DVDpedia: rating & more

[Kai]

Hi,

thanks for providing this handy & stable software. I tried all available DVD cataloguers & IMHO this is the best. Here are a few minor points where the distance to the competition might be increased further.

1) Apparently DVDpedia still takes the rating from Amazon, if that is the internet database where the movie was added from. Otherwise it takes it from IMDB. That leads to a random mixture of different rating systems in the rating column, without a hint where the rating is taken from. It would be great to have the option to *only* take ratings from one of the sources, and to erase the undesired one in already existing collection lists. Personally I find the Amazon rating quite useless, where at maximum a few hundred people of one single nationality contribute, in contrast to the IMDB rating.

2) Sometimes I would like to change one of DVDpedia's columns using the more powerful tools of a spread sheet. Do you have a recommondation for a simple XML editor which allows exchanging one entire column in DVDpedia's "info.xml" with a column in Excel/AppleWorks/OpenOffice spread sheets? Of course it would be even simpler to be able to copy/paste columns directly in DVDpedia's window

3) Being able to copy (parts of) columns would also be a very intuitive way to export data; let's say I want to copy all titles of movies by Almodovar from my database to a text file, I'd simply sort by director, highlite a section of the title column & copy it. As it is, I have to sort & then export the entire database, and then to search for the right part in the full list text file.

4) For mass import from internet databases, the option to sort by cover image size would be nice, as very often the cover images are missing after the import. That would also be helpful to find tiny cover images to replace them by prettier ones in large lists.[/list]

[Conor]

Thanks for the suggestions. Happy to hear you find DVDpedia a great app.

1) A good suggestion. The Amazon rating if you remove them and then search IMDB you will get the IMDB rating instead. You can tell the difference by the fact that IMDB is out of 10 instead of 5 and tends to have a large number of votes in parenthesis.

2) This is a very specialised need. I think BBEdit and Word with some research time could be able to do it. BBedit has a very advance search and replace system using regular expressions so you can use a wild card. You could search the XML:

"<key>field</key>
<string>*</string>"

replace with:

"<key>field</key>
<string>MERGE</string>"

Then use Word that is good at reading database files and merging them into documents. The tricky part will be having the info.xml and the columns in the same order; internally the info.xml is ordered by id number. Once again I think BBEdit could sort blocks sections of the document for you. There is no need for you to put the file back in order DVDpedia will re-arrange it automatically. Of course as anything like this, backup the file before playing with it.

3) Make a selection, use create collection from selection in the file menu or contextual menu, then remove all the columns from the new collection that you don't want to export (once again you can do this via the contextual menu or the view options), export to CSV.

4) Good idea. You can sort of do this from the finder, by sorting the data folder by size. Missing images will be 4k, small images around 20k and large images 120k. Missing images are also easy to spot in the cover view. As a side note to clean your data folder hold down option when selecting rebuild database from the help menu, this will remove orphaned cover images from your data folder. (The reason this is a hidden option is because it deletes cover data, as in any situation it's a good idea to backup the data folder. DVDpedia backs up info.xml automatically when rebuilding but not the cover images.)

[Kai]

Thank you for the fast and comprehensive answer.

>1) A good suggestion. The Amazon rating if you remove them and then
>search IMDB you will get the IMDB rating instead. You can tell the
>difference by the fact that IMDB is out of 10 instead of 5 and tends to
>have a large number of votes in parenthesis.

I'm following this advice now with my list. It works good, but I have some odd problems with some movies. E.g. "Species II" gets a well-deserved 3.7/10 (4,790 votes), and DVDpedia linked it to the proper IMDB page #120841. But the rating which gets downloaded by erasing this one & choosing "extra info>IMDB" is 3.0 (56 votes). I have no idea where these numbers come from. When I manually added a leading zero to the IMDB number, thus 0120841, it worked correctly. The number got entered automatically when I chose the film from the list displayed in the add window. Apparently there is a general problem with IMDB numbers getting stored with too few digits & sometimes leading to wrong queries, sometimes not.

>2) This is a very specialised need. I think BBEdit and Word with some
>research time could be able to do it.

Yeah, this is more or less how I'm trying it, with AppleWorks & OpenOffice instead of Word.

>3) Make a selection, use create collection from selection in the file menu
>or contextual menu, then remove all the columns from the new
>collection that you don't want to export (once again you can do this via
>the contextual menu or the view options), export to CSV.

Sure, this is another way to do this. It demands of course much more mouse clicks & keyboard inputs then copying columns would ask for. Doesn't it hurt the heart of an Apple fan when Copy&Paste don't do anything at all at the main window (except when selecting one single entry)?

[Conor]

Make sure you have the latest DVDpedia. I tried out Species II added it from Amazon deleted the rating, then ran IMDB on it and got the right rating and IMDB number with the leading zero. Could it be possible your IMDB numbers came from another source like an import that was missing the leading zero?

There are plans to implement copy better.

[Kai]

Basically all IMDB numbers in my list come from DVDpedia...but a long time ago I exported & imported the list wildly back & forth between DVDpedia & AppleWorks Spreadsheets, it is possible that the leading 0s disappeared during those transitions and DVDpedia didn't put them back in when importing. Now 99% of the list items have too short IMDB numbers, and I realize now that a huge part of the imported ratings is affected by this problem; and who knows which other fields. E.g. "20.000 leagues under the sea (1916)" got a resonably looking rating with IMDB#6333, but the correct rating 6.2 (151 votes) appears only when adding the leading 0s. OTOH clicking on the IMDB link button always opens the correct web page, for that I never noticed the problem.

Looks like I have to mass-include those 0s (BBedit should do that fine) & then reload large parts of the data from IMDB...which fields might be affected by this?

[Conor]

I did a tab delimited export and re-imported and the leading zero was present in both the tab delimited file and the imported entry. (I am assuming tab delimited is what you have been using to go between programs.) It could be one of the other programs removing the leading zero, especially if it tries to read it as a number instead of a string, like DVDpedia treats it. Because you had your data complete before adding the rating, only the rating should be affected. All the other fields are filled and would not have been replaced while gathering additional info.

BBEdit will be able to add the leading zero to the ones missing it with a regular expression as you can check that it contains 7 digits as all the numbers should. (You might even get it to remove the viewer rating for that entry on the same step, so that you can gather it again.)