Personal Video Database

I don't think so. I realize it's not really the same thing, but I prefer to use the more consistent and professional allmovies synopsis using an allmovies script. You can combine this with the IMDb plugin using the batch feature.

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for your comments. I don't know exactly what we'll see in 0.9.9, but I'm sure you'll be pleased.

1. This is one of the shortcomings of the current scanner. I'm sure we'll see improvements in the new version. In the meantime, you can still add multiple files manually by separating the full pathnames of each with a "|".

2. I think two factors are going to affect requests of this sort. First, Customizable views and more flexible custom fields will improve our ability to add whatever we want. Second, the Scripting feature gives us the means to get the data for whatever fields we have added. The catch, of course, is that we'll have to do it ourselves. 

3. What do you mean by "movie-preview"? The current Actors section shows actors and their roles if Preferences-Movies-Information card Show credits as...roles is set.

4. I was going to say you can Search or Advanced Search to filter, but they don't seem to work properly for awards. We should look at that during beta testing, and see if it can be fixed or improved.

5. Don't hold your breath. 

6. It will be interesting to see how Customizable views will be implemented in this regard.

7. Or perhaps Edit this field on a context menu—for quick changes to one or two fields.

these are some of my ideas

Keep 'em coming! 

Sorry for the 1st suggestion. I didn't notice it is there.
But I remeber it wasn't. When was it added?

Sorry, I'm not following you. Did you notice the posts here on August 8 about adding records? Perhaps that's what you're referring to, because there's no "add" function on the context menus.

02. Almost every time I want to click on "people", I click on "loan".

Me too. Thanks—I was too ashamed to mention it.

03. I can't find a way to import another poster...

Select alternate poster plugin you want to use from the Tools-Import menu. If you wish to add, rather than replace an existing poster, first click on the poster so an icon appears. Once there is more than one poster, use left/right clicks to select posters (or the icons which will appear below the posters), and the paper clip icon to set which one to display.

04. How about opening the poster using the Windows default viewer by double clicking it?

I don't see any advantages to this that would be worth the extra time it takes to load another viewer application. I'm assuming the "default viewer" would be whatever is associated with JPG images. I think a more useful feature would be the ability to open a poster (or any other image) in a specified editor, and for the edited version to be re-saved in the database. I have no idea if this is feasible, however.

05. Not very important but for the beauty...

It's already the best—it may as well be the prettiest as well. Even if the stars are bigger, however, I think it would be difficult to select to 0.1 accuracy with a mouse. You can still (in edit mode) enter whatever you want in the rating field. I assign ratings to the tenth of a point (rather than a half), but often laugh at myself as I do so. Like it really has to be a 7.7, not a 7.5 or 8.0. I remind myself the mouse selection is offering a 20-point rating scale, whereas professional reviewers stick to a 8 or 10-point scale.

Also how about a "New person Master?

What specific functionality are you looking for that is not available by just adding (and updating) a person? You may find you can add it by using a batch file to run several people information plugins or scripts a once. As a true relational database, the program is as capable of being a database of people with their related movies as it is a database of movies with their related people. But I've yet to hear of anyone using in this way, so there doesn't seem to be much demand to add "built-in" features that cater to that use.

Can you add the IMDb Top 250 and to be updated weekly or so?

I like this idea. I've use the ID field (because it's sortable and, for me, otherwise unused) to record the IMDb 250 rank. The ranking is dynamic, however, so it would be nice if I had a way to update this information. I think this would be handled best by a separate script that would download the entire list and update a user-specified field for any of the 250 that exist in the database. Hmmm. Maybe it's about time we started a script wish list (and begged louder for volunteers who are good at writing scripts!).

BTW, what I have done a few times is use Excel to parse the list into Title, Year and Rank fields, and import that into PVD to update the rankings. It works, but a script would be much less tedious.

When you delete a person from people...

Ctrl-Deleting a movie deletes it from the database, rather than just making it invisible. It may do the same with people, but I'm not sure if there's any practical difference between a Delete and a Ctrl-delete for people. Either way, the person deleted will no longer appear in movie records. When the movie records are updated, the deleted person will reappear—as long as they still meet the criteria in the plugin settings. I think the only practical way to deal with a concern about the amount people information in the database is to restrict what is downloaded using the plugin configuration. Once that is done, you pretty much have to let the program download the information it needs to maintain the movie/people relationships correctly. Over time, as you add and delete records, your database will get "cluttered" with (mainly invisible) orphaned and duplicate records. These can be removed by running Optimize Database.

May I continue with ideas or it is a bother?

In making my endless suggestions and questions, I've never seen the slightest hint that nostra is bothered. I'm sure he appreciates the input (as do other users, like me), and he seems pretty good at not being bothered when he had more important things to do. Right now, for example, I suspect he's busy putting the finishing touches on 0.9.9. So don't be disappointed if none of our recent suggestions are implemented. Once the beta is released, he's not going to add any major new features, but nosta listens to what beta testers have to say, and makes whatever improvements are practical and possible.

Welcome to the forum, ice. I'm a stand-alone-single-guy, so I'll move directly to your second suggestion. I like it. I've found it annoying that clicking on a link apparently adds the item to my database, but I hadn't thought of the useful alternative of going to the website. Just so you understand the program a little better... It's not actually "adding" the item. The item is already there—which is why the link appears. Selecting it is just changes it's visibility status. If you're curious about what's actually in your database, select Filters-Advanced-All. The numbers can be surprising. My 650-movie database has 85,000 movie records! I'm really impressed with your insight, however. One of the few bits of information stored in those records is the IMDb URL. 

P.S. If the behaviour is changed, we would need another way to make the record visible—perhaps a link context menu item.

As you work night and day, ignoring work, family and friends to implement an endless list of features in 0.9.9, perhaps you could use this reminder of what your users think of you and your program. It's compiled (mainly) from posts from new users over the last several months.

By far the best program for video management that I have found—great work and thank you for creating it!
Great work done so far!
Heartfelt Congratulations to you and your fantastic software.
I'm very impressed.
I'm very very pleased with this program. It's great!!!! THANX
I've recently "discovered" your program and I find it great and very useful.
I appreciate your making such a fine program available for free.
I have been looking for a program like this for a long time now—Thank you.
I hope you go on with your development and have the best Freeware Movie Database.
I just found your database and it is amazing—and for free!
I just love it, want others to love it as well—It's so well done.
I just started using PVD yesterday and I love it.
I LOVE the product.
I love the program and prefer it to all the others I've tried.
I love this program!
I Love this program.
I love you.
I think the program it's almost perfect.
I’m very enthusiastic about it.
Keep up the good work, it is truly appreciated!
So pleased to have found this software.
Thank you for this great and free tool to manage my films.
Thank you for this great software.
Thank you thank you thank you!!!
Thank you very much for the really great program.
Thanks again for this great piece of software.
Thanks for creating such a great application.
Thanks for the excellent work you've done building this software!
Thanks for this awesome software. I tried every other and this is far the better—and free!
Thanks for your great software.
Thanks for your work.
This is a great application!
This is an awesome program.
This is the most amazing video program I have used.
This little app is simply amazing.
Very good program.
Your program is excellent.
Your program is fabulous—keep up the great work!
[ed. and my personal favourite...] 
WOW!!! U R ENORMOUS!!!

Thanks for sharing this with us.

I'm lazy, so following is a copy of my reply to your parallel post on the MC forum. I included a prod for improving MC's Theater View (a 10-ft interface), but others have been begging for the same thing for more than a year. I'm hoping the customizable interface feature that will be in the next version of PVD (due out in beta in a few weeks) will allow the same functionality. It's won't be the same thing (i.e., it's not intended specifically for providing a 10-foot interface), but if it allows me to stay on the couch, I'll be happy. Did I mention I'm lazy...

I hope you'll stick around and share your views as the development of PVD proceeds.

---

Thank YOU! This is... FANTASTIC!!! 

I feel rather sheepish about my pessimistic views of my ability to import to MC via MPL (not to mention my rather cumbersome import-via-filename solution). I think this serves as a perfect illustration that it's not only feasible, but rather easy to do. Even for a code-phobic klutz like me!

This provides almost all I can wish for in terms of the "convergence" of the best-of-breed movie and media managers (PVD and MC, IMHO). The idea of MC attempting to do what my movie manager does so well now seems pointless. Even if I had no interest in maintaining a movie database, I would rather use PVD as a tool for assembling and importing movie information to MC. All that's needed now is an improved Theater View that can make use of all this information—specifically, by being capable of displaying detailed information for each movie.

Some comments:

Adding replace=",<->;" to the template will replace commas with semicolons so genres and actors will import to list fields correctly.

I believe the movies PVD will export are those that are displayed, rather than "selected." PVD provides powerful searching and filtering for doing that. For the limited testing I've done so far, I've "bookmarked" test subjects, displayed those, and run the export.

PVD saves posters in it's database. These can be exported as well, but it requires an extra step to rename the resulting imageN.jpg files. The following template can be used to export posters along with the movie pathname:

%OPTIONS%
encoding="UTF8"
replace=".avi<->.jpg"
replace=""<->"
replace="#13#10<-> "
replace="#13<-> "
replace="#10<-> "
filter="CSV files saved as TXT|*.txt"
%OPTIONS%
%HEAD%Poster;Path;
%HEAD%{%value=63};{%value=27};

Open the exported TXT file using Excel; in the Excel text import wizard, specify a semicolon-delimited file. Copy the following formula to a third column: ="rename "&[image]&" """&[filename]&"""". Copy & paste the entire column into a text editor, and save the file with a BAT extension in the same directory as the image files. Run the batch file. Move the image files to the same directory as the movies files (if they are not already there), so MC will find them (I suppose your auto-import has to be configured for it to do so).

- One person-link each actor cast for his/her synchronisation voice

I assume this refers to dubbed movies. It's been a long time since I seen one of those. Isn't subtitling the more common method of translating films? In any case, I suspect this would involve too big a change in the structure of the database to be worthwhile. Is there a source from which such information can be downloaded? If not, you may as well just add it manually. Change your preferences to show actors and roles, then add the information to the role, something like: Jason Statham ... Farmer ([voice]), Leelee Sobieski ... Muriella ([voice]), etc.

- A bigger controll-move-button in the screenshot maker

I think I understand... Making screenshots requires good timing and reflexes. It would help if the play/pause button stayed beside the capture button (now it's "attached" to the right side of the window, while capture stays on the left, when the window is enlarged). It might help if all the buttons were larger, too.

I'm not sure I understand your idea, but it gives me one... The ability to export to, and import from another PVD database might be a useful "utility" feature. It would provide a convenient means for creating a database that is a subset of another, and to share records with other databases. I'm assuming the export of all movie information, including all images and associated people. It probably should include the option to exclude "personal" information like date seen, rating, comments, etc. The advantage of this over a CSV/XLS export/import is the resulting movie records would not need to be updated.

Neither idea satisfies patch's need. If I understand correctly, he has multiple users running independent versions of PVD, but sharing a common movie collection. Your feature or mine could be used to establish a new database for a new user, but won't help on an ongoing basis. A problem remains with updating new movies (i.e., downloading information). Some movies cannot be identified by scripts without some intervention by the user. Once this has been done by one user, it would be helpful if the identifying information (e.g., IMDb record number, suitable poster URL, etc.) was automatically available to the other users—so their updates would be fully automatic.

Nice ideas, but I think the priority should be the improvement of the program's ability to correctly identify movies from file names. If were successful 99% of the time, there may be no point in adding more features to deal with the 1%.

I've noticed the rating returned by these scripts is often one less than it should be. It seems the problem is the rating is obtained from the "alternative name" of the star image, but (for reasons I can't fathom) this is incorrect. You could get the correct rating directly from the star image file name. That's st_rN.gif, where N = 1 to 9, representing 1 to 5 stars in 1/2 star increments. In other words, the rating = N + 1.

It seems that I'll have to add Advanced search as well...

Of course. We want all the features, especially the advanced ones! 

Please don't forget Darkethorne's point—that people should be updated (perhaps optionally) at the same time the movie is added. That, along with the ability to identify people needing updating, should make everyone happy.