of this to http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/2646/media-b... a month ago, to no response avail, but getting upvotes, which evidences a market to be had for this )