Personal Video Database

I made some changes to the "HTML Print Layout" template:
- fixed some problems with the browsers refresh button
- in "no details"-view the information on genre now is ommitted. Replaced it with file properties (filesize, codec, languages)
- added "show/hide movie id" and "show/hide file properties" to the "Print Layout" dialog

Yes, at least that was what I expected, since it says on the help page:

width - Maximum image width (The image will be resized to fit)
height - Maximum image height (The image will be resized to fit)

I supposed this to be like CSS max-width and max-height: that the image will never be wider than "width" and never be taller than "height" while aspect ratio is preserved?

DivXBase v1.12 (by MetaGen) is a rather old movie database application (it is available in german only, I think). There was no development anymore for years now, the project is completely abandoned and its original homepage is gone, too (although you can still download it from several freeware sites).

So why bother? Since it is very small, even doesn't need to be installed (just one single .exe), but nevertheless is able to analyze media files on its own, this program was the weapon of choice for everyone in need for something very compact and easy to use. But as time went by DivXBase became more and more antiquated. New codecs where developed, Matroska and other containers became more present, and DivXBase can't handle them. Data had to be added by hand in these cases. Information stored about codecs is very limited within DivXBase anyway.

I know a lot of people still running DivXBase. And although DivXBase is very simple, Personal Video Database is the first app that provides all of its crucial features, concerning different storage media, split media files, same IDs for different entries (for files stored on the same DVD for example), customizable export, multiple databases, etc.

But as you can imagine, it is much easier to give PVD a try if you know that you could switch back whenever you want to...

To import DivXBase data in PVD is easy (via CSV-import):
- export your DivXBase database: Choose "Export to Exel File (CSV)" in DivXBase
- the exported file needs to be opened in WordPad (not Notepad, cause this might cut off lines longer than 256 chars)
- in WordPad you need to search and replace (press CTRL+H), choose case sensitive
- replace every occurrence of " x " (it's three characters: space+x+space) with "x"
- save the file
- in PVD configure the CSV import ("Tools"-Menu -> Preferences -> Plugins, choose "CSV" (Type: General Import) and click "Configure"
- add fields to the right pane in this order: "Title", "Media Count", "Languages", "Video Codec", "ID", "Resolution", "Size", "Length", "Quality", "Comment"
- set Delimiter to ; and Text Qualifier to "
- enable "Ignore Header"
- that's it, after clicking "OK" twice you can go to the "Import"-menu and choose "Get Movies from CSV file" and import the data
- be patient, it might take some time to finish

With the attached export template PVD can rebuild a fully functional DivXBase database file (.dxb). Information on loaned entries will be exported, too. Limitations: PVD's URL-field will not be exported to DivXBase's OFDB- and IMDB-numbers.


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When using templates: GIF-images are exported as bitmaps, but with file extension GIF, as it seems. At least Internet Explorer (v7) only displays them when renamed to BMP. Code used to export them:
{%value=poster maxvalues="1"}
Im running version 0.9.9.21 on WinXP.

And now for something completely different   (won't start another thread for this...):
In the help file under "Posters, Photos, Screenshots"-Subtemplates the parameter "imgdata" is not mentioned:
http://www.videodb.info/help/hlp_export.html
I guess you didn't leave that that out on purpose, cause it's quite necessary to have any posters exported at all with a subtemplate.

To both rick and mgpw4me: That's how it should be.  

I will prepare a brief tutorial, but I won't give an introduction to HTML and CSS. Concerning the HTML part you can copy and paste lines, change them and see what happens. I was trying to keep that as simple and compact as possible. Perhaps I should mention that the list templates have some headlines that you can't see with standard styles applied, so don't be surprised.

After you finished to change something you should test if the HTML is still valid (that every tag has its closing tag, and so on), especially if you're less experienced. You can do that here: http://validator.w3.org
I tried it myself a few minutes ago and saw that I used XHTML syntax in one line and I'm into (barrier-free) web design for years now... I changed that now, but I'm shure you won't see any difference in this case, most browsers are kind enough and don't bother.
CSS is a bit more complicated, because the different browsers still (mis)interpret some things in different ways, but people could change colors or fonts quite safely. Nevertheless I would advice them to read one of the CSS tutorials you can find easily on the web. The majority of users won't even know about hexadecimal values or RGB colors, for example, and I don't want to write a documentation raising more questions than giving answers to those. Nevertheless, everyone who wants to should dare to mess with the source code. There's no reason not to try and if they do something wrong their computers won't explode afterwards... although in some cases I'd really like that.  
You can validate CSS here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

To buah: Thanks, I like it that you like it (like it is, like).   And there only is one iframe, the list part is a simple <div></div> containing an unordered list (<ul></ul>). By the way, it would be possible to have a "real" frameset generated with templates (but the iframe looks nicer...). I just wasn't aware that nostra implemented a copy command that can be used. It's documented here, but I overread that.  

Since it is possible to store all the CSS in seperate files now, I can do more complex things with so called alternate styles (that have to be in different files).

Concerning PVD export templates in general, some stuff seems not to be documented. Nostra even introduced something like functions, but I don't know if there are more, what they do and how they work. By the way, is there a possibility to define some kind of (constant) global variables in the %OPTIONS% part, that could be used throughout the template? Something like #define in C++? It doesn't need to be that complex, simple string replacement would do (like {#StringReplace...}, just not applied to %values but to the template itself). Sometimes missed that, but just a little bit.

New versions of the templates... I only transformed the single occurence of XHTML into HTML, no big deal...

(The two language versions of the iframe template have some files in common. When extracting the second one to the same directory you surely will be asked if you want to replace files. You can safely click yes, those files are the same anyway. Both language versions will work properly afterwards.)

Almost perfect...    I had a bug in them, that rendered one of the scrollbars useless in Firefox.  
New versions...

Yes, I understand what you'd like to have for printing purposes. I will see what I can do.

New versions of the templates...
I modified the javascript part. Links to local files should work now.

Topic: links...
First of all I changed the templates to replace the pvd link codes to some kind of silent but W3C conform HTML code (span class='pvdlink' title='[linktype and reference]'...) using a chain(!) of "replace" statements. Funny (and very useful, of course...) that it works this way...
I will use javascript to "reactivate" all pvd links based on movie IDs and URLs later, that's all I can do. The export functionality for templates is limited and there is no direct access to the database contents. For pvd link types "title", "name", "original title", "genre", "country", and so on, the templates can't fetch information to which HTML subpage(s) the exported links should point, or can they?
I wasn't aware myself, but by the way: per default PVD exports all internal link codes as is. That means they show up in the exported HTML source as <link contry="Loompaland">...</link> and so on. You don't see the code when exporting via "Web Pages(IndexMovies)", because they can't be interpreted by the browser and are kindly omitted. But they are there. Nasty, nasty links! They break HTML specifications... The HTML <link>-tag is not allowed within the <body>-tag. That might become problematic, if the W3C or some browser developer considers <link> within the <body> tag to do something, that shurely would differ from its beviour within PVD. Furthermore, the HTML attributes "id", "name" and "title" already have purposes that have nothing to do with their function within PVD. This can lead to very unexpected behaviour in some cases, especially when export templates become more complex, containing CSS and javascript functionality relying on IDs, for instance.
The templates I wrote just replaced "<" or ">" with "&lt;" and "&gt;" to prevent these characters (whenever they appear in floating text) to be misinterpreted as HTML tags, hence all the link codes became visible... Oops!  

Topic: printing...
To print all movies at once you'll need a template that exports all the data (you want to print) into a single file. Of course you could add some javasript to the iframe template that gathers all the information by following all links to the subpages, then inserts all of it into the current page and then calls the browser's print dialog, but that's complicated and not reliable. Javascript would need to have access to the different HTML files and depending on security settings and browser behavior this is impossible in some or even most cases.

Topic: javascript functionality...
Regional characters: There should be no problem with regional characters right now since almost every exotic character can be displayed: within the HTML pages the charset is declared as utf-8. Are there some special characters displayed incorrectly after export? Then please tell me more details about that. Or perhaps I didn't understand your suggestion?
Sorting: You can sort the list in PVD and then export it. The sort order will be the same in the exported file. Of course it would be nice to have all the major functionality of PVD in the exported HTML, too. But with all the data that would have to be stored in the HTML file and all the necessary restructuring of HTML content via javascript that follows, it would be easier to have a MySQL-Database with some PHP as frontend. Or a Firebird database... um...
We already have that, or kind of, I'd say even something better, and it is freeware, too! Thanks to Nostra!  
I don't want to mock your suggestions, of course, they are quite neat. But it would be a lot of work to recode the functions of PVD and even internal functions of Firebird to achieve all this funtionality. Let's face it, we've got an export template here, not another fully functional front end to the database. To write something to access a PVD database through the internet with enhanced fuctionality, that is a different task, I guess. But being able to re-sort the movie list in different ways within the HTML file is a cool idea nevertheless, so I probably will spend a lot of spare time and add that... some day...  
By the way (see Nostras post here), the sorting problems of PVD will shurely be addressed sooner or later, though it seems to be a little bit tricky...

The new templates are attached:

Great, thanks a lot! 

Seconds would be neat for interaction with other programs that won't deal with minutes but want to have the length in seconds for CSV import. PVD export templates seem to be limited to minutes at the moment.