Personal Video Database

Hi all,

Kind of sad to see this once-great software and website wither on the vine. PVD was such a great help to me in cataloging my burgeoning Internet videos library. But between Nostra leaving, the end of http: support on all the relevant data sites, and the never-ending changes to those sites, it's a wonder Ivek has been able to keep it working. Kind of shocked, really, that the domain registration never ran out, for one thing.

Personally, I had to stop using PVD a few years back. I could never get the "new/mod" version to work, not with the script I had been using. I just didn't have the programming skills needed to get it working with the new mod. Left off with less than half my collection scanned in. 

Recently built a new PC, and might try to reinstall it one more time. But I'm not hopeful that the process has become any easier.

I wish there were a video database software that was half as feature-packed and efficient as PVD...

aimhere

Hi,

I need to export all the posters and screenshots from my PVD database. Most (if not all) movies have a single poster (which is really the DVD box cover)... some have a single screenshot, while others may have two or three. I've played around with the XML export template, but can't get it to do what I want.

I'd like to export the posters with filenames like "<title>-poster-<n>.jpg", and the screenshots as "<title>-screenshot-<n>.jpg", where "<title>" is the movie title, and "<n>" is the number of the image (where multiple images exist for a given movie).

So I modified a copy of the "XML (Movies)" export template, deleting most of the movie fields except for Title, adding "<screenshots>{%value=screenshots}</screenshots>"after the Posters line, and added the following line in the "%OPTIONS% section:

imagenameformat="%t%-%fs%-%in%%ext%"
Running the export seems to generate images with the correct filenames in the "images" subfolder.  "%t%" gets replaced by the movie title, "%fs%" is replaced by either "poster" or "screenshot", "%n%" gets replaced by a number (usually "1"), and "%ext%" gets replaced by ".jpg", as expected.

However, PVD is only exporting the FIRST image in each category. In other words, if a movie has multiple posters or screenshots, PVD only exports the first one.

How do I modify this so that it exports ALL the posters and screenshots, and numbers them appropriately?

aimhere

Keep running into a minor bug in PVD 1.0 when changing between Movie and People views. Specifically, when using the Search functions.

If I am in Movies view, and enter something in the Search panel, I get a list of matching movies. If I then click on one movie, [optionally edit it], click on another, then switch to People view and back again, often the previously-selected movie is displayed again, NOT the more recently-selected one.

Something similar happens if I start off in People view, do a search, select a person, select another, then switch to Movies view and back again. PVD displays the record for the previously-selected person instead of the most-recently-selected one.

This doesn't happen ALL the time, but pretty frequently. It only happens the first time I switch views after doing a search. It doesn't happen anymore after switching views again... until the next time I do a search.

Admittedly, it's a VERY minor issue, but I figured I may as well report it anyway.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Start off in Movies view. Make sure the Search panel is visible.
2) Enter a search query where you know it will return multiple results.
3) Select one of the results in the list on the left.
4) Now select a different record.
5) Switch to People view.
6) Switch back to Movies view.

More often than not, PVD will display the record for the movie selected in step 3, rather than the one selected in step 4.

The same thing happens if you reverse Movie and People views in the steps above.

It seems to me that in PVD 1.0, when the "Toolbar" tab is selected, the icons on the toolbar are pretty large compared to the rest of the user-interface elements.

Would it be possible to have a "small icons" option added to the program preferences, with a set of icons about half the size of the existing ones?

Hi,

I'm having a bizarre problem with the open-file dialogs for images within PVD.

When I click on the "load image from file" button on the toolbar in the Poster, Front Cover, or Disc Cover sections of the Movies editor screen, or the portrait section of the People editor screen, the "Open" dialog is missing the button that turns the "Preview pane" on or off (this button should be near the top right corner of the dialog, between the View button and the Help button). Further, the Preview pane itself is present (and cannot be turned off, since the button is missing), but does not display anything when I click on an image file. I can get thumbnail previews if I set the dialog's view options to medium, large or extra-large icons, or to "Tiles" or "Content". But the Preview Pane itself stubbornly refuses to show the selected image.

Oddly, the dialog for the "Open..." command on the main PVD menu (for opening a database) DOES have the preview-pane-toggle button (but since that dialog only shows database files, I can't tell if images would preview in it or not).

What's really strange, though, is that PVD is the ONLY application I have that has this problem. The file-open dialog in, say, Microsoft Windows Paint (or in Paint.NET, or Libreoffice, or most any other app that can load images) has a fully-functional Preview pane. Likewise, Windows Explorer itself has a Preview pane, the toggle button is present, and the pane will display image file previews.

I KNOW this used to work in PVD, but I can't be sure at what point it stopped working. It may have been when I upgraded to the latest release (I am running 1.0.2.7), but I can't verify that.

I can work around this by using any of the thumbnail views within the Open-image dialog, but the dialog resets to Details view every time I use it.

Any idea what's wrong? How do I get this working again?

Aimhere

Hi,

One thing I can't find anywhere in PVD is a quick, easy way to show a count of the number of movies listed in each actor's filmography. I'd like to see this added.

At the least, it should show the total number in each category (actor, director, etc.) of the filmography section. I see it already kind of does something like this for the "Awards" category (a record might say "Awards (1 Wins & 2 Nominations)" for a given person), but it could be applied to the other categories as well.

Ideally, it could be further broken down to show both the total number as well as certain other statistics: the number of movies with visible records plus the number with hidden records (the way I use PVD, I always import full filmographies from IMDB, so visible movies are movies I actually own, hidden ones are ones I don't own). So PVD could display, say, "Actor (100 movies, 25 visible, 75 hidden)" or something like that.

Sure, I could sit there and count the movies by hand, but why should I have to? 

Aimhere

(P.S. - I know that the "Statistics" feature can show the number of movies in my database for each actor, but this only counts the number of visible movie records, not the actor's entire filmography. And besides, it takes an extra step... I'd like to see the count shown right in the People view.)

Hi,

I finally upgraded my PVD to the 1.x version, and while it's working well enough, I'm really missing the way the "old" Mass Editor used to work. When I add a bunch of movies off a DVD-R with the file scanner, I need to set the values of several fields on all of them. With the 0.9 version, with all of the movies selected in the list, I could click the edit button on the toolbar to get the multi-editor in its own window, and could change the value of multiple fields all at once. In 1.x, the Mass Editor only lets me set the value of a single field at a time, and I have to laboriously choose the field from the drop-down fields list (which is way too small for the number of fields, by the way) , choose the value from the values list, and click the green "Apply" button to apply the changes, then do it all over again for each and every field I want to update. The old method was MUCH faster and easier. Why even call it a "Mass Editor" if you can't edit everything en-masse? 

ALSO: There is a pretty big bug in the Mass Editor right now. If you select a Field, select a Value, click the "Apply" button, then choose another field, the "Value" box retains the value from the previously-chosen field, which is totally inappropriate for the newly-chosen field. If you accidentally click the "Apply" button, the inappropriate value is written to the record, and you then have to edit the record to remove or correct it.

For example, say I have a "Location" called "Storage boxes in closet". I select a number of movies, open the Mass Editor, choose the field "Location", then choose "Storage boxes in closet" from the Values dropdown. Okay so far. Then, I choose the field "Media Type" (perhaps intending to set it to "Retail DVD", let's say), get distracted for a moment, and click "Apply" accidentally (forgetting I hadn't actually chosen a new value). Now I have a movie with "Storage boxes in closet" as a "Media Type", and have to fix it manually.

Furthermore, if the more recently-chosen field happens to be a "list" field (e.g. "Genre", "Tags", etc.), then clicking "Apply" has the additional effect of adding a new (inappropriate) value to that list, and you have to go into "Preferences/Lists" to delete it.

What needs to happen is, any time a new field is chosen from the "Field" drop-down list, the "Value" box should be cleared out so it doesn't retain the previous value.

Aimhere

Hi,

I've noticed a bit of weirdness with regard to how PVD looks for its database files on my hard disk.

When I set up Windows 7 on this PC, I relocated the "My Documents" folder off of my C: drive to the E: drive. (To do this in Windows, you open Windows Explorer, find and right-click on "My Documents", click "Location" tab, then "Move...") The folder I moved it to is "E:\Aimhere's Documents", though this still appears in Windows Explorer as "E:\My Documents".

Now, this arrangement works for most programs. All of my other apps which attempt to store files in "My Documents" get redirected to the correct folder on E:. But for some reason PVD doesn't work correctly with this.

If I try to create a new database in PVD, in the "Save as..." dialog I can navigate to the folder path "Computer > E: > My Documents > PVD Files" and see my existing database files. So I type in a new file name (let's call it "TEST") and click "Save". But if I flip over to Windows Explorer, I find the database file has been saved as "E:\Aimheres Documents\PVD Files\TEST.pvd" instead of "E:\Aimhere's Documents\PVD Files\TEST.pvd" (note the difference... PVD saved it in a folder named without an apostrophe.)

What's more, the new 1.x version of PVD won't even open database files from "E:\Aimhere's Documents\PVD Files" (if I navigate to this folder in the "Open..." dialog and choose a file, no data is displayed in the app window)... unless the file is ALSO present in "E:\Aimheres Documents\PVD Files". If the file is not present in the latter folder, PVD 1.x just creates a new, empty database there with the given filename. (The 0.9.x version will at least open a file from its original location in "E:\Aimhere's Documents\PVD Files".)

It looks like PVD's internal routines for managing folder paths are somehow stripping the apostrophe from "E:\Aimhere's Documents" prior to opening the files, resulting in the creation of "E:\Aimheres Documents" (if it doesn't already exist) and writing database files in subfolders of that. And 1.x appears to expect to load databases from that location as well.

If this issue can't be fixed, I may need to move my databases to a different folder (perhaps just "E:\PVD files") and forget about using the "My Documents" folder. I wouldn't mind doing this, but PVD's code really ought to be fixed so it works as expected with folder names containing apostrophes.

Aimhere

(P.S. - this folder-name issue explains why I was having trouble loading my existing movie database from 0.9.x into 1.x, per my post in the "Apostophe Catastrophe" thread. Once I moved the copy of my database to the folder without the apostrophe, 1.x was able to load it. It seems PVD just doesn't deal correctly with apostrophes, in folder names as well as in database fields!)

Hi,

Would it be possible to add an option to the IMDB plugin, which would let it import "Archive Footage" titles for People, in addition to their main "Actor/Actress" filmography? For that matter, an option to include "Self" titles might occasionally be useful. (Both of these should remain optional, chosen in the plugin's configuration dialog, for those users who don't need this information.)

The reason I ask is that, some of the people I add to my database have almost as many, if not more, titles as "archive footage" as they do regular titles. And just today, I ran across one whose IMDB page ONLY included "archive footage"... there was nothing under "actor/actress" so the plugin didn't import anything.

Thanks.

Aimhere

Hi,

I have a minor problem in PVD 0.9.9.21 I'd like to solve. There was a time a while back when the IMDB plugin was returning URLs of the form "http://us.imdb.com/...", instead of "http://www.imdb.com/...", because that's what IMDB itself was returning for search results at the time. Eventually, IMDB went back to using "www.imdb.com", though. But now, I have a number of performers in my People database who still have the "us.imdb.com" flavor of URLs, and every time I update a record from IMDB (via the plugin) without remembering to change the "us" to "www", I wind up with two URLs in the URL field, the original "us" and the current/standard "www".

What I'd like to do is filter my People database to only show records that still have "us.imdb.com", so I can update them all and be done with it. But there doesn't seem to be any way to search by URL in the "Search" box. "URL" is not an option in the drop-down list next to the "Search" box, and choosing "All" doesn't actually include the URL field in the search (apparently "All" only includes the fields listed in the drop-down list, which, again, doesn't have "URL".)

I thought that maybe I could export the URLs to a CSV file (which I can), edit that, then re-import it... but discovered there is no CSV import for People, only for Movies. 

So my question is, IS there a simple way to do a search (and replace) on the URL field in People view?

Aimhere