newvie has questions, of course

[pandutzu22]

Hi,
I am new the the world of *pedias and I love them. I just bought the combo DVD/CD/Book. I have several questions

1. I started with DVDpedia. I have all my cover art for my movie collection. I am adding them manually to the new entries. The cover art I have is landscape (it has the front and the back of the DVD), and it is "hi res". Wehn I get in full screen mode, my cover art is squished. Is there any way to change that to landscape or, the program to automatically detect if it's portrait or landscape? Does the DVDpedia change the cover art resolution. All my cover art are at least 1500x900 pixels jpg images and they do not look that way in full screen mode. I could add a jpg image but I have not figured out how to add it to this post.
2. Where is the "data" stored... I would like to keep it on a NAS.
3. I read you have plug ins for this (i.e., FrontRow plus ins). Where do you get the pug ins. How do you link the VIDEO_TS folders to the movie

General question
Are there plans to integrate all the *pedias into one magic library like a datapedia?
How about Softwarepedia? Can we use the CDpedia for LPpedia?

I hate to bombard with too many questions on my first post. I will come back with more.

Thank you,

Adrian

[Conor]

Hi Adrian,

1. DVDpedia assumes the covers to be of regular DVDpedia proportions and this is why it squeezes the widescreen images. We experimented with letting DVDpedia set the ratio as it does in Bookpedia but the interface was not as clean. There is no way to have DVDpedia change the ratio of the covers. The covers will remain in the original high resolution, for displaying they will be scaled down and set to 72dpi, but this is only for display purposes the file remains untouched (this is why it will look different, especially if the DPI is higher).

2. The data is stored in your home folder at ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia. With DVDpedia not running move the folder to the new location and launch DVDpedia while holding down the option key to select the new location for the library.

3. The plug-in was created by our friends over at para9.com and you can download it directly from them. You will find other plug-ins and extensions on our extras page. To link a VIDEO_TS folder drag it over the info view for the movie. You can also link images and view them in DVDpedia with a click on the link, so you could link the high-res images to the movies and then have a smaller DVD cover only version for the main image (use the "download cover art work" menu command to get the Amazon version, be careful with this command as it will replace the current high resolution cover). This would fix the full screen as well as keeping the main covers smaller for the views with many images such as the cover view and cover flow.

We would like to have a more flexible Datapedia but haven't started work on it, as the current Pedias are keeping us busy. A number of users have been using CDpedia for LPs and you can find information on this forum about that, it mainly involves a lot of manual data entry.

[pandutzu22]

Thnak you

[pandutzu22]

How do I import CDs from iTunes if the Itunes is not on the local drive but on an external HD?

[Conor]

If the "import playslist..." command is not finding your iTunes Library you can always export a playlist as an XML file from iTunes and drag that over CDpedia to import.

[pandutzu22]

All my CD are "screwed up". I exported the xml for the entire Music library. I brought it in and all the CDs have a different art cover (the art cover is messed up). In other words, I did not find any CD that the name of the CD match with the CD cover displayed for it. I checked about 100 out of about 500 CD.

So, how do I bring in the CDs from iTunes? My iTunes library is on an external HD and the iTunes points to it.

Thank you,

Adrian

[Conor]

The cover is lookup up by iTunes using the unique ID for the track, so there should be no confusion. Could be that the iTunes on the computer where the import takes place is not pointing to the same library as where the export came from?

[pandutzu22]

Nope. I have one itunes, on an external HD, complete with cd covers.

[Conor]

It's going to be hard to find the bug without access to your iTunes. Please email us the exported XML file, of course we won't be able to verify the cover import, but I can at least double check the file to make sure that the information CDpedia is expecting is there.

[pandutzu22]

Will do when I get home. Thank you,

Adrian