Personal Video Database

The selection and quality of posters at TMDb has improved dramatically over the last year or so. That plugin currently only includes the option of downloading all available posters. That's not practical, as movies typically have several high-quality posters, and popular ones can have a dozen or more. It would be wonderful if the plugin could be modified to download only the default poster and/or allow a selection from the available posters.

I might be misunderstanding it, but it appears from the API both should be possible. It's not clear which is the default poster URL, but it's likely the one returned by Movie.search. Other poster URL appear to be provided by both Movie.getInfo and Movie.getImages. The best implementation would be to modify the existing movie info plugin to just get the default poster, and to add a new poster plugin that would present thumbnails for selection and allow for choosing the original, mid or cover size.

I'm suggesting this here because I think this might significantly reduce the demand for keeping the web-page based plugins like Amazon and IMPAwards up-to-date. Although the selection is not as broad, TMDb does now seem to reasonably good coverage of common non-English movies, and includes non-English posters. The minimum poster width is 666 pixels and the norm seems to be 1000, so the quality is much better and more consistent than other sources. Those for whom TMDb would be an appropriate default source for posters are unlikely to need anything else.

Good idea. I wonder if the most practical approach would be for the program to compare the title extracted from the filename (with any specified replacements) to [Title] and [Original title] both with and without special characters. That way, special characters could either be replaced in the filename or just omitted—and either would be matched.

I think my most common special characters are ':', which I replace with ' -' to maintain readability, and '?' and '!' which I prefer to drop from the filename. In doing the latter, I'm resigned to just matching those files manually (18 of 2,200 movies, so it hasn't been much of a burden).

Is there a way to add “profiles” to the software? When members of a family are using it, one movie could be marked “seen” for one user and “unseen” for others. Only a few things have to be changed (“seen-unseen”, “Rating”…) That could be stored in separated textfiles.

I wonder how common the situation is where two or more users want to share the same database, but do not want to share their "viewing data" (i.e., seen flag and date, rating). What might be more useful for the typical "family user" would be the ability to record multiple "viewing events," whereby at least the date and viewer(s) are recorded for each. This way, the information is available to all family members. That may have a bearing on when an with whom one plans to view a movie, or who to ask for a review.

Although not automatic and therefore somewhat error-prone, it is possible to accommodate the recording of "viewing events" using custom fields. One could be [Viewed by]—a multi-select field for recording the family members attending the last viewing (i.e., it's associated with the existing [ViewDate]). Before recording a new viewing, the previous viewing would be added to [Viewing History]—another multi-select field where viewing events are recorded in the form "YYYY-MM-DD Viewer1 Viewer2 ..."

The mass editor is great but lacks a “replace function” to allow for example to replace “himself” in actors field by “lui-même” (French traduction), or delete double spaces or empty lines in descriptions and so on.

That would be handy. I'm not sure how it would work...Perhaps a button that would toggle the "Value" box to "Find" and add a "Replace with" box. Or easier—given the toolbar environment—those boxes could be fixed, and the default value for the "Find" box could be {Entire Field}.

While the screens are getting wider it’s always a waste of space when adding a ribbon style interface...

It seems to me the new interface makes better use of space—with respect to presenting tools and commands. But I suppose you mean if the program can be used in windowed mode on a wide screen, there's room for separate tool boxes to be placed outside the program window. True, but that doesn't address the efficient management of tools (i.e., which are active, where they're placed, etc.) as the current interface attempts to. On a more practical note, I don't think nostra is willing to revisit the interface question until version 10 or so.

I think a better use of surplus screen width—or a second screen—would be the ability to display the Movie and People panels simultaneously.

Or may be add a light version of the software with only filters and a “play” button? It’s not always a good idea to have the whole interface when you have children messing around. And it could be helpful when you want to "distribute" your collection to friends too.

There's already a Permissions system (on the "Administration" menu) for this purpose.

This feature has already been added to version 1. It's done by the program itself—no script is required.

Maybe problem is only with 1080p version.

I can't imagine why. But are you now saying the problem is restricted to one file? That's not what your first post implied. Does it work for other 1080p 10-bit files?

The plugin needs to be updated.

It still does.

It'd be really great if the Manual actually covered Using New Movie Master and/or Adding New Movie, instead of assuming that users are importing data from an existing file.

As you might have noticed from the Table of Contents, the manual has not progressed that far. Since I've no time for it, we'll let you write the next chapter once you've figured this out...

I'm having trouble importing any movie details at all from imdb. not sure if it's a problem with imdb, with pvd, or my user error.

AFAICT, the program and plugin work fine. Please describe exactly what you're doing and what's happening (or not happening).

Why are you using the file system to organize movies? That's what PVD is for.

Export the watchlist, and import it with [Viewed]=[-1]. Searching the forum for "importing" will find information about how to import.

Welcome to the forum.

Are you using the current version of the IMDb plugin? Do Help > Check for updates.

Have you configured the plugin at Preferences > Plugins? Select the plugin and Configure. Also set Overwrite fields > All (or at least make sure the fields you want are checked).