One question: would it not be much better and easier if you install a database server on your Server PC and have a single PVD database on the server as well that is accessed by all the users in the network.
A server version would definately help with some but not all of what I'm trying to acheive.
It would allow multiple users to access the PVD on the file server
The difficulties I would have are:
1) The "File server" in my case is just a PC with large hard disks which are shared over the network. People log in to multiple accounts to use it as a PC, so it would not be easy to ensure the server version of PVD was running, and running only once.
2) File storage updates. I regularly need to buy more hard disk space, which often results in the path to some of the movie directories changing. If the basic movie description data is stored with the movie file then PVD rescan is virtually garanteed to accurately update it's database (even if I needed to open a new database & scan in the file server again). With a server version I'm not as confident server configuration updates would go as smoothly.
3) When we go on holidays it is nice to bring a laptop +/- an external drive with some movies. If PVD supported tagging I could effectively bring it too, as setting it up for the new configuration would be trivial.
To illustrate how it could work, I can describe how audio is handled
I digitise my music, tag it, and put it on the file server (resulting in key track data being stored with the sound data).
Media Monkey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediamonkey is configured to rescan the file server directories on startup.
So any new music is available to everyone at home.
As each user runs their own copy of Media monkey, they also have personalised data such as ratings, play lists, last played & frequency etc. (Some users even still persist with iTunes or Winamp)
I would like to achieve a similar thing with my movies, hopefully through PVD.
What about other programs using the same information? Being able to get my PVD information into MC would be great, for example, but what would PVD do when MC wrote its version of the information back to the tags?
I do not think movie file tagging is widely used or standardised yet (which is why we are having this discussion). As such I think it is very unlikely any tags created by PVD would automatically work with MC. However I believe tagging will be more widely used in the future, and at least a de facto standard will emerge with time.
I suppose each user would want to maintain their own database, but based on the same store of movies on the server. Nevertheless, would it not make sense to built a "master" database of all movies on the server? Then each user could start with a copy of that, and delete the movies they're not interested in.
Master databases worry me. Simple single user programs accessing movies on a file server sounds less complex and mor flexible to me.
I thought ID3 was for music only
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saving the information in the movie files removes the risk of the files getting separated.
Agree
ID3 was suggested as a format to start from that much of the industry is familiar with.
Incorporating movie tags within movie data files will no doubt be the ultimate standardised solution. The separate file was a simple way of achieving the same functionality with all movie file types without compromising compatibility with movie players or needing to write to large video files. Yes the files would need to be copied together if movie files were moved, but I already do that with subtitled movies. Tags within movie files (.avi .mkv .wm etc) could be progressively added later as resources and tools permit.