I was thinking about search.

a dumb simple method would be to write a mini script that recursively LISTS contents of a directory and writes the results to a text file
then appends other directory listings to that text file.

the text file could be accessed via a users browser, and use the browser's search feature to parse the text file/list

toss the tiny script into a nightly cron job, and either overwrite or create a new list base on date

IE:
cd action
ls-l >> main/text.list
cd drama
ls-l >> main/text.list
etc.

with a little tweaking and paying attention to PATHS you could get it to write out a text file of all the vid directories.
It's how I do it for my large collection.