Personal Video Database

Seeing as my changes to the html-export template might already be of use to others I decided to post a link here even if I don't feel I'm completely done with it.

http://medlem.spray.se/luke79/pvd/templates.rar

I'll try and remeber the changes I did in each file and inside that rar-file are also the originals so you can check for yourselves. I might go a bit too much into detail, but whereas I had to figure these things out by myself, maybe my explanation of the changes will give others courage to try themselves first before asking for the changes to be made by others (on that note... I still need help with that TV.com script   )

Web Pages(Index&Movies).ptm

1) I changed the width of the page to match my changes made in the movie.ptm file from 760 to 800 pixels by changing

<table width="760" border="0" align="center" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
to

<table width="800" border="0" align="center" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
2) I removed the annoying double title by changing

<td width="710" class="border"> &nbsp;<a href="movie{%value=mid}.html" class="style5">{%value=origtitle} - {%value=title} ({%value=year})</a><br />
to

<td width="710" class="border"> &nbsp;<a href="movie{%value=mid}.html" class="style5">{%value=origtitle} ({%value=year})</a><br />
Movie.ptm

1) Again I removed the double title from the webpage title and the webpage body text, and widened the page from 760 to 800 pixels (so that the names and roles of the actors weren't squished together as much as before) the same way I did the changes above

2) I added a "style" in the head part of the code called style4 for later use in another template. This basically just says that the text introduced later in the code will be of 12 pixel's height (width?) and that the first font to be used is Arial... Times New Roman if Arial isn't installed etc.

.style4 {
font-size: 12px;
font-family: Arial, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}
3) I removed some data fields by simply deleting those blocks of information (anything inside a <tr></tr> tag that I wanted removed) and changed positions a bit of other fields. What's more interesting is that I added fields that to me were very interesting such as Subtitles, Duration, File Size and Quality. I found these values by guessing and by looking through the part of the .pvd file that's created by PVD to search for strings such as "subs", "length", "size", "resolution", "videobitrate" etc. For more strings look at this link http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/index.php?topic=766.0, information I sadly didn't have before I started fiddling around

4) I think the most valuable changes I made was fixing an error where movie screen dumps showed up as text instead of pictures through this change in the screens.ptm file

{%param=imgdata}
to

<img src="{%param=imgdata}" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
5) and by moving the information about Seasons and Episodes from TV-series from the top to the bottom of the page, making it easier to read and also adding hyperlinks (which I intend to have point towards a new similar page as movie.ptm with information about each episode as soon as Nostra has time to add that function) by the following change

<tr>
   <td colspan="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="top">{%value=description}</td>
</tr>
{%value=episodes template="pages\episode.ptm" grouptemplate="pages\season.ptm"}    

to

<tr>
   <td colspan="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="top">{%value=description}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
   <td colspan="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class="top">{%value=episodes template="pages\episode.ptm" grouptemplate="pages\season.ptm"}</td>
</tr>
and the following changes in these files

Episode.ptm

{%param=epnum}. {%param=origtitle}
to

{%param=epnum}. <a href="{%param=url}">{%param=origtitle}</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Season.ptm

Season {%groupparam=season}
{%values}
to

%HEAD%<table>%HEAD%
<tr><td><span class="style4"><b>Season {%groupparam=season}</b><br>{%values}</span></td></tr>
%FOOT%</table>%FOOT%
I hope that gives you guys some ideas of what you can change yourselves. The reason I was reluctant in posting this before is that the information inside the "Quality" field will look fairly strange when there's no data. Something like ", , Kbps, ch,". If any of you have any ideas how to remove the spaces and commas and text when there's no data to be printed, please let me know.

/Luke

First of all Rick, thanks for being crazy active on the forum. It's like you're everywhere at once... please don't get a life 

Secondly I did some thourough comparison between theTVdb.com and TV.com on one of my favorite series Battlestar Galactica 2003 and had a hard time finding information that only existed on TV.com. I was able to though, cast and crew for each episode being one of the few. I didn't know about theTVdb.com before I found PVD and the reason for that is that I never felt like I needed any other databases than IMDB and TV... but there will always be data that one database has and the otherone lacks which is why having AllMovie as another good database for movies (and as I suggest) TV.com for TV-series would make the collection of data so much more exhausting 

All I can say is that I tried and failed realising that I just don't have enough experience to make a script. So all you PVD users out there... HILFE!

Thanks Nostra for a great program though. I hope we can all help in making it even greater.

/Luke