I have reviewed the previous threads regarding EAN and UPC and done some research on this. The difference, as I understand it, is that there is the world (except America) using EAN-13 and America using UPC-12.
I started looking at this because when I brought over my DVD Profiler database all the EANs (let's call them unique codes because I have DVDs from different countries so EANs & UPCs) were missing digits. I found this out because when I tried to do a lookup in DVDPedia of DVDs imported from DVD Profiler DVDPedia could not find them.
I thought this was an import glitch, but found on later investigation and getting familiar with DVDPedia and in this forum posting by Conor that the situation was worse. EANs are 13 characters and UPCs are 12 characters. But... DVD Profiler explicitly states in the software not to use the first character of EANs (only 12), and not the first and last characters of UPCs (only 10). So now I have to go through every single DVD and redo the EAN/UPC. Great - way to go DVD Profiler.
Obviously this is not DVDPedia's fault - this is FYI for anyone coming from DVD Profiler.
However at the same time I found some other strange things. If you type in an American UPC (reading off the DVD) in DVDPedia, say 043396222199 for Das Boot, and search Amazon US it finds it, but when the UPC is filled out in the advanced tab in DVDPedia there is an extra character (always a "0") there. This isn't correct is it? Where is the extra "0" coming from?
Also I note that when I do this lookup on the advanced tab DVDPedia says the video format is PAL - but it's NTSC. I believe this is because I have set my Preferences|General|Video Format to PAL. And when DVDPedia imports data it skips over fields which are already filled... but in this case the auto-filled in data is incorrect and this behaviour can't be changed by the user. The same problem does not occur for Region - mine is set to "2" in preferences but the "Add Movie" dialog sets it correctly to "1". Perhaps the defaults should be ignored for add movie?
DVDPedia - EAN / UPC Revisited & Amazon US Numbering
Thanks for all the information regarding UPCs and EANs. The reason the extra 0 gets added for the advanced info is because even though you can do a search by UPC on Amazon, they return the EAN to us. (Which is really the smart thing to do since the UPC is just a subset of the EAN, basically an EAN that starts with 0 is a UPC.) Even books are standarising to the EAN nowadays with the new 13 digit ISBN, which is really an EAN. Old ISBNs are encoded as EANs by starting with the prefix 978 (the bookland code). So it seems EANs are the cool way to go.
The reason the program doesn't change the PAL/NTSC information is because it doesn't retrieve that information from Amazon. Of course we could guess at it when you search in the US or in the UK etc. but this is what the default preference is all about - set it to your most common format and when a different one comes along, just change it manually.
DVD Profiler has always been a bit of a work in progress and it's very cool that they have their own database but they're stuck in their own anachronistic ways – standards are the present!
The reason the program doesn't change the PAL/NTSC information is because it doesn't retrieve that information from Amazon. Of course we could guess at it when you search in the US or in the UK etc. but this is what the default preference is all about - set it to your most common format and when a different one comes along, just change it manually.
DVD Profiler has always been a bit of a work in progress and it's very cool that they have their own database but they're stuck in their own anachronistic ways – standards are the present!
And I see it is possible to do a search also on Amazon putting "0" in front of the US UPC code and DVD is found.Conor wrote:The reason the extra 0 gets added for the advanced info is because even though you can do a search by UPC on Amazon, they return the EAN to us.
.....
standards are the present!
So that means in the DVDPedia UI the text string "UPC" should be changed to the standard "EAN"? Joking
