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How do I deal with long-running documentary series?

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rick.ca:

--- Quote from: nostra on May 06, 2010, 10:00:07 pm ---I was too lazy to read the whole topic, but do you have the "Filter episodes" option checked in Tools -> Preferences -> Movies?

--- End quote ---

Me too... ;D

...and consider this food for thought, rather than concrete advice...

The IMDb isn't a very good source for documentaries, and I doubt it ever will be. It is, after all, a movie database. So, given your level of interest, you're probably putting a lot of effort into getting data "manually." If so, you might find downloading data from IMDb does more harm than good. Even if you take care to ensure it doesn't overwrite data you've acquired from elsewhere, you probably don't want bad data "polluting" the good. As a practical matter, you might want to use IMDb where it "works," and use other sources where they are better.

I don't know how typical Horizon is, but it makes an interesting example. As you've said, it's data on IMDb is a mess. I suppose the main problem is the lack of it, but I wouldn't trust anything that's there. On the other hand, a quick search finds several sources which must be of far greater interest to you. At TV.com, there's what appears to be a fairly comprehensive listing—by episode number—of 1,057 episodes since 1964. It appears this would at least provide a fairly complete record of episode titles and air dates. That may be all you want or need for older episodes (there's 1,057 of them!). The BBC should be a much better source for more recent episodes. And it appears there may be coverage of earlier episodes at the BFI—which has 848 episode entries. None of these sources are going to have everything you may want. But together, they certainly have far better data than the IMDb.

The TV.com list caught my attention, BTW, because it's something that can be easily imported. Unfortunately, it's not possible to import episode data into PVD. But it seems you've recognized you may be better off not using the series feature for other reasons. That may be a good thing, because you can import anything (including custom fields) to a movie record. This capability may be very important if this method of importing data is the only one available to you.

The attached screen shot illustrates several things. First, I was able to import the entire series (episode number, title, air date, year and URL's). Don't be misled by the one episode showing—it's the only one with additional information. But most of that was easy to add. I imported the available IMDb URL's (289). As nostra says, those can be imported normally with the plugin (i.e., it doesn't care they are episode records). I imported the BFI URL's. Those provide a direct link to a synopsis which I cut & paste into the Tagline field. The description comes from the BBC site, but that appears to be a lost cause. The only site I've ever seen that's more of a hopeless mess is the CBC. Public broadcasters! ::)

Anyway, my point is this might be a way to easily establish a framework for an entire series, and provide links to online information. That would provide an overview, a place to attach existing media and a start on where find further information—that you might add manually for the relative few you're most interested in.


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Gaco:
Thank you for your thoughts everyone!
buah: I see!
nostra: That way to import does work, nice!
rick.ca: I will look at some of these the alternative sources later for sure!

I will try out some of these things tonight and see how works best for me. Will write back once I settle on a particular solution :)

buah:
Gaco,

I hope you caught how to avoid manual entering of each url.

Gaco:
After thinking a good deal about this, I've decided that storing Horizon programs as episodes in any way isn't satisfactory. It may be the "correct" way to do it since it technically is a TV series, but in practice it's too inconvenient to have all the episodes hidden away first under the entry "Horizon" and then season or year. It doesn't give an easy overview of the episodes and thereby defeats a good deal of the reason of why I use PVD for my documentary hobby in the first place; this is especially a problem because Horizon has so many seasons/years!
So creating a new movie entry, plugging in a URL and then importing info is the way I'm going to go.

Only question that remains is which links that will work to import. rick.ca how did you import info from BFI? I'm thinking on just doing a bit of "charity work" for IMDB and update every Horizon doc I see with info from other websites anyway..

buah: Doing the entries manually is what I'm planning right now. Just to clarify, I will only add in those documentaries that I have watched and out of the 1000+ of total episodes, only ~150 of them are "available" (torrent networks). So since my basic need is to click off movies as "seen this date" and rate them one at a time, it doesn't really concern me if I have to use a couple of minutes every time to import manually via URL since I'll only have to do that once few weeks on average, so np :)

rick.ca:

--- Quote ---rick.ca how did you import info from BFI?
--- End quote ---

I cut & paste it's listing of all episodes into Excel, converted the links to text, parsed all the data to separate fields, and then imported that into PVD. The attached worksheet illustrates this. If you wish to use it, convert all cells to values, delete the first column, and then configure the Excel import plugin to import the remaining columns.

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