Author Topic: Movie descriptions  (Read 6014 times)

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Offline Cartographer

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Movie descriptions
« on: June 30, 2009, 04:14:00 am »
I tried for the longest time to find a place that gave succinct, reliable descriptions of my movies to put into the description field.  I found that IMDB And AllMovie are great for a lot of things, but the descriptions leave a bit to be desired.  Often they're too long, and the quality varies depending on who wrote them.  I finally settled on Netflix, which has short, pretty useful summaries.  And since every movie I have came from a DVD, it's almost guaranteed that Netflix will have a summary on them.

So, I guess my feature request would be a plug-in to automatically pull description data from the Netflix website.

Offline rick.ca

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Re: Movie descriptions
« Reply #1 on: June 30, 2009, 04:49:42 am »
I kind of like the idea of a consistently concise description in the 100-word range. After a quick look at Netflix, however, I see what for me would be a problem. They also typically include the full names of the director and/or principal actors and related movies. So there's not many words left for substance. They remind me of TV Guide entries. That's fine if that's all there is, but in PVD all that other information is right there in the card. I'd rather see the 100 words devoted to pure description—a synopsis without any name-dropping.

It looks like it would be fairly simple to grab those using a script. Maybe someone will do that for you. I think I'll look around and see if anyone does it my way. ;)


Offline Cartographer

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Re: Movie descriptions
« Reply #2 on: June 30, 2009, 11:46:23 am »
You make a good point.  Netflix was the best one I had found at the time, but there must be a better source out there that gives more substantive summaries.  If you find a site that has these, please let me know.  And if I run across anything closer to your needs, I'll post it in this thread.

Offline rick.ca

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Re: Movie descriptions
« Reply #3 on: June 30, 2009, 08:19:26 pm »
I had a look at the sites I'm familiar with, but didn't find anything. One or two had some that were pleasingly concise, but they weren't consistent. Maybe nostra will write us a plugin that runs long descriptions through an auto summarizer.  ;)

 

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