Personal Video Database

It's very apparent that you don't care Rick.... in more ways than one.

I'm out

It's all a matter of goals. If your goal is to make something that is most useful to you, and then to share that with others, that is one thing. And there is nothing wrong with that goal, and in fact a lot right with it. I certainly couldn't quarrel with it. On the other hand, if the goal is to make the program appeal to the widest range of people, and to increase the number of people using it, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the ever growing I-tunes, I-Pad crowd who are used to more "sexy" views of their media. (I personally detest I-tunes and wouldn't have it on my system, but that's just me). Anyway you are the final word on the subject, as it should be, and your willingness to even entertain ideas on the matter is a plus, and all my posts are meant only to explore ideas, and should not be taken as some sort of demand (a sly reference to my other thread that was shut down).

As for the ideas mentioned by Rick, I think the Pop up on hover might be the best way to handle such a view, but a re-sizable window where the movies are currently listed might be good enough, or maybe the ability to have a scrollable window for movie data in lower portion of the screen. Of course a compatible and compact template would need to be made to display movie data in either case. The very simplest of ways to have something of a cover view, would be to have a single vertical column of covers where the movies are currently displayed, but  that would be a terribly inefficient way of displaying movies, but there are people who would like this.

Cheers

Well as I said it's a rather minor point of consistency and not really that important now that the beta has saved filters but I still would like to respond to what you said.

There's not going to be another filter just to accommodate one media type.

It's not for just a single media type. It's for all media that is not online

Clearly, File path works very well for the majority of users whose media is online.

Well clearly it would work well for users whose media is online. Why wouldn't it? But of course we are talking about users whose media is not online, and I would guess this would be a majority, if not of current users, certainly of potential users.

Those with DVD collections can also use it simply by adding a value to the field.

Like I said the better "Kludge" is to simply add a saved filter for a non NULL Media label. It's cleaner. But then why have a kludge at all. The best solution would be to simply add an "owned" boolean along with seen and wish? This would cover all situations.  

But media isn't always scanned, or may be to much trouble to scan

These fields can be filled in manually, and Media type through a multi edit, so this is not really an issue. but again the correct way is to add an owned boolean.

It's not a major issue, and there are work arounds, but if your argument is that the current system is the best of all worlds, or even adequate, for anyone who cares about software consistency and usability, that simply won't fly unchallenged.


[Ed.] There's a quote tool—please use it.

I assume a file path applies to movies that are available for play on an accessible drive. How would this apply to a normal collection that is mostly on DVDs? DVDs have no file path but they do would likely have media type, media label and/or media location.

I have a need to move the information in the "barcode" field to the "media label" field in over 500 movies and was wondering if anyone knows of a quicker way to accomplish this, instead of a couple of hours of manual editing. ouch

I did see that the inconsistency between wish and own has been fixed in the beta version, and in the correct way in my opinion, but if we use wish for it's named purpose - to indicate movies we "wish" to own - then there is still no quick filter for movies we own, since simply not having a wish to own, is not the same thing as not owning. We may have seen a movie, not own it, and also not wish to own it. There still needs to be a quick filter for media label or media location in my opinion to quickly filter for movies we own or don't own.

I apologize if this has been brought up before, but the way this program uses "wish" as a synonym for "not owned" is very confusing to the user and at a minimum the name of the filter should match the name on the movie screen, whether it be wish or own. Personally I think it should remain as the actual field name, which is wish, since all other possibilities would then still be available.

1. Seen (wish to see is covered by "seen" simply being off)
2. Wish (Means wish to own)
3. Owned (does not need it's own check since it can be filtered based on whether there is a media location or not) (Would be nice to have a preset filter for this though)

whereas if "wish" was changed to "owned", "wish to own" would be difficult to implement for the user, unless they used the owned field as a wish field, which would be a bit irritating.

In summary I think it makes sense that the wish field should just be consistently referred to as wish, and that there should be a preset filter that would filter "owned" or "not owned" based on whether there were a media location or not.

Any thoughts

Update: I see the naming is now consistent in the beta version, but it would still be very handy to have a preset filter for whether there was a media location or not, like there is for whether there is a file path or not.