English > Feature Suggestions
Trailers
deazo:
Even though I find the possibility of locally playing trailers interesting, I would like to clarify that my personal suggestion was not about that, but more about the ability to search for trailers directly from PVD'd interface and view them, as streaming videos, from PVD or a player software.
Saving thousands of trailers on my hard drive is really not something I ever want to do.
Nostra might hence want to count TWO feature suggestions instead of one. Just more work hey? ::)
rick.ca:
Welcome, kompjuta.
--- Quote from: kompjuta on August 16, 2010, 02:45:26 pm ---I don't like the idea of combining the full movie and the trailer when you hit the "play" button. I prefer to keep them apart.
--- End quote ---
That's fine, but I doubt we'll see a separate field and play control until it's feasible to create a plugin that can find and download HD trailers of reasonably consistent quality. If you have to do that manually anyway, you may as well save the path as URL hyperlink. Clicking on that will launch the trailer in the default player—exactly the same way Play launches the movie.
--- Quote ---Is there a way to do this manually, by modifying some "properties" of a movie record ?
--- End quote ---
No. Others have asked for this, but I don't recall nostra's response. I prefer to use a separate field (the otherwise unused Release field) to record the "movie series." I can then filter and group by that field, and not suffer the consequences of having those movies classified as series.
--- Quote from: deazo on August 16, 2010, 07:27:35 pm ---Saving thousands of trailers on my hard drive is really not something I ever want to do.
--- End quote ---
I don't know why not—they're much smaller than movies. ;)
But that's okay. There's nothing wrong with your suggestion. But is seems prudent to consider the different ways in which trailers might be collected and viewed, and different user preferences for handling them. It's clearly not a matter in which we all want the same thing and just need to figure out how to best implement that capability. If there were a plugin that automatically found and downloaded trailers, you might be happy with that. If there were a plugin that automatically found a URL and would stream that to an embedded browser, I might be happy with that.
Hyomil:
--- Quote from: mgpw4me@yahoo.com on August 14, 2010, 04:19:19 am ---I took a quick look at some of the trailer sites and a couple look promising...fairly quick and the video links aren't hidden.
There is an issue with the large number of links for some movies...interviews, various codecs / sizes / operating systems, making selection difficult. That means a selection dialog is necessary in any trailer script, which means that "silent mode" is not an option. You wouldn't be able to select all the movies in your database and expect to have the trailers in your database some hours later. You'd have to manually select each and every one.
--- End quote ---
I came across a program called Media Center Master, which auto-scans folders and auto-downloads info from IMDb, TMDb, and TVRage, and trailers from movies.yahoo.com, trailerspy.com, and movie-list.com, so those may be the most amenable to scripting.
If there were any that allowed searching by IMDb ID, a script might be able to run in silent mode, but none of those trailer sites do (nor does hd-trailers.net, another one I found). However, you can search TMDb by IMDb ID (and the program does, once its decided on the IMDb ID), and it has trailer links, though I would imagine there might be some that were to sites other than Youtube. IMDb itself has trailer links to trailers from an unmanageable variety of sources. criticker.com is another site that has links to trailers and the IMDb links on every movie's page, but I can't find any way to search by those IDs, even with a Google Site Search. Also, allowed sources for videos are Youtube, Google Videos, or Metacafe (though there are sites like keepvid.com that say they can create direct download links for all those). listal.com is similar, and only allows Youtube videos, but some of the videos for a title are things like "Making of" or interviews.
Most interesting to me was that Media Center Master was doing Advanced Title Searches at IMDb. Added as feature request here.
mgpw4me@yahoo.com:
--- Quote from: Hyomil on August 23, 2010, 01:10:32 pm ---
If there were any that allowed searching by IMDB ID, a script might be able to run in silent mode, but none of those trailer sites do (nor does hd-trailers.net, another one I found).
--- End quote ---
Now that's an interesting thought. Most trailer sites have some supplemental information (actors, release year, etc.) which could be related to information already in the PVD database (regardless of source). This would have to be dealt with as unformatted data, but SOME logical conclusions could be drawn...a 4 character number would "probably" be a release year for example. With a title and (year or partial cast list), a script could draw reasonable conclusions for "most" movies. That might mean you end up with a nudie of Adrienne Barbeau from the Swamp Thing instead of a trailer, but maybe that's not such a bad thing <grin>.
If a person were presented with a list of thumbnails (as with posters), such a "thing" (ugh) could be controlled.
At any rate, It's an interesting "challenge", so I'll commit. I'll look at a couple of sites and see if a script can reasonably select trailers (over the next week or two). Hopefully it won't end up like my "find an image for each person in my database" programs...100gb and growing.
rick.ca:
I've now downloaded about 200 trailers. In each case, my objective was to find the best quality original (i.e., valid, not some fan-made crap) trailer available. Also, I wanted a trailer for every movie on my wish list, that I have media for, and that I have viewed in the recent past. So the age and type of movie varied greatly, as did the quality of trailers I ultimately found.
The main thing I learned was that there are really two separate issues involved in this question. First, whether or not a trailer exists and the quality of those that do depend on the age and popularity of the movie. Any recent release of a popular movie will have HD trailers, and they will be very easy to find. Tricks may needed to download them, but that's another matter. Movies more than just a few years old are not as likely to have HD trailers. Some searching will be required to find them among more common lower resolution trailers that were the standard at the time of release. As the movie gets older, it becomes less likely a HD (or anything that can be viewed full screen) is available. Very popular movies, of course, are re-released with a new trailer. Or, more likely, re-issued on DVD with a remastered trailer which is made available by the publisher or otherwise finds it's way onto the Internet. I originally assumed there would be more good quality trailers for old movies—provided by people who have ripped them from DVD's—but that doesn't seem to be the case.
So the second issue is the determination of the best method for searching for a trailer—given the nature of the movie (i.e., the first issue). If it's a current release, it makes sense to avoid the crap on Youtube and go straight to where there are only HQ original trailers posted. I found HD-Trailers.net a good choice for that (once I decided downloading a 100+ MB file for a 2 minute trailer wasn't totally insane). The same trailers are readily available elsewhere, in different formats and resolutions. For older movies, Youtube often seemed the best source. It's frustrating searching through the crap, but using Greasemonkey scripts to identify and highlight the HD versions makes it a lot easier. In some cases, I found doing a Google search that excluded Youtube helpful. Interestingly, the Youtube results are still included (obviously because it's owned by Google), but shown separately after any other results. That search often confirmed there was no other good source available, so I could then be more focused on finding the best available on Youtube.
Looking at it this way, it's difficult to imagine how the search process could be automated. I don't see any effective substitute for the necessary user judgments in determining the best source to check first, which trailer to choose based on attributes and descriptions available, when it's necessary to play the trailer to determine quality or validity, etc. Also, I wonder if it's feasible or practical to duplicate the various "tricks" used to download via Firefox (i.e., modifying pages using Greasemonkey, and downloading using DownloadHelper).
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