I have a fairly large collection of Movies and TV Shows that I store on my Windows Home Server for streaming. The collection grows regularly as files are being added, updated, or removed. One of my biggest frustrations is being able to manage this collection without all the unnecessary and complex setups most media management software require. Another big problem for me is renaming files, and the Total Commander rename facility is excellent at this, however I am not willing to keep Total Commander installed just for the ability to rename. At the moment there is a big collection of application I need to use to manage this process, and more recently I started writing my own tools to do some of this as well.

One of my work incentives this year is to train our development team on WPF and Prism, since this is our chosen platform for development going forward. As I haven’t had much time to work with the methodology or technology, I realised a WPF driven media manager might actually be an extremely powerful tool to develop. I have actually gotten as far as creating the Visual Studio 2010 solutions for the projects, as well as adding the first bit of functionality to make file renaming easier. I also realised that this would be the perfect time for release my first project on CodePlex. The project entitled Media Mogul is now available on CodePlex here.

Media Mogul is a Media Manager written using WPF and the .Net Framework. The project was started as a learning exercise for WPF and will hopefully develop into a proper media management solution. The current version is very much in Alpha stages with very little functionality.

As the description indicates there is currently very little functionality and absolutely no user interface. However over the next few weeks when I have some time I hope to update the project with some more features. The one working feature of the project however is one of the command line utilities called Media Rename. The documentation for it has been created, but basically you can specify a replacement matrix for a group of files, the Media Rename will process these files and rename them accordingly. I am hoping to extend this very soon to support regular expressions as an input value for the replacement matrix.

One working feature, although currently limited in functionality, is the ability for the command line applications to determine if a file is really a media file by reading the file header and matching it to a list of known media types. If I file is not found matching these signatures it will be ignored. Another file feature is the ability to check for locked files, and if any are found, they are ignored when doing the rename.

I am anxious that I may have released this to early, but now is possibly the best time to start. I will admit the source code currently looks horrendous, and it will be next big item I am addressing, ensuring the code is formatted and optimised as much as possible over the next few days.