Personal Video Database

Finally I can reproduce the bug. Hooray!!!  
It doesn't reset the viewdate, but sets it. If a viewdate is already there, it is not altered. That's what happens on my PC, at least... Can you confirm this bevaviour? Then I could post a small bug report.

If you use ID as disc#, you could put that into the list on the left side...
in "Tools" -> "Preferences" -> "Movies" -> "Title formatting": enter the following line in the field "Show movie in the list as:"
%T  (disc# %N)

Don't know if there is a way to incorporate the other fields into the list (perhaps by modifying the skin?)

This is just a very small thing...

If you want to create a link to another movie in your database, did you ever wonder how to use "link type: ID"? The ID you'd need here is not the one from the "ID" field, but the unique one from the internal database index ("Database Record ID"). Just don't get confused!!  

This "Database Record ID" is not visible in PVD.

How to create such a link in detail:
- select some text in the "Description" or "Comments" field (any custom fields should be fine, too)
- right click on the selected text and choose "Create Hyperlink"
- if you choose "Link type: ID", then "Value" has to be the hidden "Database Record ID" instead of the "ID" shown in PVD

Since I didn't find any other way to view the "Database Record ID", I wrote a very simple export template for that purpose (see attachment)

Move the template file "ID + Database Record ID + Title (Textfile).ptm" into the subfolder \Plugins\Templates of the PVD program folder. It will be listed in the menu "Export" after you restart PVD.

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Ok, to narrow it down... the problem seems to be: all files exported by PVD with utf8bom (at least on my computer with WinXP) start with the following three bytes:
3F BB 3F
Displayed as ISO 8851-1 (or ANSI) this is: ?»?

But the correct BOM for UTF8 should be:
EF BB BF
Displayed as ISO 8851-1 (or ANSI) this is: 
This one works fine and is recognized as UTF8.

I attached a zip containing a text file exported with PVD (template: "Plain list.ptm") using UTF8BOM (called "file as exported by PVD.txt") and a second file where I (manually) changed the first three bytes to EF BB BF ("same file with BOM corrected manually.txt")...

Plain list.ptm:
%OPTIONS%
filter="Text Files|*.txt"
encoding="UTF8BOM"
%OPTIONS%{%value=203}. {%value=title} / {%value=origtitle} ({%value=year}) [{%value=genre}]
Quite often programs change characters to "?" when the character that is exported does not fit the encoding. Might be a hint, but I'm wondering if it makes any sense, because ï and ¿ are both present in the ANSI character table.


[attachment deleted by admin]

Unfortunately I can't reproduce the problem

Just a guess: perhaps something is different with your database that has an effect on this issue? Did you try it with a newly generated database, too?

Yes, Rich-Text is complicated, but in the end it's a markup language like HTML.
If someone's interested and wants to know more, here you can find the specifications:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140277%28office.10%29.aspx

I didn't program that from scratch of course. I would have gone mad!   I exported a draft in Word as Rich-Text file, did some modifications and copied and pasted the appropriate parts to the template.

I note that it would not be difficult to modify this to delimit the fields with tabs.

That's quite simple, even without changing the template, just use the search and replace function in Word:
Search for ") " and replace with ")^t"
If you want to exclude the bold font type for that (to ensure movie titles with parenthesis stay without tabstops), you can do so: In the search and replace dialog click on the format button and choose "Font", where you can advise word to search and replace only text that's not bold.

It also should not be that complicated to export to Rich-Text as table directly. The only thing I cannot export to a Rich-Text file are the posters, because they would have to be embedded directly into the file. External image files don't help here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140283%28v=office.10%29.aspx#rtfspec_24

A feature request for export template development (http://www.videodb.info/help/hlp_export.html)...

When developing export templates, in %OPTIONS% section there seems to be no way to access the filename that was chosen by the user in the "save as" dialog. It would be neat to have the filename without extension for additional processing:

As it is now, all static files (stylesheets, background images, etc.) may be copied to a subfolder (which can go by a name like "HTML-files" or whatever). The subfolder would be created along with the exported file. I'd like the name of this folder to depend on the name of the exported file. So what I want to do: If the user chooses "peter's database.html" as export filename, I'd like to copy all static files to a subfolder called "peter's database_files". Hence it would be obvious that both belong together. In addition to that, Windows would automatically link files and folders named that way and treat them as a pair:
http://paulelso.wordpress.com/2006/09/20/xp-folder-option-managing-pairs-of-web-pages-and-folders/

Maybe you can add a new variable for the %OPTIONS% section providing the users chosen filename without extension and perhaps, just in case, also a second one providing the full filename (or the extension alone)?

If %fname% would be the variable for the filename without extension, something like this shall work:
filter="HTML Files|*.html;*.htm"
copyfile="template\style.css<->"%fname%_files\style.css"
imagepath="%fname%_files\images\"
Would be really great.
And by the way, thanks a lot for all your efforts, of course!!

This is about export templates and the charset encoding UTF8BOM, PVD v0.9.9.21:
It seems to me that something goes wrong when exporting with:
encoding="UTF8BOM"
Every template using UTF8BOM generates three characters (the byte order mark) at the beginning of the exported file. These should be invisible, but every program I tested does not interpret them. They are displayed instead. Special characters within the text are broken. As an example: "ü" will be "ü". Notepad (unicode capable, WinXP) reports the files to be ANSI-encoded instead of UTF-8. Different files (not generated with PVD) saved as UTF8 with and without byte order mark are handled correctly by Notepad.

Thanks for the info on IE Tab Plus.

...user would have the ability to name the report whatever they like

I tried a different approach now to provide full control over the title apart from the filename...

Something different: Within the template, in %OPTIONS%-area: is it possible to get the filename that was chosen by the user in the filter dialog, with and without extension? Something like %filename%?
Then I'd like to change the subdirectories name from "htmlprintfiles" to "%filename%_files" (and I would need to omit the filenames extension here) to take advantage of this Windows feature:
http://paulelso.wordpress.com/2006/09/20/xp-folder-option-managing-pairs-of-web-pages-and-folders/

You can always find the newest print template here.

I can't reproduce that behaviour, works fine here on Firefox 3.6.3... 
PVD never overwrites existing files (except the main html files and the poster images). Did you export to a directory where the subfolder "htmlprintfiles" already existed? Old versions of the stylesheets would be a problem. Try to delete "htmlprintfiles" and then do a fresh export with "HTML Print Layout". Please let me know if it works afterwards.

Ok, I will add sequential numbers soon.
I added ID, cause you can use the ID to index your DVDs and stick the number onto the cover of every DVD. Makes it easier to find the right one...