Cataloging Your DVDs Online

I took a couple of hours today to try out two DVD cataloging sites. I used to belong to DVDSpot, but the developers of that site took everything offline in October 2007. I had located a couple of alternatives, but I'd never gotten around to testing them out. I decided to take a box of DVDs and try my hand at cataloging them on the two sites.

The first site I tried was DVD Count. This site's developer had been a DVDSpot user and needed a solution to manage his own DVDs so he developed one. I was hoping for more similarities with DVDSpot, but I found this site a bit clunky to use. I found myself manually having to enter about 10% of the titles in the portion of the box that I added to this site. One of the things that I really disliked about the entry form is that it defaulted to Afghanistan as the country. I accidentally forgot to change one of my manual entries, and there was no way to edit my error. I did like the detail that was included in the entries; however, it was a bit uneven because many of the entries were made by other users who provided varying levels of completeness to the record. I really don't blame them for skipping many of the fields because to a non-techy person, many of them were daunting and probably seemingly irrelevant. There was a place to add a cover image as you added entries.

The second site I tried was DVD Corral. I loved the ease of adding items. Their database seemed much more complete, but I also noted that some titles came up with incorrect titles. For example, Greater Vision Live at First Baptist Atlanta came up as Live at First Atlanta. Greater Vision wasn't even listed as performer and the word "Baptist" was omitted. There was no way to edit this. There was also no way to manually add an entry. You were prompted to send a message to the webmaster about the missing title, but that's kind of frustrating. There needs to be a way to edit an entry, and there needs to be a way to add an entry.

Online DVD cataloging sites are just not as friendly or as social as some of the book cataloging sites like LibraryThing. I think Tim and his crew need to come up with DVDThing! I'm not completely happy with either of the sites I used today.