tinyMediaManager 5.3.4

tinyMediaManager turns a folder full of messy video files into a tidy, browsable movie and TV library, with posters, plot summaries, cast lists and clean file names.

It is free for the core job, and a PRO licence at 12 euros a year adds more data sources and automatic subtitle downloads.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it saves everything in a format that Kodi, Jellyfin and Emby read directly.

What tinyMediaManager Actually Does

You point it at the folders where your movies and TV shows live. It looks at each file name, finds the matching title in an online film database, and pulls in the details: title, year, plot, cast, ratings, poster and background art.

It then writes that information next to each video as small NFO files and image files. Media centres such as Kodi and Jellyfin read those files, so your library shows up fully dressed without scraping everything a second time.

Finally, it can rename files and folders to one consistent pattern - for example Movie Title (2024)/Movie Title (2024).mkv - which is what media centres match best.

Movies, Collections and TV Shows

• Movies. Scrape details and artwork, fetch trailers, edit anything by hand and rename files in bulk.
• Movie sets. Group films into collections such as a trilogy, with their own artwork, and assign each movie to the right set.
• TV shows. Import a whole series folder, match every season and episode, and spot missing episodes at a glance.

It also reads the technical details of each file - resolution, video and audio codecs, audio channels, subtitle languages - so you can filter a big library by any of them. For a deeper look at a single file, MediaInfo shows every stream in full.

Free or PRO - What You Get

The free version is not a demo. It does the whole core job with one data source, The Movie Database (TMDB), which covers both films and TV.

PRO costs 12 euros a year, and one licence covers all your computers. Purchases go through Paddle, which offers a 30-day refund.

Subtitles are the one catch worth knowing up front: even with PRO, automatic downloads need a paid OpenSubtitles VIP account. If you just need to fix or sync a subtitle file, Subtitle Edit is free.

What Is New in 5.3.4

• TVDB for movies. TVDB is now one of the sources in the universal movie scraper.
• New filters. Filter TV shows by IMDb, TVDB or TMDB ID, and filter movies and shows by subtitle title.
• Fixes. Better renaming for folders that hold several movies, smarter automatic trailer picks, and movie sets with a colon in the name now export properly.
• macOS. File and folder names go back to the previous Unicode handling, which fixes trouble with accented characters.

The week before, 5.3.3 brought back automatic updates on macOS, refreshed the dialogs and pop-up messages, and started writing Kodi 22 edition tags, so a Director's Cut and a theatrical release of the same film show up as separate versions.

Which File to Download

The regular desktop downloads include their own Java, so there is nothing else to install. On Windows, do not run it as Administrator, since the developer warns against that.

All settings, the database, the cache and logs live inside the program's own folder, which is why the portable version moves between computers so cleanly. It checks for updates every time it starts.

Things Worth Knowing Before You Start

The first scan of a big library takes a while, because it looks up every title online and downloads artwork for each one. After that, it only processes new files, so later scans are quick.

It matches by file name, so a file called movie_final_v2.mkv will need a manual search. Spend five minutes on the first few mismatches and the rest usually fall into place.

If a file in your newly tidy library will not play, the Codec Finder tells you which codec is missing. VLC Media Player plays almost anything in the meantime.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell: if you never open your movies in a media centre and only want a list of what you own, you do not need the NFO and artwork side at all.

• A simple catalogue of your collection. Ant Movie Catalog or EMDB keep a searchable list on Windows.
• Fixing the files themselves. Renaming audio tracks, removing a language or adding subtitles inside an MKV is a job for MKVToolNix.
• Music rather than video. tinyMediaManager does not handle music; Mp3tag is the tool for tagging and renaming an audio library.

More catalogue and tagging tools are in Media Managers.

Quick questions

Download tinyMediaManager 5.3.4 and see how it handles your library, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.