Trailers

[mgpw4me@yahoo.com]

Rick,

I agree that the actual download of a video would be done better by a program dedicated to the task.  Finding a link to look at is another thing.  I don't think (short of invoking an external program) that PVD could download a video....without saving it in the database as an image and then "somehow" writing it as a proper media file to an "appropriate" directory.

What I'm considering is a 'one-click' way to search for possible links.  Once found, the user probably will choose to "view via internet page" and save / or not, and update their database (or not)...manually.

I look at this as a faster way to find clips.  Downloading is better suited to other apps that will be updated as the source sites change.

While I have may person images, it's still easier to click once to invoke a script than open a google window to do a search.

[Hyomil]

For older movies, Youtube often seemed the best source. It's frustrating searching through the crap, but using Greasemonkey scripts to identify and highlight the HD versions makes it a lot easier.

Which script?  Youtube enables you to filter using the 'Search options' under the main search box but not to change the defaults.  I appended "&search_duration=short&high_definition=1" to my Web Search Pro URL for Youtube to get

Code: [Select]

http://www.youtube.com/results?sourceid=captaincaveman&aq=f&search_query="{searchTerms}"+trailer&search_duration=short&high_definition=1
which works.

The crap to gems ratio does seem to be increasing, moreso for new movies, I'd imagine.  I just did a search for "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" trailer (looks like a crap movie, but a very distinctive title that shouldn't turn up many irrelevant results), filtered it by 'HD' and 'Short (~4 mins.)', and found there were still 534 results!  Clearly some users aren't checking to see if a video exists before uploading it themselves.  Then there's:

• videos where the word trailer doesn't appear anywhere (even when +trailer is used)
• reviews of the trailer
• audio commentaries on the trailer
• spoofs of the trailer
• a "mashup" with the The Matrix trailer called "Scott Pilgrim vs. The Matrix"
• video blogs where, in the course of describing their day, someone says "So I was watching the scott pilgrim vs. the world trailer..."
• the trailer with foreign-language voiceovers
• videos of a different topic that use the soundtrack from the trailer
• videos that claim to be the "original" trailer.  (Accept no imitations!  Comes from a time long before Trailer#3 when people still took pride in their work.)
• fan-made "trailers" that contain no actual footage from the movie
• "Scott Pilgrim vs The World - NEW Official Trailer" (Others number the trailers but this guy trumps them because his is always NEW)
• a "trailer" that's actually a "behind the scenes" video posted by someone whose description is in Russian and probably doesn't know the difference
• trailers for the video game based on the movie
• spam telling you where to download the full movie for free
• the whole movie posted in 7 different parts
• a video that claims to be a "Teaser Trailer," followed by a "Release Trailer"
• "TV Spot #5" which is presumably a condensed version of the trailer (See all 5 to see all the ways the trailer was edited down!)
• the trailer playing on a TV filmed through a shaky cell phone camera (yet HD!) in a noisy environment (No one informs them that a real HD version of the trailer has come out.).

Google has some good options for their Advanced Video Search like the -site:youtube.com feature you mentioned.  You can also limit the Duration to videos < 4 mins., the Quality to High, and the Language to English (or whatever language you're expecting, although occasionally a foreign-language dubbed trailer is all that's available).

But it looks like VideoSurf (in add-on form here, and add-able to Web Search Pro here) can do almost everything Google can do and some things it can't.  They have:

• Visual Summaries: Thumbnail frames from the video.  Hover over them and they appear in the large main thumbnail.  Click 'Show Faces' and only faces are shown so that you can identify who's in the video.  Click them and with some videos you can start playing right from that point (If not, the times of the thumbnails are listed, so you can drag the slider to them).  This is particularly nice to help keep from getting Rick-Rolled or to spot videos that are actually songs (all the thumbnails will usually be identical).
• Refine Results by Person: People known to the Videosurf database that are recognized in the videos appear in the upper left of the page in thumbnail form and you can click on them to narrow down the search results to videos containing them (like if you know that a certain actor is in a movie).

VideoSurf doesn't have a "High Quality" option like Google Videos, but a Google Videos search using High Quality turned up a trailer on Hulu that wasn't HD as the first result.  (Adding "HD" to the search terms didn't help at either site.)  Videosurf actually has a "Trailers" filter that narrowed down the search from 3442 results to 9.  Or a "Professional Sites" filter that took it down to 30.  Another very useful thing is it automatically groups duplicate videos into one search result, so you won't be clicking on the same irrelevant video more than once in the results (unless someone has made token changes like inserting an advertisement, but you've still got the thumbnails to go by).

[rick.ca]

Which script?  Youtube enables you to filter using the 'Search options' under the main search box but not to change the defaults.

Yes, I realize Youtube has filtering options. And I do use them, but I don't want to start with them on. Remember, I'm using Youtube because I haven't found a HQ trailer elsewhere (or I know there's no point looking). So I don't want the non-HQ filtered out. At the same time, I don't want to miss a HQ one if it happens to be there. So I use the YouTube HD Suite. It places quality/format icons on the list thumbnails so it's easy to see exactly what the quality is. It's also configurable as to what quality/formats get icons.

The crap to gems ratio does seem to be increasing, more so for new movies, I'd imagine.

Yes, and all the more reason to go straight to a site which only has HQ original trailers when looking for a movie released in the last few years.

VideoSurf looks very interesting. So much so, I'm afraid it would be a distraction from the task at hand. The lack of a quality filter (or any information about quality) rules it out as a source. It might be useful for sorting out what some files actually are (e.g., where thats difficult to determine from Youtube). But that would be mainly from it's nifty frames and faces displays. Since it gets the files from the same source as we do (mainly Youtube, it seems), it otherwise suffers the same problems we do. For example, if the original file isn't tagged as a trailer, it's not going to show up if the trailer filter is used.

But the VideoSurf Firefox plugin looks very promising. Unfortunately, I can't use it on the Youtube search results page—because it replaces the thumbnails with my quality icons on them. It's still very useful to have the "visual summary" available when a video is played. And I suppose I can turn it on for the search page if I'd rather see them than the quality icons.