Personal Video Database

"," and " (" won't be a problem in future versions.

A filter button/menu for actors is not practicable. In my database there are aproximately 12600 actors. And I only imported the most prominent actors from the first page for each movie in IMDB!
In a small database there might be a few thousand actors only, but even those could not be handled in such a menu. One major thing that keeps the exported HTML files from bloating to infinity is that I only link actors that occur in two or more movie entries.

Remember that all exported data is stored in HTML files. There is a lot of redundant information. As an example: movie entry x is listed in several files... for each actor that participates in it (+ at least in one other movie), in the file with the filmlist of the director, in the genre list, etc.
If you want to have a film list available for each actor without having a few ten thousand lists prestored as HTML files bringing your hard drive's file system to its knees... you will need to generate the lists on demand. It would take a lot of time to gather the corresponding data from all the exported movie sheets (pimpHTMLframesExport does so) on the fly. To be able to generate such lists fast you would need a genuine database... like Personal Video Database.  By the way, javascript's access to the file system is very restricted, too. That can be changed, but I wanted to keep the exported thing publishable on any PC and on the net.

If you want to have such features outside of Personal Video Database (which uses Firebird as database): there are some approaches to get the data to mysql as a backend for web pages on common hosters and alikes:
PVD .9.9.21 Website Template Easy to Web scripts based on PK Template
(PK's MovieDB dynamic website template)
Kroozbox - PVD to media theatre solution

I thought it was possible to have >1 language and getting links for all of them...

That is right. But the entries must not be comma separated ("English, Spanish, French"), but within different list entries ("<li>English</li><li>Spanish</li><li>French</li>"). All within <ul class="sound">, as I mentioned before.

The template field is {%value=astreams params="full" template="HTML Frames\astreams.ptm"}. It's the line beginning with <h2>Audio</h2> in movieiframe.ptm and it refers to the subtemplate astreams.ptm. The language information is called by {%param=langs} in astreams.ptm.

Your browser would display something like this in the end (as long as in PWD the "languages"-field is not empty, of course):

 Audio:

    English (mp3, stereo)

pimpHTMLframesExport.exe will process this part of the exported file. Any additional lines with {%value=langs} or whatever are ignored. pimpHTMLframesExport.exe is just a bonus thing working with the existing template as is. You can add own lines and costumize the template to some extend and pimpHTMLframesExport.exe should still work fine, but it won't touch, link or mess around with the customized parts of the template.

Hi Arj0n!

I think {%value=rating} represents your own, personal rating. There also is IMDB-rating ({%value=imdbrating}) and the Moviemeter rating is stored in "other rating": try {%value=orating}, that should work.

All this %value stuff is provided by the PVD interface and is independent from any specific template, it should work in every template there was, is, and will be, mine included.

Hi ouaf,
default sort order is always the sort order you had in Personal Video Database itself at the time you exported your data. Sort in PVD by year and this will be the default sort order in the HTML list.
Concerning the "rebuilding"-popup: if it just stays there and nothing happens, it seems as if there was an error while executing the javascript code. The popup will not be removed, because javascript execution did stop. I don't have any problems with the javascript code, so I can't reproduce the error myself. To help me find the cause: In Firefox there is an "Error Console" in the "Tools"-menu. Please start it. In this console click "Clear" (in the upper right). Then (on the exported HTML page) choose "Further Options" and tell me, what errors are shown in the "Error Console".
What operating system do you have? WIndows XP, Vista, Linux, something else?
Thanks for your feedback.
Svenne

P.S.: I will tell you how to add the original title soon (so both localized title and the original will be shown)... won't be complicated. It shall be in the movie list, right? The truth is: It is already there, but hidden. You can switch between original title and localized title in the "Further Options" menu, but since that one doesn't do its job on your PC, it won't help you now... If possible, I will try to fix it...

Some kind of major update...  

Nostra is chained to the oars with version 1 development... I'd like to say thanks and, again, want to contribute something:

Changes in the "HTML Frames"-template:

- added: "category" will be exported
- added: if you click on the button "Further options" you now can switch between (localized) movie title and original movie title

But the major addition to the "HTML Frames"-template is a small executable called "pimpHTMLframesExport.exe". You will find it within the exported data in subfolder:
\[exported filename]_files\pimpHTMLframesExport\

If you run pimpHTMLframesExport.exe it will add additional features to the exported files.

Links will be added for genres, categories, countries, director names, actor names, and audio track languages, if different ones appear in two or more exported entries. So afterwards you can click an actor's name, for example, and get a list of all movies within your exported data where this name appears (as actor). This is not so very different to the behaviour in Personal Video Database itself.

Depending on the amount of exported data there will be a few thousand additional (but predominantly very small) HTML-files, all residing in the subfolder
\[exported filename]_files\.

Just one note:
If your database is really huge and with full actor lists, meaning a total of a trillionzillion different actors in your database, it might take a long time and lots of memory and virtual memory for pimpHTMLframesExport.exe to analyze the data. Try to be patient, but if you run into any problems (program crashes, stalls, etc.), please let me know. With my database containing more than 1200 entries and 15 to 30 actors per entry everything went fine and didn't take a long time. Theoretically it should withstand some 4 billion different(!) actor names in total. I would guess at some point earlier memory size and the size of Windows' swap file might become a limiting factor. But I'm completely unsure if someone could ever run into that. So if someone has a huge database... save all data, documents, and whatever you were working at, first and give it a try. Then let me know what happened. (But don't make me responsible for exploded computers )
 
Additional to that feature: filters will be added (to the "further options"-menu) for genre, category, and language, if there is sufficient data. (If you don't use category at all, for example, and the field stays empty throughout your database, a category filter would make no sense. So there must be two ore more categories, elsewise no category filter will be added.)

Some of the additional features will only appear if javascript is enabled in your browser.

pimpHTMLframesExport.exe should be run on freshly exported data (meaning only once on the exported data). Afterwards (or if you don't intend to run pimpHTMLframesExport.exe at all) you can safely delete the subfolder "pimpHTMLframesExport".

Hi Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV! ;-)
If you want to change templates this page can give you some hints:
http://www.videodb.info/help/hlp_export.html
Sure, images can be somewhat complicated, due to formatting and so on...
I modified HTML List now and added poster thumbnails (see attachments). I can change that to be "Front Cover" if you need that instead. Just let me know.
With thumbnails the list will not be in a single file anymore, of course.


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Thanks for the hints, I'm not using a listbox. Used an unordered list. I fetch all <li>-elements (have them in an array just as you get them with getelementsbytagname), sort them and put each one into place (without changing the <li>-elements themselves, so there would be no need to rerender those ...in theory). In fact, I thought browsers would wait with page rerendering until all elements are done cause by default page refresh is delayed until everything is in place... I will experiment to find the time consuming steps. Perhaps it's faster not to move the elements but to change their content with innerHTML. I will try a listbox, too. I can imagine you're right with that...

The sort itself is quite fast. Restructuring and rendering the page is the slow thing... Internet Explorer is almost the same, even a bit slower...
Thanks for the info on HTA. It's something that I was completely unaware of. Sounds interesting!

Some new features...

- I added colored dots for loaned movies and for those on the wish list

- just to make mgpw4me happy : I added some sort functionality. While viewing the exported data in your browser you can choose to (re-)sort your movie list in three different ways (but the initial sort order will still be the same you had in PVD when exporting). If you push the "Sort list..."-button a menu will pop up...
If you choose to sort by alphabet: it will be case insensitive and characters like à, á, â, ã, ä, å, will be treated as "a", while the german ß will be treated as double-s, æ will be treated as "ae", and so on... might not be just as good as the Unicode Collation Algorithm, but almost!