They have a trial so you don't have to pay before you test it out. It's the PowerDVD 22 Essentials on the trial page. It'll give you the full software for 30 days.

I agree with you. It's what is keeping me from upgrading from verison 20. It does look like they do have genres that you can separate by genre, in the upper right hand corner on the Movies tab "Show All" is a drop down and you can right click on each video and choose edit, there is a Genre category to edit. It does add categories to them if it can match the movies, but it's as you say the matching is poor. I don't have a massive library like you, but with what I have there are plenty that haven't matched and when I click on match movie info, the correct one is usually the first one so it's strange to me why it couldn't match it to begin with. I also think it doesn't update the data in file because I've matched these in PowerDVD 20 and they're aren't automatically matched in 22.

There also seems to be many movies missing. Movies that, in my mind, are mainstream; like the original Mad Max or the 2009 remake of Star Trek. Plus, when you go to manually edit the release date, you can only choose from the calendar pullout and there's no quick way to scroll through years, you have to go month by month.

The tv shows is the worst though. It doesn't seem to do seasons properly. I'm not sure how it does its thing, but I have mine as a folder of the show, then subfolders for seasons. It shows every subfolder with the names of what the subfolder names are while Plex will properly list each show and clicking on the show will list each season properly. I haven't really dove into this more because that matching is just so bad I don't want to go any further.

I don't have a large setup that would really necessitate something like Plex. I pretty much do everything from one place. My computer is hooked up to my tv, my media is on an external drive hooked into my pc, and it's the only place I watch these things and I do really like the PowerDVD enhancements and I would rather just PowerDVD, but the media library part is killing it for me.

Thanks. To be honest I forgot about the trial, they emailed me about an upgrade as I had an older version before and just went through to try it out. Yeah I like the interface but the matching is just terrible.

I hadn't got to TV Shows but yes its handling of seasons and general matching especially nmon US TV shows is poor compared to others. It took 2 whole days to index the TV shows over the weekend and again was missing loads of stuff and it was near impossible to use as a library

I'll just use it as a VLC replacement with no library usage and just seach using explorer and trigger into PowerDVD for now on the PCs.

The over selling of the products capability is what annoys me here, they say it can do a load of stuff but cannot even do simple media indexing to a reasonable standard and isnt really customizable they way they make it out. Its really not much more than VLC.

What it needs is moovieinfo dropping and either replaced with somethign else or give people the ability toi use their own choice of matchingservice. Also it doesnt really do NAs stuff well - in places the interface only supports locally attached storage which is completley pointless these days.