Two years ago I started writing a program that will allow me to catalog my movies. I called it Revolucion Movie Library.
There are many programs out there that can do this, but non of them suited me. Some are too complicated, have many useless features and make simple things hard to do. And most of them are … ugly.
In meantime I changed it many times, optimized, polished the interface, added few interesting features that friends requested and improved it and improved it again. And, of course, fixed bugs I created. The goal was and still is to make software that is simple and easy to use, that makes user feel good and that it does what it is supposed to be doing.
So, it’s not completely finished yet, but here are some of the current features and screenshots.
Features:
- Simple and easy to use
- Get movie info and movie covers from online movie databases
- Add movie in three steps
- Easy catalogize all movies stored on your hard drive
- Browse movies in three views (list view, table view and cover show)
- Fast searching
- Advanced filtering
- Search and view movie trailers from Youtube
- Capture frames from movies (so you can quickly remind without playing the movie)
- Easily export to HTML, PDF or Excel format
- View movie news like most popular upcoming movies and weekend box office
- Automatically translate movie info to language you choose
- Backup and restore database
- … and other that I currently can’t remember …
Demonstration video:
Watch in HD: http://www.vimeo.com/3373420 (use full screen option).
Screenshots:
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The Revolucion Library is still in development, but the first beta version will probably be available in next few weeks.
For all developers out there, Revolucion Library is written completely in Java with custom Swing components and few open source libraries, backed by Hibernate and HSQL database. For details, ask.
Please do tell me what you think about all this. Do you like it or not, and why ? What features do you think this type of software needs to have ? Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Revolución Movie Library 
[…] it is doubly so when Swing is the UI toolkit of choice. Željko Ziriković is the mastermind behind Revolucion, a new Swing-based media player. And while Mikael Grev’s initial work on his own media player […]
It’s really nice ! I’m curious, which L&F do you use for swing ? Or do you made it yourself?
Thank you. I didn’t write a complete L&F, insted I written UI implementations for components that I use, and some custom components that do not exist in Swing.
This is very cool, i definitely see some nice inspiration from the Zune software. I’ll patiently wait to try it out !
(otac mi je iz novi sad :)
Yes, latest version of Zune has pretty nice UI.
A primetih još pre po prezimenu da imaš veze sa ovim krajevima ;)
lol, znao sam da je nešto falilo :)
valda normalno je, kad imao sam 6 godine zadni put sam naški prićao (nikad nisam pisao, jel se to isto puno vidi ? :)
back to the subject at hand, good job on the ui and i hope we’ll all learn something interacting together :)
It really rocks! I’m longing to try it…
It’s amazing, I’ll follow your blog.
Inspiring! Bookmark to your blog instantly added.
Keep up the good work,
S.
Thank you all for nice comments. I’m really delighted.
As I said, beta version of Revolucion Library will be available for download in next few weeks. I have to fix some small UI problems, implement auto update functionality and some other things like exporting to XML and maybe uploading to Google Docs. I have many ideas :)
To clarify one thing – Revolucion Library is and will probably stay to be closed source project and one day I hope to make some money out of it. But, this is also my graduate work and I support open source, so I will write few posts to explain how I did some interesting parts (ui, youtube player, image manipulation etc.), with code of course.
That’s awesome work! best swing ui i’ve ever seen.
Could you give me a hint about how did u do the Youtube player? I’m very interested on that part.
Did i say it’s fantastic?
:)
Thanks.
Great UI Željko. You’ve worked hard and the UI reflects that.
Congratulations, it’s really neat! And the software seems as quick and smooth as it is beautiful!
I wonder how you play the videos? Do you use a java-based solution or a native one? Looks like you embed a browser in your application to run Youtube?
I’m impressed very much!
Looking forward to try this nice app!
And the tutorials and howto-s as well appreciated! ;)
Makes me wish I actually had some movies to put in Revolucion. Looks amazing :)
Will I be able to buy this??
Yes you will. I can’t tell you now the exact date when the final version will be realised, but in few weeks beta version will be available for download so you can try it.
For all of you who asked how Revolucion Library plays Youtube videos:
open source this and make the rest of us Swing programmers better… ;-) this is awesome – well done…
I have a Large collection of dvds on my NAS. Each dvd is in iso format. Will this play a iso. Like VLC dose?
Revolucion Library is not a video player, so for playing movies you have in your collection it will open your default video player. If you set VLC to be default video player, it’ll use VLC.
Any approximate date for the demo. Really looking forward to testing it out. Nice work!!! Cheers
[…] few weeks back, Željko got in touch with me regarding his Swing project , Revolucion Library , which is an awesome looking media player for Java. He has clearly put a lot […]
Nadam se da će brzo krekovati ovaj fantastični program :)
..a i da ćeš zaraditi dobru kintu u međuvremenu, jer ti aplikacija stvarno vredi.
Btw. did you check out JavaFX? Do you think you might have done Revolucion easier using JavaFX? I’m planning some work on a book library, similar to yours. Right now I’m considering the technology to use. I threw away Adobe AIR idea, because of its resource consumption, and trying to decide whether to use custom Swing or JavaFX.
Hehe. Upravo ovih dana radim i na tome da to sto vise otezam ;)
From what I saw, I think it would be much harder to do Revolucion Library in JavaFX. And I like Swing, so for now I don’t feel the need to switch to anything else. But, what I would like to see is an easy way to use JavaFX in Swing.
Very impressive media player. Good work!
I was writing a media player myself and I know how much work is involved (especially in the final stage just before releasing the player).
I am interested in how you created the background image. Do you just paint an image on a JPanel of do you create the image using pure Java2D API? How does the image behave when resizing the window?
Thanks.
Yes, background is an image painted on a JPanel and a horizonal line at the bottom of the window is Java2D. And windows are non resizable ;)
i want to build a dialog like picture#4 :)
can you tell me , what kind of trick is need ? :<
i know the top window(like Frame,Window,Dialog) can’t 100% translucent,however take a look at the edges of dialog, i don’t know how to edges translucent.
That’s not really a dialog – it’s a panel painted on a glass pane of the frame. But you can make a dialog like that if you use Java 1.6u10+. Create a JPanel and override it’s paintComponent method so you can fill the round rectangle as a background and draw a round border. Then set that panel as a content pane of the dialog. And then set the shape and translucency of the dialog with the methods from AWTUtilities. Only the shadow around the dialog would be a problem …
thx. i got it. :)
http://www.curious-creature.org/2007/09/28/translucent-shaped-windows-extreme-gui-makeover/
http://www.curious-creature.org/2007/08/01/blurred-background-for-dialogs-extreme-gui-makeover-2007/
i use LM(layoutManager) to build the panel(on the glasspane – like picture#4),but it look not well.
do you hava use any LM in that dialog? or just setLayout(null) ?
if setLayout(null) will difficult to set component position because if it size resize will cost-time to calculate interrelated details. thx
You can use any layout manager. For that dialog I used Netbeans and GroupLayout. Just remember to set EmptyBorder as a border for the panel if you paint shadow around it, so the components don’t go out of the ‘visual’ border.
May I ask you where you got the background image from?
I made it in Photoshop with few custom brushes.
Fabulous, a shame i don’t have much time to work on dtek anymore which is quite similar (Java, Swing, movie database), your software is fabulous. I can’t wait to try it…
I hope there will be a way to create plugins to import movies informations from french database, i would wrote some…
IMBA.I like it!
I hope i can use my created db in trial version also in full version. ?
Thanks. Next version will most probably have different database, precisely I’ll switch from RDMS to XML database. But, I may make a tool that can import old data.
Helo.I have a little idea for you. Put two column to info for name of film.Original name and regional name.I think it wil be better.I following your blog.Good luck.
I’ll think about that.
Hello again. I take to “frames” function now.I really like it very much.But there is problem when i took frames from some HD film (1080p) and my screen resolution is only x768.I cant see whole picture and i cant quit:( Maybe some fit setting, i dont know.Just only notify.Good job anyway!
Great notice, thanks. I’ll fix that. I never tried HD video so I didn’t notice that. Feel free to inform me if you notice any other things.
When does it comes out ?
I do not have lot of spare time in recent months, so I can’t tell you the exact date, but I am working on a new version of Revolución whenever I have some spare time.