Phantom Library

Up and running

1. 1

   Start it

   Unzip anywhere and double-click PhantomLibrary.exe. No installer, no .NET to set up — FFmpeg is included.

2. 2

   Add a folder

   Click + Folder and pick your video directory. Subfolders come along automatically.

3. 3

   Let it work

   Videos are read in and previews appear in the background. New files show up by themselves.

Two views

What it does

Previews that move

Hover a tile and it plays through all its frames, each one fading into the next. Move the mouse sideways to scrub yourself. Choose 9 to 30 frames per video, or one every 60 s down to one per second.

Tags that stick

Left-click a tag to filter, right-click to exclude, switch between AND and OR. Tags sit on every tile and survive deleting, renaming and re-scanning. Select many videos with Ctrl or Shift and tag them at once.

Always up to date

At start every folder is checked again: new videos come in, deleted ones drop out. Live watching adds new files while it runs, and recordings still being written get a red band.

Find anything

Full-text search across name, folder, tags and extension, ratings from 0 to 5 stars, favourites, ten sort orders and quick filters for untagged, missing or recently added videos.

Built-in player

Based on LibVLC, so it plays .ts, .mkv and .flv the Windows player chokes on. A strip of frames under the video jumps to any spot; speed from 0.5× to 4×. Needs VLC installed — without it, videos open in your default player.

Clean up safely

Finds duplicates by size and a checksum of the start and end — without reading multi-gigabyte files in full — plus similar videos in another encoding. Deletes go to the recycle bin, and a duplicate group can never be deleted completely.

Sort into folders

Move files by a pattern like {folder}\{year}-{month}\{name}{ext} with 14 more placeholders, and see every change before it happens. Tags and ratings move with the files.

Fast at any size

A SQLite library instead of one big file, a grid that only builds the tiles you can see, and previews made in one FFmpeg call per video, across all cores.

Keyboard

Ctrl + F

search

F5

read in again

Enter

play

F2

edit tags

F

favourite on / off

0 – 5

set rating

Del

move to the recycle bin

Shift + Del

delete for good

Ctrl + A / Esc

select all / clear selection

Ctrl + wheel

tile size

In the player: Space pause · ← / → 10 s (with Shift 60 s) · ↑ / ↓ volume · N / P next / previous · F or F11 full screen · Esc close.