Posted by: rick.ca
« on: July 31, 2008, 09:48:50 pm »Thanks for sharing this with us.
I'm lazy, so following is a copy of my reply to your parallel post on the MC forum. I included a prod for improving MC's Theater View (a 10-ft interface), but others have been begging for the same thing for more than a year. I'm hoping the customizable interface feature that will be in the next version of PVD (due out in beta in a few weeks) will allow the same functionality. It's won't be the same thing (i.e., it's not intended specifically for providing a 10-foot interface), but if it allows me to stay on the couch, I'll be happy. Did I mention I'm lazy...
I hope you'll stick around and share your views as the development of PVD proceeds.
Thank YOU! This is... FANTASTIC!!!
I feel rather sheepish about my pessimistic views of my ability to import to MC via MPL (not to mention my rather cumbersome import-via-filename solution). I think this serves as a perfect illustration that it's not only feasible, but rather easy to do. Even for a code-phobic klutz like me!
This provides almost all I can wish for in terms of the "convergence" of the best-of-breed movie and media managers (PVD and MC, IMHO). The idea of MC attempting to do what my movie manager does so well now seems pointless. Even if I had no interest in maintaining a movie database, I would rather use PVD as a tool for assembling and importing movie information to MC. All that's needed now is an improved Theater View that can make use of all this information—specifically, by being capable of displaying detailed information for each movie.
Some comments:
Adding replace=",<->;" to the template will replace commas with semicolons so genres and actors will import to list fields correctly.
I believe the movies PVD will export are those that are displayed, rather than "selected." PVD provides powerful searching and filtering for doing that. For the limited testing I've done so far, I've "bookmarked" test subjects, displayed those, and run the export.
PVD saves posters in it's database. These can be exported as well, but it requires an extra step to rename the resulting imageN.jpg files. The following template can be used to export posters along with the movie pathname:
Open the exported TXT file using Excel; in the Excel text import wizard, specify a semicolon-delimited file. Copy the following formula to a third column: ="rename "&[image]&" """&[filename]&"""". Copy & paste the entire column into a text editor, and save the file with a BAT extension in the same directory as the image files. Run the batch file. Move the image files to the same directory as the movies files (if they are not already there), so MC will find them (I suppose your auto-import has to be configured for it to do so).
I'm lazy, so following is a copy of my reply to your parallel post on the MC forum. I included a prod for improving MC's Theater View (a 10-ft interface), but others have been begging for the same thing for more than a year. I'm hoping the customizable interface feature that will be in the next version of PVD (due out in beta in a few weeks) will allow the same functionality. It's won't be the same thing (i.e., it's not intended specifically for providing a 10-foot interface), but if it allows me to stay on the couch, I'll be happy. Did I mention I'm lazy...
I hope you'll stick around and share your views as the development of PVD proceeds.
Thank YOU! This is... FANTASTIC!!!
I feel rather sheepish about my pessimistic views of my ability to import to MC via MPL (not to mention my rather cumbersome import-via-filename solution). I think this serves as a perfect illustration that it's not only feasible, but rather easy to do. Even for a code-phobic klutz like me!
This provides almost all I can wish for in terms of the "convergence" of the best-of-breed movie and media managers (PVD and MC, IMHO). The idea of MC attempting to do what my movie manager does so well now seems pointless. Even if I had no interest in maintaining a movie database, I would rather use PVD as a tool for assembling and importing movie information to MC. All that's needed now is an improved Theater View that can make use of all this information—specifically, by being capable of displaying detailed information for each movie.
Some comments:
Adding replace=",<->;" to the template will replace commas with semicolons so genres and actors will import to list fields correctly.
I believe the movies PVD will export are those that are displayed, rather than "selected." PVD provides powerful searching and filtering for doing that. For the limited testing I've done so far, I've "bookmarked" test subjects, displayed those, and run the export.
PVD saves posters in it's database. These can be exported as well, but it requires an extra step to rename the resulting imageN.jpg files. The following template can be used to export posters along with the movie pathname:
Code: [Select]
%OPTIONS%
encoding="UTF8"
replace=".avi<->.jpg"
replace=""<->"
replace="#13#10<-> "
replace="#13<-> "
replace="#10<-> "
filter="CSV files saved as TXT|*.txt"
%OPTIONS%
%HEAD%Poster;Path;
%HEAD%{%value=63};{%value=27};
Open the exported TXT file using Excel; in the Excel text import wizard, specify a semicolon-delimited file. Copy the following formula to a third column: ="rename "&[image]&" """&[filename]&"""". Copy & paste the entire column into a text editor, and save the file with a BAT extension in the same directory as the image files. Run the batch file. Move the image files to the same directory as the movies files (if they are not already there), so MC will find them (I suppose your auto-import has to be configured for it to do so).
