We like to showcase right click functions that are unique and/or useful, and in fact have published a series of collections of interesting right click functions. This time around we would like to feature Portitle, a free utility that can look up movie summaries, reviews, trailers and download subtitles for your media files via right click.
Portitle comes in the guise of a Windows app and Chrome extension (with an Android app in the works). It can look up movie and TV episode information from a wide range of sources including IMDB, Wikipedia, AllMovie, RottenTomatoes, iTunes, YouTube, TrailerAddict, OpenSubtitles, SubtitlesBank, and a number of torrent sites as well. It is supposed to overcome spelling mistakes and be able to identify titles in several languages, and is designed to be easy to use from Home Theatre PC’s (HTPC) or Media Center computers (i.e. computers that are used as media players), using only the mouse.
So how well does it work? Predictably, the more mainstream and well known the media that you are trying to look up, the more likely that Portitle will look it up correctly. I was disappointed that relatively unknown media (which incidentally can download from well known Torrent sites), such as documentaries and the like, was mis-identified. (For example, looking up ‘Lost Worlds The Story of Archaeology’ sent me to the page for the TV show ‘Lost’).
Regardless, once (and if) your media is identified, you can access a wide range of information, including IMDB, Wikipedia, subtitles, trailers, and even links to pages on torrent sites where your media can be downloaded. You have to be online of course and the info will be displayed in your browser (the Portitle site will present you with a bunch of links – See screenshot below for what it looks like.
A note on the browser extension: currently available for Chrome, the browser extension lets you highlight any text in your browser (i.e. the name of a movie or TV show) and look it up via right click using Portitle. Useful to some people, perhaps, but overall not too exciting.
The verdict:
I would give Portitle 7 out of 10 stars, but I feel like I am being generous because for many of the documentaries and files I looked up that it did not find, I was able to get meaningful results for on the internet just by cleaning up the search string a little bit and doing a manual Google search (including the entire program on YouTube and cover art and information from some of the torrent sites Portitle supports). For example, replacing the full stops and underscores by spaces, and clearing junk such as “PDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org”, “2of3”, and the like, typically found in torrent file titles. Surely this could be easily automated! Also, although the Portitle site states that it can search for media based on file ‘movie hashes’, this didn’t seem to be the case or I couldn’t figure out how this is done.
On the flip side, if you have a lot of media files that you would like to lookup, or if you use a Home Theatre or Media Center PC, you should check this nifty extension out.
For an alternative, check out previously mentioned program ‘Filequery’, which does something similar, but isn’t as ambitious. [Thanks go to reader David O for pointing out this tool in the comments section of a previous post]
Get Portitle here (Windows, Chrome, and soon on Android).
