Author Topic: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)  (Read 33966 times)

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Offline CAD

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Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« on: January 21, 2010, 12:42:16 am »
What are everyone's favourite websites /tools for TV/ Movie stuff.
 8) -PVD excluded of course as that is NO 1. -  8) 

The main two i use (nearly daily) are
http://next-episode.net/
http://next-flick.net/.

Tools are:
XBMC running on xbox1
notepad++
DaFT - Database Fishing Tool
DVD Remake - awesome for changing menus etc.
DVD Rebuilder with CCE - Best tool available for shrinking.
IMGBurn for  burning.
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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #1 on: January 21, 2010, 03:23:05 am »
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Offline deazo

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2010, 03:25:13 am »

  Thanks for Next-flick, very interesting.
  Here is what I regularly use:

 http://www.5fox.org/
 http://tehparadox.com/
 http://www.foriegnmoviesddl.com/
 
 I have also included tens of different RSS feeds into a Netvibes account that I check regularly.
 www.netvibes.com

 Softwares:
 PVD
 XBMC on htpc
 Jdownloader
 Sublight

 
 
 

Offline rick.ca

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #3 on: January 22, 2010, 05:13:13 am »
I've been using Episode World for its upcoming episode schedule "bookmarks" and series information, But it doesn't have "Babe of the Day," so I may have to switch to Next-Episode. ;)

Next-Flick is interesting, but I prefer to use PVD for relating actors, directors and movies, and the IMDb My Movies feature for keeping an online record of the movies I've seen. In my dreams I see a plugin that will keep My Movies in sync with PVD—as to movies in collection, date viewed and user rating.

I appreciate using the data from IMDb, but otherwise don't like the site much—other than for digging for trivia occasionally. I really don't like the inconsistency of user-supplied data. So for descriptions, reviews and a bunch of other data, I use my allmovie+ script (a modified version of the one included with PVD) to get the information from allmovie.com.

There are so many video-related sites, it's difficult to recommend any. Nevertheless, here are a few from my Web Search collection that are worthy of mention...

  • I don't use it regularly, but I'm often surprised at how informative/good a Wikipedia movie entry is compared to most commercial sites.
  • MoTechPoster is an obscure little site that often comes through when my poster plugins fail to find anything.
  • Ebert and Bernadelli are my favourite reviewers, but when they don't agree (often), I like to check others. I really like what MRQE does in making sense of what thousands (it seems) of reviewers out there are saying.
  • And it's easy to forget Google is still pretty damn good at finding movie information, as well as images, trailers, torrents...

I use µTorrent to watch for new episodes via RSS and download them when available. I use Episode World, BTW, mainly just to check that µTorrent is working as expected. If something is missed, or I decide I want some non-current episodes, I'll use EZTV. It lists torrents by series, properly sorted by season and episode—making it easier to find and download missing episodes or entire seasons.

Because good file organization makes everything else so much easier, I've found it very worthwhile to replace Windows Explorer with a real file manager—Directory Opus. Since I insist on using every geeky tool I can get my hands on, DOpus has saved me a lot of time and grief by including everything I can think of and more in one application. So, for example, downloaded episodes are automatically renamed by a built-in regex renamer, and then are easily managed in it's feature-rich, highly-customizable, tabbed interface.

All this is of questionable value, unless I can actually enjoy the results. For that I use J. River Media Center. I don't think there's any question it's the best media manager around—for the user who is equally serious about maintaining a multimedia database and enjoying the results. Like PVD, it's not for the user who needs something that works "out of the box." It's so feature-rich and configurable, it requires some time to learn and configure. To make a long story short, I use raldo's PvdImport (a MC plugin) to automatically import video meta data from PVD to MC. I use MC's Theatre View (a 10' interface) to browse, view and play all my media (music, photos and video) from the couch.

Offline CAD

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #4 on: January 22, 2010, 10:05:36 am »
I use next episode for tracking episodes.
it really comes to life when you register and add tv shows to your watchlist and use "stuff to watch" link.
I use it to track releases for download. - Marked as watched after Download

I use next-flick to track movies i am interested in getting. More as a reminder system of what I want. Movies are removed after I have seen them (The "whats hot" feature is good too)

MRQE is cool 8)

If you use directory OPUS (even if you don't) Teracopy is the best copy program there is.
Look for script to allow teracopy to run within DOPUS (go Amiga) :) - im showing my age now  ;D

Does Episode World do miniseries/specials? - eg Torchwood Specials - it does.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2010, 10:31:29 am by CAD »
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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #5 on: January 22, 2010, 02:17:32 pm »
Quote
it really comes to life when you register and add tv shows to your watchlist and use "stuff to watch" link.

Yes, I noticed. I like it almost as much as "Babe of the Day." ;)

Quote
If you use directory OPUS (even if you don't) Teracopy is the best copy program there is.

It looks like I'll have to wait until McAfee figures out it doesn't contain a trojan—it won't allow it to be installed. :'(

I don't have issues with copying files—why might I need this?

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #6 on: January 22, 2010, 11:54:42 pm »
Quote
It looks like I'll have to wait until McAfee figures out it doesn't contain a trojan—it won't allow it to be installed. Cry
One reason (of many) why i don't use MccrapforaFee,. Lots of false positives.

Quote
I don't have issues with copying files—why might I need this?
Its really (really) fast. If you copy multiple files it will queue them up rather than copy them all at once.
Lots of choices on how to handle copies, ability to pause etc.


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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #7 on: January 23, 2010, 04:05:32 am »
Quote
One reason (of many) why i don't use MccrapforaFee,. Lots of false positives.

I'm not getting a lot of false positives, but I was surprised I was unable to override this. There probably is a way to do that, but I couldn't be bothered looking for it in the crappy interface. To be honest, I'm not real happy with security system that behaves like a virus. It came dirt-cheap with my Dell system, so I feel like I'm stuck with it.

You may be amused by this aside: I was livid with Dell because they lied about delivery when I ordered, and delivered 4 weeks late. Then the pre-installed McAfee refused to recognize the included 3 year subscription, and began pestering me to register. Dell online support acknowledged the problem and referred users to McAfee. McAfee's online support acknowledged the problem an referred users to Dell. So it required yet another "WTF are you doing!" call to Dell. In the end, it took a McAfee tech 45 minutes to resolve the matter over the phone. And that didn't involve any troubleshooting—just working around a known problem in registration system designed by lunatics. >:(

When I bought my first Dell 20 years ago, the experience made me wish I could afford to invest the same amount in Dell stock. I was right—that would have been an excellent investment. Now I wish I could afford to short Dell stock. A business model based on shameless lying, bundling crappy software and leaving it all up to some ill-informed guy in Mumbai to explain to customers is surely not one that's likely to work for very long. ::)

Quote
Its really (really) fast. If you copy multiple files it will queue them up rather than copy them all at once.
Lots of choices on how to handle copies, ability to pause etc.

Hopefully I can resolve the McAfee problem and give it a try. While it doesn't make much difference to me, I do notice a copy process can slow down—almost to a crawl—in some situations. You seemed to indicate there was some way of integrating it with DOpus. Are you referring to simple shell integration, or is a script available?

Offline CAD

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #8 on: January 23, 2010, 04:49:13 am »
Quote
You seemed to indicate there was some way of integrating it with DOpus. Are you referring to simple shell integration, or is a script available?

When/If you get Teracopy installed  ;).
Click on More button,
then Menu button. Inside Menu button, Select Options.
In here you find information on how to integrate it into Dopus and also Total Commander.
Also other options to integrate into windoze shell.

I never rely on out of the box stuff. Especially software. First thing I do is reinstall everything to the way I want it.
Usually I mount a separate partition as a folder and point all my personal info to it.
My setup is 2 sets of drives striped in raid.
1 raid set has:
Main C drive partition - Holds all program files.
Data partition mounted under c: drive as C:\Data\ (This hold all personal program DATA)
2nd Raid set has:
D:drive partition - This holds swap file and temp files are also pointed here.
Storage partition  mounted under c:\ as c:\storage - This has tv shows, programs for reinstallation etc.

When ever I do crunching or moving of data, I always try to move the data between the 2 raid sets.
eg dvd rebuilder extracts video data from c:\data\movie location (raid set1) and saves modified data sets to d:\temp (raid set2)
Then after crunching it saves final video_TS structure from d:\temp (raid set2)  back to c:\data\movie location (raid set1)
This way there are no bottle necks caused by the system reading and writing to the same volumes.
 
All applications are installed to specific locations.
eg
Utils\security\Virus scanner
Apps\DVD\Videodb\

That way I can find stuff easily.
I also use acronis home image to backup system regularly with a few rollbacks. This is separate from personal data (mail, videodb database etc etc).
(It is the first program that gets installed (even before drivers.)
I install windows - Install acronis. - Back up my system with a "clean windows" image.
Then create progressive images as I install stuff.
If I get a virus or some crappy software stuffs my pc up. I can be back and working in about 10 mins.
Data is backed up separately and I don't bother with sotage as I can always get it back from other locations.

Dell sucks BTW - they buy the cheapest possible hardware they can at the time. You can have two identical models with completely different hardware inside. I like to build my opwn systems from scratch. Even if you get someone else to put it together, every single componant is specified. The advantage of this is you get a "feel" for hardware. You can quickly figure out if issues are caused by hardware /drivers or crappy software. I always specify everything from the case down to the version of memory.
It is a legal requirement here that all electronics have at least a 1 year warranty so i don't have worries about warranty issues etc.
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Offline rick.ca

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #9 on: January 25, 2010, 06:21:02 am »
Quote
When/If you get Teracopy installed...

Further efforts seem to indicate it's impossible to do so with McAfee enabled. I can't wait to get a false positive with something "mission-critical." Maybe I will have to dump McAfee. ::)

I tested Teracopy with McAfee disabled. I observed only a 10-15% improvement in speed moving large files to another partition on the same drive. Maybe DOpus has already optimized copying. This is the only scenario were it might make a difference in my single-drive environment. I have an external drive, but it's used for backup only (using Windows Backup, but I wouldn't care about speed anyway). I also maintain a daily multi-version backup of all data files to a separate partition using CopyTo Synchronizer. It seems fast, but there too, I don't really care whether it is or not—it runs while I sleep.

Quote
Dell sucks BTW - they buy the cheapest possible hardware they can at the time.

In delaying my order, Dell gave me lots of time to consider what I might have done differently. For me, building it myself is not a good idea. I did discover, however, even in my relatively small community there is a reputable shop that assembles and services computers. Had I ordered from them (they even have an online "built your own computer" ordering system), the same components would be versions 3 to 6 months older than those going into the Dell (and none, as far as I could tell, "better"), and the overall cost would be about 25% more. This, I concluded, would have been worthwhile for the peace-of-mind that comes from dealing with people of integrity—who will also be available for local servicing should anything go wrong. A small shop like this, of course, can go out of business at any time. But the way it's going, I think that's more likely to happen to Dell.

Offline CAD

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #10 on: January 25, 2010, 08:39:35 am »
Quote
even in my relatively small community there is a reputable shop that assembles and services computers.
I guess im lucky where i live. we are not a big city, but have heaps of choice for computer dealers.
it is ok going to Dell or other vendors ( i bought a Dell Laptop), but know what you are buying.
Hit the forums and see if ther are issues.
TOMS Hardware is always good - http://www.tomshardware.com/us/#redir
And my fav. whirlpool - http://whirlpool.net.au/


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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #11 on: January 25, 2010, 12:19:26 pm »
Quote
but know what you are buying.

I made sure I knew exactly what I was buying. The mistake I made was assuming I knew who I was buying it from. Had I reviewed the right forums, I would have learned that Dell had, probably long ago, abandoned it's integrity and commitment to customer service. What really boggles my mind is that three months ago there was no question in my mind I was a Dell customer-for-life. My previous purchases had worked so well and lasted so long, there was no reason to look elsewhere. But now look where I am. Sure, they made one more sale. But never again, from me or anyone who will heed my warning. It took an enormous amount of wilful stupidity on Dell's part to accomplish that.

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #12 on: January 25, 2010, 01:47:52 pm »
We have a saying in Serbia: A good voice is heard far away, but the poor even further.

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #13 on: January 25, 2010, 09:27:08 pm »
Good. I don't think Serbians should buy Dell either! ;D

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #14 on: January 26, 2010, 12:36:27 am »
And they don't, believe me. But, it's rather general issue. At least here. It's the same with my housemaids and chauffeurs, i.e: the more I rely on them, the worst they become. And I learned to change them when they trespass the very low threshold of my tolerance. In quite.

[end of troll]
« Last Edit: January 26, 2010, 12:40:41 am by buah »

Offline Anson

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Re: Favourite Tool Teracopy
« Reply #15 on: February 04, 2010, 07:50:17 am »

... Teracopy ...

Thanks for this hint. It's really useful for me.

I observed only a 10-15% improvement in speed moving large files to another partition on the same drive.

When i copy only a single file with Windows Explorer, I can keep on working at the comp or get a cup of coffee and it's done when i return :-)

Teracopy starts to be really useful when you do several copy or move operations in a row, most of all when moving files which shall be copied before the move, and when copying/moving very many or very large files or from/to many different directories, which would slow down or even can crash the windows explorer, and after starting a copy/move in windows explorer, I would have no control over the process (besides aborting it completely; no options to start later, pause, modify(!) or resume)

Since this is the talk forum, I'll give a few examples how well it served me on using it for the second day :-)


Example 1: i just had 30 movies (around 60 GB) and wanted to move them from one external "working data" USB drive to another "storage data" USB drive, using different destination directories to sort them by genre etc. When I do this with the Vista Explorer, I end up having around 15 copy processes running parallel and sharing a bandwidth of at most 6 to 7 MB/sec (at first, and most of the time dropping to shared 3-4 MB/sec or even lower over time, sometimes even getting timeouts, terrible lag on the entire comp, etc, and doing a single copy operation for 200 files with 400 GB is almost impossible with Windows). Now I did the same (mark files and drag to destination), and this started Teracopy 15 times, with the first of them running and the others being in a state "copy waiting". If needed, i can manually "start now" any of those waiting processes and/or "pause" any of the running processes with a single button, and the first of them will start automatically only when no other is running any longer (*). During the entire copy operations, the bandwidth seems to be a constant 7+ MB/sec, thus at least as fast as Vista Explorer, and not deteriorating over time or causing crashes. Copying 200 GB was a matter of only hours in the background and not days of exclusive copying :-)
btw: in addition to other problems, having several copy operations at the same time might also cause more fragmentation of the drive.

(*) small problem: when I started a few dozen copies at the same time, the last seems to not have seen a running process and thus started automatically, but below 20-40 parallel copies, it always worked perfectly :-)

Example 2 : parallel to the above (copy from one USB drive to second), i started copying from my emtec media cube (connected as another third USB drive :-) to my internal harddisk, and (without exactly measuring times) it looked as if both copies ran at 6+ MB/sec (instead of a Windows Explorer copy which would have split 6 or later even less MB/sec among them). btw: Windows seems to randomly assign bandwidth to those copy operations, eg sometimes splitting 6 MB/sec evenly to 2-2-2, and at other times to 1-2-3, or 1-1-4, or even 10-100-2890 KB/sec, while Teracopy seems to evenly split the available bandwidth among all running copy processes.

Example 3: this is an advanced version of example 1 ... moving 50 Files to different subdirectories on two external drives, using one of them as data storage for movies and the other as backup (with identical directory structure and contents). Not using any backup software or similar, I just copied a group of files once to one drive, and then moved the same group of files to the corresponding location on the other. Using Windows, I first need to wait for the first copy to finish until I can start moving the files (alternative: copy to both locations at the same time and manually delete files afterwards, but that once caused me a few duplicates and a few missing files since i deleted not exactly what i had started copying a few hours earlier. thus i prefer moving them). With Teracopy today, I copied the first group to the first drive (simple drag and drop in windows explorer) and immediately moved the same files to the other backup drive (simple drag and drop with shift held down in windows explorer), followed by similar copies and moves for more groups of files. I ended up with having around 40 Teracopy processes queued up on a large taskbar (alternating "copy wait" and "move wait"). After several hours 20 copies and 20 moves were properly done for a total of shuffling around 2x100 GB, and this might have been possible completely unattended instead of starting a new copy/move group every 10-30 minutes (when using windows explorer without Teracopy).

Another approach to achieve the same result could be to start only the series of copies (no moves) and set Teracopy up to not close the window on completion. After completion of a copy (or after completion of all copies half a day later), for all those finished copy windows, the destination could be changed to the other drive, the method (copy vs move) could be changed, the window set to autoclose after completion, and then the operation could be started again. Thus all copy operations would be done again for the other backup drive, but this time removing all copied files. After yet another half day of unattended work, the files would be at the intended locations.

{edit: my comp just finished 2x125+200=450 files with 2x225+100=550 GB in less than a day unattended and/or in the background; for comparison: a max bandwidth of 7 MB/sec would result in 7*3600*24/1024=590 GB in 24 hours, and standard windows explorer might slow this down to an average bandwidth below 2 MB/sec resulting in 3+ days of work around the clock with intervention at least every half hour}


In addition to the above, even the free Teracopy has some more options, a display of the list of all selected files, etc

Big Thanks again for recommending Teracopy !

Offline CAD

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #16 on: February 04, 2010, 11:57:04 pm »
Quote
(*) small problem: when I started a few dozen copies at the same time, the last seems to not have seen a running process and thus started automatically, but below 20-40 parallel copies, it always worked perfectly :-)

You can drag and drop onto an existing teracopy process and it will add files to be copied to the end :)
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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #17 on: February 06, 2010, 12:31:19 pm »
Quote
(*) small problem: when I started a few dozen copies at the same time, the last seems to not have seen a running process and thus started automatically, but below 20-40 parallel copies, it always worked perfectly :-)
You can drag and drop onto an existing teracopy process and it will add files to be copied to the end :)

Yes, thanks for the hint (btw: how can i remove files from such a list?).
But that is only usable when you want to copy more files to the same destination, and I got the 20-40 parallel processes from copying movies from one temporary directory to many different genre-subdirectories on a second drive and then moving the same files to a third drive (one copy as data, one as backup).

What you included in the quote above was intended as a small warning (someone might forward it as bug report to the creators of Teracopy) that Teracopy might not see that there is already a running process and thus automatically start a newly created copy/move if there is already a large number of waiting processes.
This problem is not very serious in normal use since it appeared only after i created a few dozen copy processes at the same time, and in most cases also wouldn't hurt if it happened. But users should be aware of it IF they start a large sequence of copies and moves and the order of executing them matters. eg when first a copy and later a move of the same file should be done (eg to have one file on a data disk and a backup copy of it on another disk), or when first some files have to be moved away before other files can be copied to that free space. only in those few cases, the user would have to abort the last (automatically started) process to not mess up the execution order of the process queue.

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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #18 on: February 07, 2010, 02:49:55 am »
Quote
(btw: how can i remove files from such a list?).

Click the more button - then highlight what you want to remove - standard ctr /alt controls apply for selecting multiple files.
right click in window for options - Select remove or hit the Del key
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Re: Favourite Website / Tools ? (Movie / TV related)
« Reply #19 on: February 08, 2010, 10:46:51 am »
... more ... highlight ... right click in window for options ... Select remove or hit the Del key

I asked this question because I already had tried that, but nothing happens when i rightclick (in the list of files) or hit del. And when i click anyplace else in the window i get the context menu which has options like "always on top" and "exit". And i did NOT push the button labeled "delete" since i think that will delete the source files and not only their names in the list !?
btw: i have only the free version 2.12 and not the pro version.

When i just started to move files, i got the error that more space was needed. thus i wanted to select a different destination, but clicking on the destination path and selecting a new path was only possible after i had clicked the "ignore" button. maybe Teracopy is a bit selective (and doesn't tell me clear enough) in which states which options can be used ... Thus i went back to trying to modify the list of files like above and also did the variations of having Teracopy active or paused (and even completely done with copying) while rightclicking and always the same result (no reaction). The only way to remove files for me is to use "clean up", but that only removes all files from the list which were handled properly so that "problem files" can be tried again.

ps: to make it clear again: i like the program a lot and even with limited options to modify the list of files to be worked on, i find it a lot better than the builtin copy/move in vista (which has no such options at all, no pause, no queues, nothing of this).