Built for Myself, Free for You — CineLibrary, Open Source

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CineLibrary

A fast, native Windows movie catalog for MediaElch-scraped collections. Browse, search and play your movies across multiple external drives.

Stop letting your movies gather dust in forgotten directories.

Treat them with CineLibrary — making your collection visible, searchable, and alive again.

CineLibrary: where your movies stop hiding and start shining.

(This is constantly evolving my personal passion project, so always be sure to check latest releases)

Stay tuned, Next Release is planned for next week!

Built with C# + WinUI 3.

Features

Multi-drive library — index movies across external drives; knows which are currently online
MediaElch-compatible — reads movie.nfo, posters, fanart; caches artwork locally so offline drives still show thumbnails
Grid + list views — with S/M/L/XL thumbnail sizes (like Windows Explorer)
Full-text search — title, actor, director, plot
Filters — by drive, genre, collection, favorites, watched/unwatched
Collapsible sidebar with drives, collections, top genres
Resizable movie detail window — hero fanart, poster, chips, plot, cast
Export — CSV or HTML
Keyboard shortcuts — Ctrl+F search, Ctrl+B toggle sidebar, Esc clear search
Light / Dark / System themes with Mica backdrop

Download

Grab the latest portable build from Releases. Unzip anywhere and run CineLibrary.exe — no install required.

Build from source

Requirements:

Windows 10 20H1+ (19041) or Windows 11
Visual Studio 2022+ with .NET desktop development and Windows App SDK workloads
.NET 8 SDK

git clone https://github.com/aungkokomm/CineLibraryCS.git
cd CineLibrary
msbuild CineLibraryCS.csproj -t:Build -p:Configuration=Debug -p:Platform=x64

To produce a self-contained portable build:

msbuild CineLibraryCS.csproj -t:Publish -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64 -p:PublishDir=publish\

How it works

Use MediaElch (or any tool that produces Kodi-style movie.nfo + poster.jpg / fanart.jpg) to scrape each movie folder on your drives.
Launch CineLibrary → Drives → Scan (or pick a folder on that drive).
CineLibrary reads the nfo files, caches the posters, and writes everything to a local SQLite index.
Disconnect the drive — the movies still appear (marked OFFLINE) with posters and metadata intact.

Data location

Dev build: CineLibrary-Data/ next to the .csproj
Portable build: CineLibrary-Data/ next to CineLibrary.exe SQLite DB + cached artwork live there. Back it up to keep your favorites/watched state across machines.

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