Personal Video Database

I can't reproduce this. Are you using a custom language file (to change the captions in the program)? Do you get the expected result when the filters are set to "All"?

Yes it all shows up when filters are set to "All". It's just like there's no difference between "All" and the including filter (Only owned etc.).

Hmm no I don't think I use any custom stuff. I've made some custom Categories but that's it.

I've attached the .pvd file but I couldn't. Rapidshare link: http://rapidshare.com/files/443825163/Documentaries.pvd

After thinking a good deal about this, I've decided that storing Horizon programs as episodes in any way isn't satisfactory. It may be the "correct" way to do it since it technically is a TV series, but in practice it's too inconvenient to have all the episodes hidden away first under the entry "Horizon" and then season or year. It doesn't give an easy overview of the episodes and thereby defeats a good deal of the reason of why I use PVD for my documentary hobby in the first place; this is especially a problem because Horizon has so many seasons/years!
So creating a new movie entry, plugging in a URL and then importing info is the way I'm going to go.

Only question that remains is which links that will work to import. rick.ca how did you import info from BFI? I'm thinking on just doing a bit of "charity work" for IMDB and update every Horizon doc I see with info from other websites anyway..

buah: Doing the entries manually is what I'm planning right now. Just to clarify, I will only add in those documentaries that I have watched and out of the 1000+ of total episodes, only ~150 of them are "available" (torrent networks). So since my basic need is to click off movies as "seen this date" and rate them one at a time, it doesn't really concern me if I have to use a couple of minutes every time to import manually via URL since I'll only have to do that once few weeks on average, so np

Quote from: Gaco on May 06, 2010, 06:28:05 pm

That's not the problem. Problem is, Horizon would show up in every search without showing which episodes actually had the tags/categories in question!

1. If you then apply advanced search on a specific category, you'll get episodes with that category.

Ok that's always something.. but actually the grouping by category is more of a problem

2. Make a custom list field "Series", and assign to each episode containing series name entered in "Series" field, and you'll get what you need.

I'm not sure what you mean, i don't see anywhere to create "custom list fields"? But in any case, I don't see that this should put episodes together with their corresponding groups when viewing by group (i.e. tree view)?

I was too lazy to read the whole topic, but do you have the "Filter episodes" option checked in Tools -> Preferences -> Movies?

Yes it is checked. The short story of the topic is this:

Background: IMDB is treating some very long series of documentaries (example: BBC Horizon, spanning a wide range of subjects) as a TV series with episodes, not individual movies. This is a problem in PVD because they don't necessarily share the same genre and are really independent documentary movies, just as my ratings are very different for each. I use "categories" to designate the sub-genre of the documentary films in my PVD. So when right-clicking and choosing "view by category" all the individual episodes from Horizon doesn't come out into the various categories, but stay under the same entry, namely Horizon. No matter which "View by..."I use, the episodes doesn't really show up in the right place (although in the case of search apparently you can make an advanced search among some specific category, though this doesn't solve the big problem).
Best solution right now: Therefore I have chosen to not import the documentary films directly via IMDB but just add them as seperate entries write in some info about them manually.
What I need: Although each documentary in the Horizon series can't be found in a search on IMBD because it's listed as an EPISODE for Horizon (1964), it does have a direct IMDB link. I need a way to manually force import IMDB info into an entry from a IMDB url (such as http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1087881/). IMDB episode webpages seems to share the same basic layout and info representations as IMDB move webpages, so it shouldn't be any trouble at all to make?

Very well


This is my category list. I use it to add my own tags associated with genre and content in each of the documentaries. I have only just started, so I only have the categories needed for the movies I've seen so far, but I will add more as I need them:



Now lets try and group by category:



Which looks like this:



I then sort by rating and look under Science:



Even though I have given the episodes "No Ordinary Genius" (which are really independent from all the other documentaries in BBC's Horizon series) categories Science and Physics, it does not sure up under Science and Physics, but stay in "Undefined" because I have not categorized / put on genre tags on Horizon because it is impossible as each documentary in the series is a unique subject.





Another aspect of the same problem with the episodes is following:


When grouping by rating, the episodes does not show up under 6-8 which is where they belong with a rating of 8, but under "not rated" because I have not rated the Horizon series as a whole, which is impossible.



So you see, the big problem is that PVD treats all "TV series" as though you should be able to rate the series as a whole, and to specify it's genre as a whole, which in the case with normal TV series and documentary mini-series is totally possible, but not decade-longtime running documentary series such as BBC Horizon or PBS Nova. But these gets imported from IMDB as big-ass TV series with many, many episodes! I don't know what can be done or what the smartest thing is to do. The easiest thing in terms of easy of implementation would probably be my suggestion in the first post, although the best/most complete solution would be have PVD distinguish between two different kinds of movie series, the normal kind that is currently available, and a second kind, whose episodes have properties much more like single-movie-entries, just brought together under a single TV series name. Does this make sense?

Good. It suspected that the user data would be preserved case, but I wanted to be sure. I regularly make backups so I know what you mean, but do you consider an IMDB import update (select entry in view mode, then click "Import->[EN] Get movie info from IMDB") as a "significant change to PVD database?"