Personal Video Database

Please note a Help board has recently been added. Anything of value here will soon be incorporated into the Help documentation, and this topic will be deleted.

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Opening Credits

This "Help Index" is a categorized list of links to helpful topics. Please post your suggestions for additions to this list. Provide a title and a topic or message link, and perhaps a comment that will help me categorize it. Please do not post requests for help here—start your own topic (after reading Read this first, of course).

If you don't see what you're looking for, use the forum's powerful Search feature (discussed ~here).

Most of the links on this page (marked with a "~") are to messages that have been lost. I have attempted to recreate them from my personal records. Unfortunately, those include only my posts and whatever I may have quoted from others. I'll mark those with a "*" and change the link to a post below. I have struck-out those for which I have nothing.

Getting Started

*Where do I begin? – This is a long discussion, but worth a read if you're just starting out.

Importing from Excel – Get started quickly by importing anything from anywhere!
An edited version of this topic is posted below.

*Importing from other software via Excel.

~Running PVD in Vista with UAC – Read this if you're having problems.

How to...

Download from IMDb
– *Configuring the plugin
– *Handling movie titles
– *Using Silent mode
– *When the wrong movie is downloaded (or ~here)
– ~Using custom instead of standard fields
– *Adding a single season to a series
– *Updating series information
– Batch plugins

Filter
– *Disappearing movies
– *Use to select movies for export

Search
– *Search box behavior
– ~Advanced search operators
– ~Advanced search tips
– *Advanced search vs. Statistics

Print
– described *here and ~here

Export
– *Selecting a template (or ~here)
– *Various questions including, "Is there any way to export posters in original title names?"

Cool Features

*Web search – If you can't download it, Web search it!

New Features in 0.9.9 – Maybe your issue has been addressed in the new version.

Related Software

Kroozbox – PVD to media theatre solution

PK's MovieDB – Dynamic website template

~Video editing/conversion utilities

You can only import video files, but you can play any file type. In effect, "play" asks Windows to "open" whatever file is in the Path name field. Windows does so with whatever program has been associated with that file type. The MP3 pathname would have to be entered manually to the field.

Multiple files entered in the Path name field are passed to Windows using a playlist. So you could, for example, precede a movie with some music—to set a mood, or give you time to pop the popcorn. Note, however, the files are ordered by pathname in the playlist, so the music will precede the movie only if it's filename is "before" that of the movie.

Now I have to ask... Why do you want to do this?

I think what HSSBH wants is the ability to password protect the edit function. The readonly switch applies at startup, and applies whether or not the database is password protected. I have to agree the readonly and noconfig options would be more useful if they were password protected attributes of the database files. In other words, when assigning a password to a database, one would select the desired security attributes: view, edit and/or configure.

If HSSBH can trust his users, he can create a shortcut with the -readonly switch and ask them to use only that shortcut to start the program. If, for example, he's only concerned about other family members, he could put this readonly shortcut on the desktop and hide his own full-access shortcut. He could add a little more security by using something like Password-It! to add password protection to his shortcuts. If he has $10 to spare, however, it would be better to donate it here.

Welcome to the forum, BestBoy.

restarting the router could mean that a new IP address was allocated

Thanks. That occurred to me, but I figured I had done enough guessing.

Depends what is in the exported tag and how the functionality is implemented.

The functionality I'm referring to is the sharing of all the information for a movie, exactly as it appears in the source data base, and quite intentionally not depending on anything else. The simplest case—copying entire records from one database to another—I  would expect to be a straightforward Firebird utility function. But that's a technical matter beyond my understanding. If it had to be done as an export/import tag information operation, I'd be surprised, but I wouldn't care—I'm only interested in the end result.

The tag import/export idea is about getting the movie reference right...

...so once download sources for information and images have been determined, other databases sharing the same media files don't have to search for and determine this information again.

These are different features for different purposes. I suppose we could conjure up situations where they overlap, but I don't see any benefit in doing so. I think both would be useful.

It seems like this is the same as "Tag export/import (like ID3 for mp3)" requested by patch.

The desired functionality might also be provided by the split and append/join features we've discussed before. If it's about sharing movie entries between databases (especially those of different users), this method is particularly appropriate. The tag import/export idea is about getting the movie reference right. The other user/database can then download whatever information they want. That doesn't help much if the point is to share the information that has been collected. The easiest and most effective way to do this would be to split (save in a new database) selected movies, and then be able to append this new database to another.

Nostra, you've indicated this is on your TODO list, but is it going to make it into 0.9.9? It seems my database has become too unwieldy for my tired old computer, but I don't even want to think about splitting it until I have the means to exchange records between databases. I'm thinking I could split my "Wish list" movies (about half) to a separate database, then move them into my main database as I acquire or plan to acquire them.

BTW, it occurs to me one of the complications you have to consider is the handling of custom fields. If a custom field does not exist in the target, would it be added, or would the data be omitted? I suppose another option would be to dump data from unmatched custom fields into the comments field.

That's what I would have thought from reading the help page, but the plugin search is redirected first time, everytime. I wasn't doing any searches before, and the ban (if that's the problem) isn't been removed in time. This started 12 hours ago; three days ago it worked fine.

Doing a search from IMPAwards, I noticed the Google site search results are now embedded in the IMPAwards page, rather than a separate Google page. Thinking the recent site redesign may have caused this problem, I made a Web search based on the current search URL...

http://www.impawards.com/googlesearch.html?cx=partner-pub-6811780361519631%3A48v46vdqqnk&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%s%u
I saw some promise in the fact a partner id is now used, where it wasn't before (i.e., maybe referrals from partners are not banned). Indeed, the web search works flawlessly, while the same plugin searches continue to fail. So this seemed like the solution, but then I tried the search URL the plugin is using as a web search...

Plugin search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:[Title]+Poster+site:www.impawards.com&filter=0

Web search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:+site:www.impawards.com+Poster+%s%u
It works flawlessly too. It's necessarily a little different than the plugin search, but I doubt that makes any difference.

Since deleting Google cookies makes no difference, I tried the plugin with Anonymizer—still no change. The problem is the same in both 0.9.8 and 0.9.9. And with that, I'm stumped. I can't imagine how Google is banning queries specifically from PVD, without using cookies and without my IP address.

i envy you...

I hope you understand the purpose of my previous post was to convey information to nostra that might help him narrow down the cause of your problem. 

Try to make the plugin overwrite titles.

The plugins I selected with "Automatically import... Movie information" were configured to overwrite titles and year. When I run them directly (after the scanner update has removed the title and date), they work correctly. It appears that when they are used with the scanner, they are run first (although the information displayed is not updated), and then the title and year are replaced with "#S.E" and "-1" at the same time the file path is added.

In any case, if nothing is selected under "Automatically import... Movie information," nothing should happen except for the addition of the file path.

If you have all files of a series assigned to a main series record, you can right click the record and select "Organize files by episodes" to assign each file to it's corresponding episode.

Sorry, you have explained this before. You've finally filled-up my brain's ability to remember features. You'll have to get rid of some. So why do we need this feature, if the scanner is going to organize files correctly in the first place?

Welcome to the forum.

The first one is the possibility to have additional ratings...

Just to clarify...the ratings fields that are provided are imdbrating, orating and rating. Orating ("other" or "additional rating") can be used for any any rating source, and a caption for that source saved in oratingname (not by the user, but by a plugin or script). Rating is meant for user ratings, but could be used for anything else. In 0.9.9, you can sort, group and advance search using these fields. I think this is a sensible design for standard ratings.

To handle more ratings, custom fields would have to be added. Depending on the type of field used, it can be grouped and/or sorted. As far as I can tell, stars are not a "type" available to custom fields, nor is it a "format" that can be applied in a skin. Maybe this could change. As things are in 0.9.9, an additional rating field would best be handled as a select list, as this type can be sorted and grouped.

allowing fast edition of some fields by default

I agree, but for which fields would be "safe" to do so? For custom fields, this would have to be configurable.

setup shortcut keys to edit specific items of one record in the database

If I understand correctly, the shortcut would put just the selected (as indicated by cursor position) field into edit mode. I think this is a better solution than arbitrarily making some fields editable. I imagine this could be applied universally, and added to the context menu. In other words, you would be able to select anything, right-click and select "edit." One the other hand, for multi-item fields, the context menu currently applies to the specific item chosen rather than the entire field, so this might be difficult to implement. I hope nostra will consider it however—it would be a very nice feature to have.