As more and more people are transferring there media to their home pc’s and using the likes of Windows Media Centre, Media Portal or XBMC to name a few, I wanted to find a low resource media meta manager that could provide me with an easy to use folder structure for my films that would also provide me with artwork, folder renaming, renaming of film titles and also give me synopsis information, within my chosen media player, in my case Windows Media Center.
After trying many different media managers including some very fancy meta managers which just had too many settings I wanted something that could run in the background and do the work for me. I stumbled across Yammm or in other words Yet Another Media Meta Manager. This for me ticked all the boxes and as a plus side I didn’t have to install Microsoft SQL Server to retain all the information about each film. Yammm runs as a service within Windows and it has the ability to download Meta data, rename folders, rename files andor create playlists. Metadata can be any combination of dvdid.xml, mymovies.xml andor XBMC nfo file.
All Meta information and artwork is provided via either themoviedb.org or thetvdb.com.
As I have been running Yammm now for a few months I can honestly say I have had no real issues with the program/service, it’s a case of set it up (which is very simple) and it will just run on a single folder where you store all your films or on multiple folders across multiple drives, it’s a sort of set and forget. The only issues I have had is if a newer film has been released with the same name as an old film, in my case I have Yammm set up so that when I add a new film to my Movies directory Yammm will automagically rename the folder the film is in (i.e. folder name: Grownups 2010 or The expendables 2010) renaming my folder structure, it sets the year the film was made in, if it chooses the wrong year/artwork/data just remove the XML file and artwork from within the folder and change the date on the folder to the correct date and it will re-download the correct data and artwork.
I could carry on talking about this great piece of software all day (which I will add is free but of course you can make a donations to the writer of this software), but instead why don’t you download it for yourself and give it a try,.
You can get the software from the following website http://mikinho.com/yammm
Great product, as i use it too and couldn't agree more with what you said.Great first article by the way :)Andy
After having to think about it and not put my catering knowledge first, (vegetable came to mind 😀 – Yam) i've looked into it and its very shiny indeed, no more do you have to worry about finding all the album art, correct titles etc manually which is VERY time consuming! Great find and article Matt!
Thanks Guys just thought i would share it with people
Thanks for this, im currently in the process of deciding whether to build a htpc or to use a pre-defined solution (AC Ryan, Popcorn Hour, Zotac ION) but if i use something like a built by me HTPC i'll be sure to use this to catalog my items. Does it do TV shows too as well as movies/films?