Personal Video Database

One problem I often run into occurs when I

1. do a search in movie view,
2. select one of the search results,
3. click on an actor's name to go to people view,
4. click on a different movie by that actor to look at it in movie view.

PVD switches back to movie view, but the search is still applied, so I can't look at the movie I clicked on.  I have to remove the search, go back to people view, and click on the movie again.  This could be changed in 4 ways:

1. In movie view, once the user manually removes the search, the movie that was clicked on in people view gets selected.
2. An option is added so that, if the user CTRL+clicks (or ALT+clicks) on a movie in people view, the search in movie view is removed and the movie that was clicked on in people view is selected.
3. The search in movie view is removed automatically and the movie that was clicked on in people view is selected.  This would be feasible if two other features were implemented:

a) Repeat Search, like using the F3 key in your web browser to search for the same thing you last searched for.  Even better would be if the search box was a drop-down box where you could select your previous searches like you can your previous web site URLs in your web browser.
b) Select Previous Selected Movie, like the Back button in web browsers.

4. [suggested by rick.ca] The active search in movie view is maintained, but the movie that was clicked on in people view is displayed at the top of the list of search results in the same way a new movie added while a search was active would be.  

This may be the best of all because if there were the Select Previous Selected Movie feature, you could just click that and resume going through the results of your initial search after you were done examining the movie at the top.

A light sharpen on images that are downsized (and not others) might be a better use of time than hunting for a better scaling method.

I'm familiar with the general advice to lightly sharpen images after resizing them, but I often don't take the trouble to do it since the difference is so slight when using the more computationally intensive algorithms like Bicubic or Lanczos.  With the PrintScreen cap from PVD, though, using an Unsharp Mask filter on it really made it virtually indistinguishable from the version that was resized with Bicubic in Photoshop.  Maybe that would be a good solution if it didn't slow things down too much for users with slower computers.  Original image I posted is attached with the Bicubic resize still on the left but the PVD cap on the right sharpened with Unsharp Mask (Amount 44%, Radius 1.0).  (It actually looks minutely better now than the Bicubic version, but if you gave that version an appropriate amount of sharpening, I'm sure they'd be the same.)

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Sorry, I don't understand. I find it very difficult to tell the difference. In the attached, I can see the lettering at the top is noticeably different—at full size. But the PVD version looks better!

Just to make sure, you understood that the PVD version is the one on the right--not the one on the left?  Since I saw the difference even in the PNG PrintScreen cap as well as when using PVD, I thought it couldn't be something wrong with my system.  And I still see the sharpness difference clearly even in your JPG, although that has more pixelation/noise than my PNG did, which I presume is a result of the JPEG compression and would make the 'smoothness' of the PVD version appear 'better.'  If that noise is not from the JPEG compression and you see it even in the uncompressed version of that image, I'm at a loss to explain it unless its a byproduct of the program you did the resizing with.

But maybe it could be due to a difference between an LCD monitor and a CRT like the one I'm using, as I know fonts that look good on one can look bad on the other (ex. ClearType), although I thought the difference with photos was minimal.  Is everyone else using an LCD?  (I still prefer CRTs over LCDs or plasmas, as AFAIK only OLEDs or micromirror projectors can match/better their response times.)

Another thing I thought of, assuming the difference is in the way PVD scales the image vs. my display, is that some kind of deliberate noise reduction has been incorporated into the algorithm which might make poor-quality images look better when enlarged but high-quality images look worse when reduced.  (Photoshop has a different algorithm for enlarging images than it does for reducing them--Bicubic Smoother vs. Bicubic Sharper, respectively.)

And for whom is this thumb down?

I'm kidding, of course, just couldn't stand not to notice...

In my mind, it was thumbs down for having to crop the image to fit the 512K attachment size limit of the forum.  The full PrintScreen image was 1280x960 and too big when compressed using the lossless PNG format, which I needed in this case.  And thumbs down to the movie too--I saved the poster as a reminder not to watch, lest I should forget.  

I got pop-up, than dragged the thumbnail, but got nothing? Still pop-up and dragged thumbnail.

Are you running any kind of pop-up blocker?  The large-size image opens in a new tab/window, so I had to add an exception to Firefox's own pop-up blocker (Options > Content > Block pop-up windows > Exceptions) for www.amazon.com to get it to open.  And you'll have to do the same for every country's version of Amazon you use (ex.  www.amazon.de, www.amazon.fr); adding www.amazon.* won't work there.  Did you get the "Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window" message in the yellow bar at the top of the search results page?  I got that even though dragging the image opened the product page in a new tab; I just had to go back to the search results tab to see it.

Yes, that's the one.  Link in orginal post corrected.

The page up/down and the up/down arrow keys apply to the list, regardless of which panel has focus. I'm sure that's by design—so the list is always controllable.

My page up/down keys weren't doing anything at all at the time, but now they're back to this behavior.  Don't know what happened.

I see now that if you hit the spacebar once you've reached the bottom of the movie information panel, it will jump back to the top of that panel if you uncheck "Do not jump to the next movie when scrolling movie information with SPACE."  But there's a problem with it: If you select a movie where all the information fits on one screen and then select a movie where it doesn't (that is, one that has a scrollbar), the spacebar won't trigger a jumping back to the top of the panel for that movie.  To fix this, you have to select another movie where all the information doesn't fit on one screen.  Then it will work again--until you happen to click on another all-movie-information-on-one-screen movie.  This is with PVD 0.9.9.21 BTW and it happens in every skin I've tried.

Similarly, the search box takes keyboard input, regardless of whether it has focus. That works great for a quick as-you-type search—where is space is only needed. If it is, the search box can be given focus with a mouse-click. So I find the "use spacebar for scrolling" option quite usable.

Yes, I would be satisfied with this approach if the above problem were resolved.  Its hard to break the habit of reaching for the page up/down keys, but I can see this could be slightly faster overall.

Alternatively, the mouse wheel (if you have one) can be used for scrolling. It works in whichever pane has focus.

Strangely, the mouse wheel no longer works in either pane for me; it never worked as a 'One screen at a time,' but now it doesn't even work as 'The following number of lines at a time.'  Could be that I'm now using Windows 7 64-bit whereas I was using 32-bit before.

Since you mention it, I don't see any need for there to be an "edit mode" or a placeholder in the first place.

Yes, not for screenshots or posters.

There are already controls on the images. The only one that behaves differently is "load from file." It replaces the existing image, and should be called "replace from file."

It was an unpleasant surprise when I discovered that and also that the replaced image wasn't even moved to the Recycle Bin.

Add a "delete" button, then everything—including some control over the ordering of images (by inserting and deleting)—can be done without having to go into edit mode.

I agree--and for posters, why the need for the buttons below the image (the left arrow, right arrow, and the plus).  The left and right arrows are only for people who haven't discovered left- and right-clicking on the image does the same thing (and for those people there should be tooltips that say "Left-click on image" and "Right-click on image").  The Plus button, in its current state, is also redundant, but as you say below, it could be converted.

What would be useful would be "Move Left" and "Move Right" buttons for changing the order of posters.  For single movements, that would be faster than opening up a separate interface to change the order by drag-and-dropping.

Regardless, there's no need for buttons on that row that has the "1 of 12" data.  What could go in the extra space there instead is a custom item for notes about each poster like "Fan created vs. official" "Web site of origin," "Rating," "Look for a bigger size," "Watermark in annoying place," "Adult content," "Country poster is used in" "Production or behind-the-scenes photo," "True poster vs. DVD cover" (for when a DVD cover is all that's available or that you prefer it over the true poster) etc.  If one custom item wasn't enough, then more could added to additional rows, but you could fit at least one on that "1 of 12" row.

One other thing that would be good is if there were a mode to make screenshots work like posters, where you just right-click on them to advance to the next one.  If you have 50 screenshots and want to quickly flip through all of them, double-clicking on each is cumbersome.

I do like that you now have the option to "Show random poster" like you can for People photos.  When I'm looking on the web for new movies to watch, they often have foreign language titles its hard to remember, so I have to rely on the poster thumbnail, which means I have to visually memorize all the variants, even the posters I don't care for.  Thus PVD now serves the function of flash cards.

Add another one for "add from file"—to add another image after the selected one.

Yes, it doesn't make sense to have to right-click through a dozen posters to get the Plus button to show up only beneath the last one (where its faster to just right-click again to add a poster anyway).

The only thing that would make this better is the ability to drag & drop images to change their order.

Yep, every time I use Listal.com and drag the posters around so easily, I wish I could do this in PVD.  The only thing I'd like more is a 'Load/Paste from Clipboard' button like eXtreme Movie Manager has.

IMDb Plot Keywords alphabetizer has been updated to be faster but also a feature has been added to enable you to enter the IMDb Plot Keywords that you care about into an array in the script so that those keywords will always be highlighted when you're on an IMDb Plot Keywords page.  See here for how to do it.

I submitted it for Firefox's Web Search Pro addon...

...but he wasn't able to get Jinni's search box to work with it.  Darn that Flash!  Jinni does say adding a search plugin for browsers is on their product roadmap.  You can vote to give it priority if you like on their GetSatisfaction page.

One other update, Listal now supports importing movies and ratings from the Vote History page of My Movies on IMDb here.  I just imported 800 movies in an instant and it got almost all of them except some ratings on individual episodes of TV shows, which it informs you that it didn't import.  They also support importing from Delicious Library and DVDprofiler.  Maybe next they'll support importing tags like PVD.  Tags on their site can be used as a way to help browse through other users' collections--one of the ways you can filter their movie list is by tag.  You can see all the tags that that user has assigned to movies and filter so that you only see the movies that they've given a certain tag.

First, I should mention there's the IMDb Plot Keywords alphabetizer Greasemonkey script that can be used until alphabetization is implemented in PVD.  (PVD just downloads keywords as they occur on IMDb, which is the order in which they were added.)

I prefer Allmovie "Keywords" and "Tones", ...

I downloaded your script and decided to dump Tones and Moods into Genres and Themes into Categories to append to IMDb data; this way I can look at all the movies in my database by clicking on the Tone/Mood/Theme names to get a sense of them, unlike with custom fields.  Looks promising; I'll see what how it goes.

Agreed, but again, I don't believe the data (especially the correlation to specific scenes) exists. If one were serious about this sort of thing, I think the way to do it would be to collect movie scripts (also easier said than done). Since PVD doesn't do search summaries or show where hits are within a field, they would best be saved outside the database. There, a Windows or other search tool could be used and the hits associated to the movies via the file names (i.e., the scripts would be named something like [Title] ([Year]) Script.doc). I'm doing this now with subtitles (because they're readily available for all movies), but, of course, they include only dialog—and not even who spoke the words. They do, however, include time codes which would allow the exact spot in the movie to be found.

So here's another wacky feature suggestion: Find the given search term in the subtitle files located beside the currently displayed movies. Launch the screenshot maker and grab X shots from the time interval from the end of the previous dialog to the start of the next. Tag the screenshots (another new feature) with "[hh:mm:ss] [search term]" and save them in their respective movie records.

  Never imagined such a thing.  I might use it, but it sounds very difficult.

Jinni also looks very interesting. I wish there was a way to upload movies and ratings to sites like this.

According to Likeminds, sites like IMDb actively try to prevent people from uploading their movie ratings in order to keep people from creating multiple accounts and changing the average rating of a movie by rating it multiple times.  Jinni says they're working on a way to upload your ratings.  We'll see.  Jinni does at least take title requests here and if you look at the past requests, they really are adding them to their database.

Many sites like Criticker, Listal, and Flixster have requests for this on their forums.  It takes a tremendous amount of time to upload 2000 ratings, so I usually just do my 5-star rated films.  I've yet to pick a 'go-to' site, but Criticker doesn't support TV series, doesn't have covers, and only a has a single microscopic image for each movie.  Listal I'm liking for its extensive database, social features, and it not only has screenshots but lets you upload your own and covers too.  You can even set which of the available covers you want to use as your default.  I'm very tired of going to IMDb and not even seeing a poster for a title due to IMDb charging to add them.  Also, if a movie isn't in their database, just input the IMDb URL and its added instantly.  No need to request it or fill out a form like with Criticker.  Even better, there's a RSS feed for every page on the site, rather than a few general ones.  I like Flixster's ability for each movie for users to make their own 'Other movies similar to...' lists and for other users to give a thumbs up or down for these.  Anime-Planet is similar, but they both count up votes and make users actually write out exactly how the 2 movies are similar (although voting on keywords/tones might be sufficient in most cases).

I use Web search to integrate PVD with sites like this (I haven't yet figured out how to do so for Jinni).

Web search doesn't work for Jinni probably because the site uses Flash for the search box.  I submitted it for Firefox's Web Search Pro addon; once its validated, you may be able to copy the javascript link from that and convert it for PVD.

Maybe the tags could work like the list of Actors above it--when there's an actor you want to make note of, you click on them and they're set to 'Always show' in People view. (You could CTRL+click on a tag to get to Tag view instead of displaying all the movies with that tag.)   Thereafter, the actor's name is colored orange in Movies view.  There could be a Tag view as well, with the tags colored orange in similar fashion.

In such a Tag view, you might not want to automatically download all movies on IMDb that have that particular tag, as it might grow your database too much, but you could scrape data from the IMDb Wikia http://imdb.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page to automatically get descriptions/definitions of the tags.  Many tags are ambiguous or have a more extensive or specific meaning than would first appear.  On AniDB http://www.anidb.net, you get descriptions of a movie's tags just by hovering over them.

Actors have their 'Alternative Names' field and tags could as well (ex. cop, motorcycle cop, undercover cop, undercover agent, undercover operative, female undercover, detective, policeman, policewoman, police officer) and they could be linkified if they already existed in your tag database.  If the tags were grouped together in this way, then you could quickly do an Advanced Search for all of them without having to remember all the alternative names.  They could even have pictures. (ex. Using a picture of the first movie where you encountered a tag and became interested in using it.)