This text will tell you how to find similar videos but first let us take a look at how you can find completely identical videos.
Finding identical videos
Fast video cataloger is a great way to organize your video clip collection, download it from here.
If you have a large collection it easily happens that you have the same video in different locations, perhaps in different file formats or in different resolutions. Having all these versions of a video can take a lot of space. The first step in cleaning up your location is finding the duplicate videos so you can pick what to keep and what to remove.
Fast video cataloger has a great way to find duplicate videos in your collection. From the Repair dialog you can use the “Check duplicate videos” tab to search the entire collection for duplicate videos. At the end, you will get a list of videos and can select which one to keep. The check for duplicate video function uses checksums to ensure the files are identically the same. I have written a step by step text about how to use this tool earlier
However, if a video has a different format or different resoluton this tool will not detect them as duplicate.
An easy way to find similar but not identical videos
Here is a simple manual process you can use to find videos that are similar but not exactly the same.
Start with an empty catalog and set it to index videos with just a few images per video. You can use your normal settings but, we only need a few thumbnails per video, so changing the settings can save you some time.
Then index the videos.
Once done go to the video catalog in detail view (the default one) and click on the “Length” column to sort all videos based on the length of the file.
Click the length column to sort on length to help you find similar videos.
Next just scan through the thumbnail images in the video catalog list to find pairs of thumbnails that look the same. Since you sorted on the length of the video they will be close together, as most videos will not have the exact same length.
If the thumbnails look the same click on the videos and make sure all of the thumbnails look the same, pick the video you want to keep and continue.
Even if the videos have different codecs or are of different resolutions this manual process makes it really quick and easy to find similar videos after you have cleared out the exact duplicates.