So earlier, I mentioned that development on one of my favorite media managers was being halted by the main developer. I have been following the thread over at XBMC Forums in hopes that some generous users will revive this promising gem. After 200 some odd pages, it appears that some have done just that. Well, sort of.

A few of the more code-gifted users refuse to let this wonderful media manager fade into the abyss and have begun submitting patches here and there to resolve some of the outstanding bugs. The whole thing is still very loosely organized and appears to be gaining coordination via one of the original developers that helped work on Ember Media Manager with the creator. The source code is available to the community and is a visual basic .net project. Anyone is welcome to pull the source, code any changes or fixes, and submit patches back to the coordinating developer via the above linked thread.

I personally am glad to see the community embrace this wonderful media software and pitch in to help keep it moving forward. The home theater community would be at a great loss without Ember MM. To recount what exactly it is, Ember Media Manager is just that. An amazing media management software for home theater enthusiasts to manage and organize their entire movie collections with proper metadata, fan art, posters, covers, etc. Whether it be backed up Blu-Ray, DVD, or (legal) downloaded movies, EMM will scrape IMDB and other movie database sites for movie plots, cast, runtime, fan art, posters, cover art, and even trailers. It pulls in metadata regarding the resolution, format, aspect ratio, codecs used, everything. Ember MM then saves all this information into an HTPC friendly format allowing for easy importing into Xbox Media Center (XBMC). Ember Media Manager does a much better job of organizing and managing blu-ray, DVD, and home theater media collections than most, if not all, the offerings out there including XBMC itself.

Needless to say, it would be a shame to lose such a great piece of software and vital tool in your home theater toolbox. It would, however, be great to see this take off into a major open source collaboration and progress into an even greater and more robust solution. Maybe it could even get to the point that the greatly requested management of TV series and shows would finally be added in. Let me know what you think about Ember Media Manager. Have you used it and what is your opinion of it? If you don’t use EMM, what do you use for managing your media collection?

Coffee makes the world go ’round…