Personal Media Manager has launched today, and it's as good a looking, clever piece of content management desktop software that you'll probably never know you own. The program has been developed by metadata specialist Rovi and, although not sold directly, is likely to be bundled in with hardware such as Blu-ray players, NAS drives, set top boxes and TVs, re-branded and re-skinned in such a way that you won't even recognise it.

All the same, what it will do for you is to clean up your content library using Rovi's gargantuan database of movies and music information. It will analyse nameless tracks and present the user with the correct titles, artists, genre, album art, lyrics and any other kind of tag you could possibly want. It's a full DLNA client, so it's able to communicate with any other DLNA devices in your home network which means you'll be able to play content just by dragging and dropping the files on your PC/Mac screen. So long as you have the license, there'll be no issues for any DRM files you might have as well.

Having developed mostly for TVs and set top boxes, Personal Media Manager is Rovi's way of bringing the company's experience away from the big screen and onto the laptop. Chief evangelist at Rovi, Richard Bullwinkle, said:

"We want to offer that same filmography and images media straight to your computer as well. Everyone has such a huge mosh of unlabelled content at the moment and PMM is aimed at sorting it all out at the push of a button".

For those wanting to buy PMM without having to fork out for a new piece of kit, Bulllwinkle did say that Rovi would be happy enough if it was sold separately.

"We'd be very happy for Tesco or Best Buy or whoever to sell it shrink wrapped but we just don't want to take the customer service calls. We'd be quite happy to help those stores take them instead though".

The software comes almost a year after Rovi first unveiled the Total Guide recommendation proposition for set top boxes and TVs. That package will be helping people to narrow down from the thousands of content streams available as well as applying connected social networking fun as well. Again, we're unlikely to know about it, but we should be using Total Guide in new products from the end of the year.