Personal Video Database

while my database is growing, i'm more and more missing some grouping-feature. But first it would be nice, to change a movie to a episode manually. If the filescanner misses some episode due to wrong regex I could fix it manually.

Similar discussion occurred here. I assume you are looking at case 3, where you are adding a new episode to an existing TV series.

If you have default values, than you'll have to change/correct those values (possibly) only for some of them after importing/scanning.
If you don't have default values, unavoidably you'll have to set them all after importing/scanning.

Agree that it would make sense for some fields where an almost always value applies, eg seen, language, quality, some custom fields. In other cases null is more appropriate. The harder question is does the utility justify the programming effort?

ps imo generalization of a multiple record field editor is a different topic.

Quote

I wanted to use the title field and simply add a prefix for the versions...

I think it would be better to add them as a suffix—so they don't affect sorting. At the same time, add the title alone

Yep
I currently add a suffix to my duplicate movies ("(HD)" added to all high definition movies).
And yes I have a field with the title unmodified:- "Original Title" seams a logical place for this.

I still do not play movies from PVD, because I earlier set up certain playlists ("American & Europian Classics", "Contemporary Asian", etc...). I tried once to play a movie by playing its playlist, but PVD purged playlist and played that movie. Till today I didn't exam this option enough to use it, although I intend to.

This explains our different approaches.
If you use PVD to find an index which is then manually used to find the movie then it makes perfect sense to display it prominently. Functionally there being no real difference between doing the look up on a shelf or on a computers filing system.

Now you are putting your movies on a computer accessible hard disk I suspect you would benefit from getting PVD to doing the look up.
My understanding of play lists is:
If your movie is on a single file-> PVD passes the file reference (absolute path with file name) directly to your windows default player for that file type.
If your movie spans more than one file (as defined by what is stored in the path variable) -> PVD creates a temporary play list containing all the absolute references in the path field and passes that to the windows default play list player.

So to play a movie contained on one file you need to:
1) Set the windows file association for that file type (so when you double click on the movie in windows explorer it plays).
2) Ensure the path variable is set correctly for the movie. This should be done automatically if you use PVD file scanner to add movies on your hard disk. If you access the movies from multiple computers you may need to set up the path mapping to convert between local and network addresses.

To play a movie on more than one file (multiple file references are stored in the path variable) you need to
1) Set up the file association between the play list type PVD is configured to use.
2) Ensure the path variable is set correctly for the movie (same as above).

Edit added content to wiki

Thanks patch - so you create sub directories for each genre? or Disk per Genre?

I have no sub-directories for genre, just basic media type (high def movie, low def movie, TV show).

I am using scan /folders for changed paths to add new media.
How does this affect the database if you have swapped hard drives??

It work really well. Update file path mostly gets it right.
The exceptions being if a movie has same name as a TV episode or I have two copies of a movie
I both cases I add the movie with new movie master, after which update file path seams to work if required.
Actually I tried putting TV series in PVD  but have stopped as adding new episodes involved more work than I could see benefit.

So it makes no difference to the systems that I use, whether they are laid out in flat format or sub-directories.
But it matters to my brain when I look at the folders and I see a flat format.
So I wonder if there are any advantages to putting them into sub-directories? (apart from appeasing my brain)   or leaving them in flat format.

I leave it flat as I can as it simplifies my life.
The only advantage of having sub directories on the file server is if you may want to copy or move a group of files to another location.
I do however have a directory for each movie as some of my movies use more than one file (sub titles, disc 1,2, etc), so all movies get a sub directory (I like uniformity).
I do give TV series a directory structure as they come in series which are conveniently selected as a group at times.
I use ..."TV Series/"<series name>/s<series number>/ files.

When disk is full - put in a new disk. How does this affect adding and removing movies from PVD?

If I can move a directory to another disk I do.
When a directory fills a disk I start another on a new disk (eg "Movie HD 2")

 

Considering this, I suggest to pin a topic with proven regexps for different syntax of file names. In such a topic, comments wouldn't be allowed ... only filename -> contributed proven regexp.
...
Any thoughts?

Why not put it in the PVD wiki

This file is in English Language on external disk L:.
This file is in German Language on external disk K:.

My solution if I have two copies of a movie is create a second PVD record (use the duplicate command), then edit the Title to reflect the difference (eg. append "(HD)" or "(Eng)" or "(Ger)") and manually set file path to the second copy on the film.

All PVD search, display & Play then work as normal with standard skins.

Some of my files do not have the IMDB rating.

How do I just scan for the rating.

Select the unrated films, you can use a search for this.
Ensure IMDB plugin is set to over write rating. You can set other fields to not write if you want or as is appropriate.
Select imdb from import menu to run on selected movies.

Note it will download all the information then write what you have set (because that is how the plugin is written).

after watching a movie, I mark it as been seen, then I move the file from its primary directory to another; Good, Fair, or Time Waster, within its container; so being able to see the FilePath to me is at the moment slightly more important. I can still see the IMDB rating which is fine and I'm still able to read the Description on what the movie is about so again this is fine.

You could also define a custom field for your rating. Leave flexibility to have more than one extra rating feild, so supporting more than one users opinion.
Should work OK from within PVD. Clearly not going to work outside.