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[energy_tone]

Greetings all,
  Apologies in advance for the long post...  I'd be interested in any feedback from anyone out there using MC15 or any other media library for managing home movies and family albums.  There are tons of apps out there for adding metadata to commercial songs and movies, but I'm more interested in cataloging my still images and home movies from AVCHD to digitized media from VHS, Betamax or 8MM film.  I want to tag these assets with information about who is in them, what the event was and the date so that my family can enjoy them and future generations will be able to enjoy them.
  I've done a lot of searching and testing looking for a solution to tag and organize my extensive collection of home movies and family pictures.  Sadly, there isn't a universal tagging method for all media file types that I could find.  Not even when using sidecar files.   I had hoped to find one or two file types that would support embedded metadata so that I could tag my media once and be done with it.  That way, regardless of what media library I would use in the future, it would most likely read the embedded tags.  Reality is that there is very little support for video file tagging out there.  I looked at mkv and mp4.  MP4 tags that I updated with WMP or iTunes don't map to MC15 (at least not all of the tags) and as for MKV, editing tags is a nightmare and there is no straightforward means of getting from AVCHD to MKV.  The few lossless methods I tried made the file about 5 times as large as the orignal so I gave up.
  I've settled on going with MC15 and using its database to track all my media assets.  I had been doing this manually, but organizing my files in a hierarchical windows file structure in like manner: M:\Media\Raw_Media\2009\January with separate directories of course for each year and month etc....
  I will still organize my files in this way, but will use MC15 to track all the ‘meat’-o-data.  To me, the metadata is really what makes the electronic library worth having.  What good is it to have a bunch of old videos of your family or ancestors doing this or that if you don’t know the who what where when of it?  I have hundreds of hours of video from the past 30 years and without a means to sort and describe it the real value of what is captured is lost.
  So….  Here’s why I’ve chosen MC15.   MC15 is the only media library I found out there after trying out at least a dozen that lets you configure the DLNA folder structure with fields you select.  This is awesome!!!  I’ve been a huge fan of the PS3 Media Server, but the DLNA folder structure is static.  I’ve been limited to searching for media by my folder structure.  With MC15 I can list family members who appear in videos and see only the videos they appear in when viewing Videos by “actor” from my PS3.  Love it.  Also, because MC15 supports every video file type I’ve seen, I don’t have to waste time with conversions.  Love that too. 
Love to know what others are doing or suggestions if you have any.

[cncb]

I know, it is kind of unbelievable that there is still no standard for "in-file" tagging of video files.  My home videos are MP4, so I have found Windows 7 (and Windows Live Photo Gallery) are the only programs that embed metadata in the video file itself.  The problem with this is that other programs (including MC) can't read it.  Also, the critical "Media Created Date" is only stored if you manually modify/set the date otherwise you are at the whim of the operating system file dates and you can easily lose the creation date.

So, I'm currently using MC for this since it writes all the pertinent metadata out to sidecar files whenever you tag videos.  I would prefer to embed this in the file itself, but at least it is all there in readable form.