My Movies 5 Pro - Movie & TV

Review by eFreeware

A shelf of discs is easy to build and surprisingly hard to keep track of. You buy a Blu-ray you already own, lend a box set to a friend and forget who has it, or stand in a store trying to remember whether the fourth season is already at home. Phone notes and spreadsheets work until the collection grows past a few dozen titles, and then they stop being useful.

My Movies 5 Pro is built for exactly that problem. It comes from Binnerup Consult, the developer behind the My Movies line, and it is an Entertainment app for cataloging movies and TV series rather than watching them. The pitch is simple: scan the barcodes on your 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD cases, and let the app keep the record.

This is a paid app at $39.99, with no ads and no in-app purchases attached to it. That price buys a cataloging tool, not a streaming service, and the value depends entirely on how many discs you own and how much you care about knowing what is on the shelf.

Collectors with shelves worth counting

The people who get the most from this are physical media collectors. If you have a few hundred discs, or a few thousand, the app treats that as normal rather than an edge case. The developer describes batch barcode scanning for entering large collections quickly, which is the feature that makes a cataloging app usable at all when the pile on the floor is waist high.

It also suits households rather than lone collectors. A login can be shared with family members so the same collection stays in step across their devices, and there is loan tracking for titles lent to friends or relatives. That combination is what turns the app from a personal list into something a household can actually rely on.

The app covers digital copies as well as discs, so a collection split between physical media and purchases on online services can live in one place, with a wish list for what you have not bought yet. If your library is mostly streaming subscriptions you never own anything from, there is little here to organize. This is a tool for people who accumulate titles and want a record of them.

Scanning and the shared database

The core loop is barcode scanning. You point the camera at a case, the app matches it against the My Movies online service, and the title lands in your collection with its details filled in. The developer calls the scanning speed unmatched and the data coverage the best available, and those are marketing claims rather than promises I can check, but the underlying idea is sound: less typing means more chance the catalog actually gets finished.

That service is community driven and holds data for more than 1,400,000 disc-based titles, covering over 100,000 movies and 100,000 TV series. It is the reason the app can identify obscure releases rather than only mainstream ones. When something in your collection is missing, you can report it and staff will create the title, and incorrect data can be reported for correction in the same way.

The app is not limited to what you already own. There are sections for cinema releases and upcoming physical media releases, plus trailers you can watch for titles in your collection or in those sections. A movie collections feature shows which entries you are missing from a particular series, which is a neat way to see the gaps in a run of sequels.

Organizing, sharing and reporting

Once titles are in, the app gives you a lot of ways to shape the record. You can add location, tags, notes, a rating and purchase details to individual titles, which is how a catalog stops being a list and starts answering questions like which shelf a title is on or where it was bought. Browsing is handled with sort options, filters, advanced search and several view configurations, and there is a choice between a black or a white interface.

The collection is not trapped on one device. You need an account, and your collection syncs via the developer's servers, doubling as a backup if a device goes missing. Logging into an existing account pulls the current collection down automatically, and there are clients for other popular platforms, so the same library can follow you between them.

Sharing goes further than syncing. You can connect with friends and look at each other's collections and watches, and an online collection can be published for family and friends to browse. For parents, there are parental control features. On the output side, the app creates detailed PDF reports, emails a collection as TXT or CSV, and offers statistics with title counts and graphs, with a more advanced set for contributing users. Personalization and reporting like this is where the app earns its keep over a plain list.

Moving an existing catalog across

Starting from nothing is not the only route in. The app imports existing collections from other cataloging tools, including CLZ Movies, DVD Profiler, Delicious Library, Sort It!, iCollect and others. For anyone who has already spent evenings typing titles into a different app, that matters more than any single feature on the scanning side.

Upgraders from an earlier My Movies version, or from a different platform, log into the account they used before and the collection synchronizes to the new app. The developer points to the settings page as the place to find your username and offers an email address for help if the process stalls.

What the price includes

My Movies 5 Pro costs $39.99 as a one-time purchase. There are no ads in the app and no in-app purchases, so the price you see is the price you pay, and nothing inside is gated behind further spending. That is a straightforward arrangement compared with cataloging apps that charge a subscription or show ads.

The developer also offers a free app that acts as an evaluation, giving a full 21-day grace period before it reverts to being limited to 50 titles. That is a genuine way to try the scanning and the database against your own shelf before committing. If your collection is small enough to sit under that 50-title limit, the free version may cover you; the paid app is for collections that outgrow it.

The price is worth weighing against how you would otherwise spend the money. A single new 4K release often costs more than this app, and the app's stated purpose is preventing duplicate purchases, so the arithmetic is easy to do for anyone who has bought the same film twice. For a collection of a few dozen titles, the case is thinner.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious alternatives are other cataloging apps, including the ones this app can import from. Those tools have their own followings, and the practical difference comes down to database coverage, how well scanning works on your particular shelves, and whether you want a required account with server-side syncing. My Movies leans hard into the shared database and the household features, which is a different emphasis from a purely local catalog.

A spreadsheet is the free alternative and remains perfectly adequate for a small, static collection. It stops being adequate the moment you want barcode entry, cover data, loan tracking or the ability to check your library from a phone in a store. The app is essentially selling the difference between maintaining a list and querying a database.

A dedicated streaming service is not really a competitor, because it gives you nothing to catalog. The two can coexist: the app tracks digital copies alongside discs, so purchases made on online services can be recorded in the same library rather than forgotten in separate accounts.

A catalog worth paying for if the shelf is deep

My Movies 5 Pro is a focused, well-established cataloging tool rather than a general entertainment app. Its strengths are the size of the shared database, the scanning workflow for bulk entry, the syncing that keeps a household on the same page, and the depth of sorting, tagging and reporting once titles are in. The 4.8 average from 1,304 ratings suggests the people who use it take it seriously, though ratings from a 5,000-plus install base describe a committed niche rather than a mass audience.

The trade-offs are equally clear. It costs $39.99 up front, it requires a user account, and its whole purpose is managing a collection you already own. Anyone with a modest shelf, or with no interest in cataloging at all, will find little reason to pay. The free version's 21-day grace period and 50-title limit give you a low-risk way to judge whether your own collection justifies the purchase.

If you own enough discs that you have lost track of them, or you want one shared library that a household can scan into, lend from and browse together, this is a considered purchase rather than an impulse one. The app continues to receive updates, which matters for a tool that depends on an online database staying current.

What's new in version 5.60 Build 7

Notice! If you are having any kind of problems with this update, please contact us on [email protected], and we will be able to help you. We hope that you will help us by writing a review of the app, or update your existing review when updating - thank you! This release fixes a Trakt authentication issue after changes at Trakt.