A movie catalog with posters and brief descriptions, directly connected to BIGBEN Search
OverviewM
An in-house, manually maintained “open movie database” — an idea that was years ahead of the concept that later became common practice on the internet. BIGBEN Video was the third project in the Radio Bigben and BIGBEN Search ecosystem, run entirely solo by Georgi Georgiev from 2003 to 2007.
Because there were no automated sources at the time, every title in the catalog was entered by hand — a poster, a brief description, and an age rating (0/12/16/18) to guide the viewer. Information was drawn from official sources wherever possible — including IMDb, which was already active by then.
From a modest start of 10 titles, the catalog grew quickly — to around 100 in its first year and past 400 by the end of 2005, spanning genres from animation and comedy to thrillers and science fiction, with releases dating from 1937 to 2004.
catalog
movies
IMDb
subtitle translation
Computer
BIGBEN — bigben.bl-54.studgrad.net (internal, accessible only on the Studentski Grad network)
Size
410 titles (end of 2005)
Entry
manual, title by title
Formats
CD, later also DVD
Subtitles
for some titles — translated between 2003 and 2005
The format evolved over time — from CDs to DVDs and compressed archives, following the evolution of storage technology. Some titles also received translated subtitles between 2003 and 2005.
How the Site Was Built
The catalog's own site had seven sections — home, search, catalog, categories, collections, questions, and “about” — with a link back to mediasetbg.com for more about its author.
The home page carried a clear notice: under Bulgarian law, the server did not provide download links for files — a principle followed consistently across the other sites on the BIGBEN network too. The visual and text information for a movie came from the catalog, while the download itself happened separately, through BIGBEN Search. The site was reachable at the same internal address, bigben.bl-54.studgrad.net, as the rest of the network's sites.
The catalog worked in tandem with BIGBEN Search — the visual and text information for a movie came from BIGBEN Video, while the file download itself came from BIGBEN Search. Both projects, together with Radio Bigben, shared the same computer and network — the shared infrastructure documented on the BIGBEN Server page.
The Project Today
BIGBEN Video stopped at the same time and against the same backdrop as Radio Bigben and BIGBEN Search — in March 2007, when Georgi Georgiev left the Studentski Grad network. Today it remains a hand-built catalog from a bygone era, before streaming platforms made archives like this unnecessary.
Studentski Grad 