u/aungkokomm

Been hoarding movies for years across multiple external HDDs and was never fully happy with the available options. Plex/Jellyfin are great but feel like overkill when I just want to browse and play — I don't need a media server, transcoding, or a web UI. Kodi works but it's heavy to set up per-machine. Commercial apps either cost money, need cloud accounts, or don't understand my folder structure.

So I built my own. It's called CineLibrary and it scratches exactly my itch.

What it does:

It doesn't scrape anything itself — it reads the .nfo files and poster/fanart images that MediaElch already wrote into your movie folders. If you're in this sub you probably already use MediaElch or something similar. CineLibrary just builds a catalog on top of that and gives you a nice UI to browse it.

• Single portable .exe — drop it in any folder, no install. All data (SQLite database + cached artwork) goes into a CineLibrary-Data/ folder right next to it. Put it on a USB stick and your whole catalog travels with you
• Identifies drives by hardware serial number — not drive letter. So if Windows decides your HDD is E: today and G: tomorrow, CineLibrary doesn't care
• Multiple drives — add as many HDDs as you want, each with multiple movie folder roots
• Offline browsing — posters and metadata are cached locally on first scan. You can browse your full collection even when none of the drives are plugged in. Only "Play" greyed out when the drive is offline
• Missing-safe — if a movie disappears from a drive (or you haven't plugged that drive in), it stays in your catalog marked MISSING. Nothing gets auto-deleted
• Search, filter, sort — full-text search across title/plot/actors/directors, filter by genre/director/actor/year/drive, sort by title/year/rating/runtime

Honest disclaimers:

It's an Electron app, so yes — it's about 75 MB and takes a few seconds to load the first time. It's not snappy like a native app. I know. For a movie catalog browser that I open once in a while, it works fine for me. If you need something that opens in under a second, this isn't it.

It's also a personal project — not a polished commercial product. Works great for my collection of 1000+ movies. I haven't tested edge cases I haven't personally hit. If something breaks for your setup, the source is on GitHub and PRs are welcome.

Requirements:

• Windows 10/11 64-bit
• Movies already scraped with MediaElch (free, open source)
• Each movie in its own folder with a .nfo file

GitHub / Download: 👉 https://github.com/aungkokomm/CineLibrary/releases/latest

Happy to answer questions. If it's useful to even a handful of people here, sharing it was worth it.