Personal Video Database

Hi,

So i am back on using PVD, among anything because there's no other movies catalog program with such a complete IMDB scraper (IMDB movie tags scraping is just a must for building an interesting movies database, period).
And i am rebuilding the database from scratch. Which shouldn't be no bother as i got IMDB IDs/URLs for all the entries.

But problem, i got some wanted duplicate entries (different DVD releases of the same movie).

Those got differenced names/titles when importing from CSV list, mainly just to skip the duplicate entry problem in question below at that stage. So PVD doesn't see those as duplicates when doing the CSV import.

But then when i import the infos from IMDB. It then change the title, putting the same one on both record (which is what i want, as i use the "release" field to differentiate those).

So please, tell me, where is the (hidden? .conf file only?) parameter to skip the "Duplicate record(s) found" window and always do "Preserve all copies"?

(it seems to only asks this on the first duplication detection for an entry, if i re-import IMDB infos on that same entry, it asks nothing, then just preserving all copies - so if there really is no option for this, maybe i can edit the DB directly to set the magic flag or value just after the CSV import)

Unchecking the "Show selection dialog if similar records are already in the database" doesn't prevent this window to appear. Actually, i wonder what this option changes.

I am using v1.0.2.7.

Many thanks in advance and thank again for PVD, still the best out there.

I have filled the location data for my movies, but it won't be displayed on any skin, though all those do feature the <location/> field.
The data is in the database, i can group the list view by it, and i can export that data.

I am using the latest 1.0.2.3 beta version.

DBeaver is an awesome tool - i was using Squirrel and Oracle SQL Developer before but this is much better.

Indeed i also suggested DBeaver to SquirrelSQL users at my i.t. job, considering how slow SquirrelSQL can run on some configurations, due to its Swing GUI base.
A great "pro"/commercial one for Oracle is PL/SQL Developper imo, but then it can't beat DBeaver on price.

BTW, in case you haven't noticed, you can run an SQL command from the Help menu (you may need to run the program with the -debug switch, I don't recall). I suppose the manager is needed to formulate most commands, but having done that, running them directly from PVD might be useful.

Indeed i could use it with my common SQL commands stored in a handy file.
It would even be great if SQL commands could be stored in PVD directly and possibly associated with hotkeys.

Some of us would very much prefer that it would simply retrieve the default poster (the one TMDb displays). To choose a different poster, it's more effective to use the URL to visit the site and pick a different one. It's difficult to imagine anyone wants to download all the posters—as the plugin currently does.

So how do you proceed (as you also seems to use TheMovieDB as good poster source, according to your comment)?
Do you visit the website, copy the default poster TheMovieDB got for the movie, and then paste it in PVD?
Because, as you said, with the plugin for this website, it's either all posters ("download images" plugin option) or nothing.

Could someone clone and turn this plugin into a posters plugin? Along with "download default poster / download all posters" switch parameter?
I would try to modify it myself if this was script based, but it's actually a compiled .dll.

So i searched for a good FREE database GUI client/manager, FireBird Maestro working fine but being trial software.
And i found a really good one, DBeaver, a JAVA program (so you should install JAVA JRE 6).

Here is a kind of installation procedure (Windows oriented) for it to work with the PVD database file.

- Download latest DBeaver version.
- Depack the DBeaver archive in a directory of your choice.

- Download latest JayBird JDBC connector (atm: "Jaybird-2.2.0JDK_1.6.zip") and FireBird embedded mode libraries (atm: "Firebird-2.5.1.26351-0_Win32_embed.zip").
- Depack each of those archives into a subdirectory of the DBeaver directory, namely "jaybird/" and "firebird/".

- Create a "launch.bat" commands file in the DBeaver directory with the following content :
@echo off
SET PATH=%PATH%;%~dp0\firebird\;%~dp0\jaybird\
START dbeaver.exe
- Launch this "launch.bat", you should have DBeaver running.

- Add a "New" > "Connection", select FireBird databse type, confirm. It should ask if you want to download the FireBird JDBC Connector, press no.

- On the connection setting page, press "Edit Driver Settings".

- Change Sample URL to "jdbc:firebirdsql:embedded:{file}".
- On the "Libraries" tab, press "Add File" and go select "jaybird-full-2.2.0.jar" in the "jaybird/" subdirectory.
- On the "Connection Properties" tab, add a new property "lc_ctype" with "UNICODE_FSS" value.
- Press "OK".

- Now click "Browse ..." to your PVD database on the "Path:" setting. You should then have something like "jdbc:firebirdsql:embedded:d:\PVD\MOVIES.PVD" displayed in the "JDBC URL:" field.
- Leave "User name:" and "Password:" fields empty.
- You can "Test Connection ..." which should display "Success / Connected (XX ms)".
- Press "Finish".

- Now click on the "unfold" icon on the left of the connection you just created in the "Database Navigator" tab (don't enter any credential information).

- You can now access the database.

Enjoy the fine Eclipse style interface, the great bitmap BLOB viewer of this client (even with zoom options), tables relation graph display, etc...
And all this is free!

Hello,

First, congratulations in this piece of software, i like how "database oriented" is the interface (well, i'm a developer myself ).
I got several suggestions which would save me some time (and certainly others as well) considering how i use the program.

So here i how i proceed when i add movies.

1) I import the new movies title and DVD location info from a .csv file.

2) I launch IMDB plugin to get all informations on the imported movies (expecting poster and title, as i want to keep the title as i imported it, also important for the next step).
>>> Here, it would be great if "silent mode" for plugin query could have additional configuration option to automatically select first entry when several titles are found, instead of skipping the movie. The thing being that, most of the time, the first movie in the list is the correct one.
As for now, i got an AutoHotKey (AHK) script to do this, but then i have to let the program run on front for AHK to interact with it... And then i can't use the computer during that time...

3) I then browse all these movies entries to check if imported informations are correct. If it isn't, i reset the entry and re-query IMDB (without the AHK script running) to manually select the entry. If
>>> Here, having a "reset entry" button/shortcut, along with configuration settings to select which fields should be kept on this action, would be excellent.
I also use an AHK script to do it by now.

4) Then when i'm sure all entries are correct, i query "TheMovieDB" to import only posters for those new movies entries (excellent source for posters imo).
>>> Here, i would also make of the "select first silent mode" that i described earlier.

5) I browse all the new entries to check if it got proper posters then :
- If it's not the good movie posters : I use the "remove all posters" option.
- If it is the good posters : I browse the posters found.
>>> When a poster image is open in the window to view it fullscreen, it would be great if pressing escape key would close that window, instead of having to close the window using mouse.

6) If several posters have been added for the movie, i only want to keep one.
>>> Here, i would really love an option to "remove all posters except this one" on poster thumbnail.
For now i got to move the mouse on each poster i don't want to keep, wait for the contextual button bar to show itself, then clicking the remove button. Painful process that i couldn't even automate using AHK...

OK so these were my suggestions, not complex things to implement i think, but these would really save me huge amount of time.