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Localized IMDb search
Overlord:
Hello to all!
First, congrats is due to nostra for this great piece of software, it even beats commercial ones and i find it a pleasure to use ;)
Well I'm glad to be here and I hope to be useful for some, albeit small, improvement.
Preamble:
is kinda simple, we all know IMDb is de facto the definitive source to obtain movie informations, even if you are not from an english speaking country (like me to say one). Local sites are pale surrogates of IMDb vastness.
The issue:
if you're not english there's a big probability that you name your movies with translated titles. If you, like me, would like to inject all this movies into PVD, and save much time, should use IMDb search, 'cause it will be a shure shot (italian sites for example are very incomplete) but...what the hell, IMDb doesn't seem to find anything!
Of course I'd say, one have to use the localized version of IMDb (not everyone knows this possibility). At the moment there are few: UK, German, Italian. There's also a refined way: akas.imdb.com. Its search is performed on every AKA of the movie Db, making every search 99% accurate as one expect it to be!
The fact is, I tried so many software and not a single one implements this simple but very powerful and useful feature... with PVD I first felt to have found the definitive program, so I'm here to suggest such a feature, or simply (as a programmer) help to create it!
However I think this wouldn't be too difficult to change the approach of the imdb.dll plugin, maybe to use only the AKA one in first instance (with english title search it returns the same results of the main site search) or to create a bridge plugin to shot the right URL to imdb.dll. In the end the only difference is the beginning of the url (www.imdb.com/... - akas.imdb.com/...), the identificative number after that is fortunately the same.
Nostra, you're the master, I'll wait for your wise reply :D
nostra:
Welcome to the forum, Overlord.
It is an interesting suggestion indeed. It seems like I can easily add an option to the existing plugin to use akas instead of original titles. What do you think of this solution?
rick.ca:
--- Quote ---It seems like I can easily add an option to the existing plugin to use akas instead of original titles.
--- End quote ---
I've been testing this (by comparing Web searches using akas.imdb.com vs. www.imdb.com) and was about to suggest this. The AKA URL seems to function exactly the same as the regular, so it could probably be used as the "base."
I doubt it will make any much difference to users like me. Although I have a number of "foreign" movies in my database, I couldn't find any where this made a difference. This might be because they're all "popular," so either IMDb search finds the English title. I can see, however, how this might make a huge difference to non-English users searching for titles in their own languageāassuming those are not going to be recognized as "popular" titles.
Thanks for the tip, Overlord! I've added this to my Web search collection so I can try it if the plugin has a problem identifying a movie: http://akas.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s
Overlord:
Good morning guys and thanks for the quick heads up ;)
I'm shure that after a few trials you're gonna notice the goodness of this, it can easily be used instead of the main search, but I understand the criticality of imdb plugin...
Nostra, I'm shure that any way you realize this, it will be right. My suggestion is just not to bury it too deep, because I'm shure the non-english users of PVD all around the world are already so much (at least I hope, it deserves it :)).
Keep me informed and thank you both for the hard work!
nostra:
The new IMDB plugin has an option to search in Aka Titles and it sets this option on automatically if non english locale is selected in windows.
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