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    Invelos Forums->DVD Profiler: Desktop Feature Requests Page: 1 2  Previous   Next
Enhancement Request
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DVD Profiler Unlimited RegistrantBattleRogue
Registered: February 8, 2016
Posts: 4
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Can you create new Standard Media Types for the following?:

Digital HD
  Ultraviolet
  iTunes

Digital Copy

These would really help because there's no way to transfer a custom media type from the desktop, up to the on-line, and back down to a portable device.

Thank you for your consideration.
DVD Profiler Unlimited RegistrantStar ContributorGSyren
Profiling since 2001
Registered: March 14, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
Sweden Posts: 4,508
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I doubt that it will happen since the online database uses UPC or disc id as a key.

As regards transfering your collection to your portable device, going via wi-fi is a lot better than via your online collection, if that's possible for you. I haven't tried it, but I believe that custom media types can be transfered that way.
My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users.
Gunnar
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantscurtis_34471
Registered: April 14, 2009
United States Posts: 11
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Lack of UltraViolet and Disney Movies Anywhere support is definitely a problem that will only get bigger as time goes by. iTunes, Amazon Video and Google Play Video can be thrown in there as well. The fact is that a lot of content is moving to the cloud and disc use is tapering off and users need a way to catalog these movies. There are two reasons for this:

1) Many people have movies both on disc and in the cloud
2) Many people have movies in the cloud through more than one licensing scheme

This makes it difficult to put together a consolidated inventory, so you can figure out what you have and where it is. I now have over a thousand movies in the cloud and less than 500 exclusively on disc. I have at least a few hundred movies both in the cloud and on Blu-Ray. Right now, the only option for handling all this is Excel.
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile RegistrantStar ContributorDJ Doena
Registered: May 1, 2002
Registered: March 14, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
Germany Posts: 6,737
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Quoting scurtis_34471:
Quote:
Lack of UltraViolet and Disney Movies Anywhere support is definitely a problem that will only get bigger as time goes by. iTunes, Amazon Video and Google Play Video can be thrown in there as well. The fact is that a lot of content is moving to the cloud and disc use is tapering off and users need a way to catalog these movies.



You can always add manual profiles and define your own media types.

The problem with digital files of any format is that there's no unique identifier. Every VHS, CD, Book, DVD and Blu-ray sold has a uniqe identifier: The UPC / EAN (depending on where you live).

But what identifier does a MP3, MP4, MKV, ... file have*? That's the main problem with all kinds of digital media.

No one's stopping you from adding them to DVDP. It's just the contribution part, that's not working out.






*if you're saying MD5 hash and you now what a has is, think about collisions!
Karsten
DVD Collectors Online

 Last edited: by DJ Doena
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantscurtis_34471
Registered: April 14, 2009
United States Posts: 11
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What you need to do is generate a durable surrogate key for each movie based on a composite key. One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key. All you would have to do to generate the key would be to do a select distinct on Title, Year of Release and Studio and then create a Cartesian product of that, Format (SD/HD) and Provider (iTunes, UV, Vudu, etc.). The resulting generated key would be unique and your problem would be solved.

This is what happens when you talk to an enterprise data architect about unique identifiers.
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantscurtis_34471
Registered: April 14, 2009
United States Posts: 11
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MD5 hash totals are great for doing changed data capture, but not great for key generation.

What I am talking about is generating a key based on the uniqueness of a row. Let's say that you can uniquely identify a movie by five data elements. Do a SELECT DISTINCT on those five data elements, dump the results into a table with an identity column (sequence if you are using Oracle). The sequence number becomes the key. Drop a unique constraint on five data elements to avoid duplicates. I do something similar to this when loading data into data warehouse systems, because the road to hell is paved with natural keys. If I had something unique from a source system (i.e. ISBN), I would still generate my own durable surrogate in case additional source systems come along, standards change or systems get migrated.
 Last edited: by scurtis_34471
DVD Profiler Unlimited RegistrantStar ContributorGSyren
Profiling since 2001
Registered: March 14, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
Sweden Posts: 4,508
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Quoting scurtis_34471:
Quote:
One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key

Well, that sounds great, except... If you have followed the forums for any lenght of time you should know that there are often confusions or disagreements about the following:
- Name, for example "T4xi" or "Taxi 4", "Ghosts of Mars" or "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars", etc.
- Year of Release; Festival showings or theatrical showings
- Studio name, for example MGM or Metro Goldwyn Mayer or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Fortunately many of these are settled by the rules or by built-in contribution filters, but it just goes to show that uniqueness may not be as easy to achive as you think.
My freeware tools for DVD Profiler users.
Gunnar
 Last edited: by GSyren
DVD Profiler Unlimited RegistrantStar Contributorrdodolak
Registered: March 18, 2007
Reputation: Superior Rating
United States Posts: 1,598
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Quoting scurtis_34471:
Quote:
What you need to do is generate a durable surrogate key for each movie based on a composite key. One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key. All you would have to do to generate the key would be to do a select distinct on Title, Year of Release and Studio and then create a Cartesian product of that, Format (SD/HD) and Provider (iTunes, UV, Vudu, etc.). The resulting generated key would be unique and your problem would be solved.

This is what happens when you talk to an enterprise data architect about unique identifiers.


You could do it with Provider and Title ID such as:

http://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/715157/The-Revenant
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AB7GOD8/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-revenant/id1067140154
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantscurtis_34471
Registered: April 14, 2009
United States Posts: 11
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Quoting GSyren:
Quote:
Quoting scurtis_34471:
Quote:
One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key

Well, that sounds great, except... If you have followed the forums for any lenght of time you should know that there are often confusions or disagreements about the following:
- Name, for example "T4xi" or "Taxi 4", "Ghosts of Mars" or "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars", etc.
- Year of Release; Festival showings or theatrical showings
- Studio name, for example MGM or Metro Goldwyn Mayer or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Fortunately many of these are settled by the rules or by built-in contribution filters, but it just goes to show that uniqueness may not be as easy to achive as you think.


This is a classic master data management problem that can be fixed with a little data governance and the right software.

I'm not claiming it is necessarily simple. I'm mostly just being a huge data geek, since that's what I do.
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantmediadogg
Aim high. Ride the wind.
Registered: March 18, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
United States Posts: 6,396
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DVDP has recently added Custom Fields as a feature. As of the current release, this feature is only available to plugins. Both myself and DJ Doena have released plugins that support custom fields.

Custom fields are saved and restored with the database and with the Online. They can be searched with filters, and also used in HTML sections, and they also appear in the exported XML.

My plugin Sidecar has several pre-defined custom fields that can be used immediately or modified to taste, including Digital Copy type (e,g., Ultraviolet) and Digital Copy code. So, maybe take a look, at least maybe to get ideas, or to give feedback on how this feature could be improved. Ken has many times in the past, watched plugins and user reactions to them as a guide for how to create a replacement built-in capability.
Thanks for your support.
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Advanced plugins available here.
Hey, new product!!! BDPFrog.
 Last edited: by mediadogg
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantmediadogg
Aim high. Ride the wind.
Registered: March 18, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
United States Posts: 6,396
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Another hidden enhancement is just waiting to be exploited. At developer request, the profiler database now supports custom Profile IDs! This feature has been tested to at least know that they can be created, saved and restored with the database, without crashing the main program. These new profile ID classes support locality as well.

But no plugin has yet to be released to support it, although I and maybe others have some ideas on the drawing board. What is needed is a creative person to lead an effort to guide the developers on what to implement.

What could be done with it:

- new classes of profile IDs could be created, that serve as valid keys in the DVDP database
- examples might be media-related keys, movie keys, etc.

The major limitation is that all these custom keys must start with an Invelos mandated prefix, "_". This now reduces the profile ID by 1 character.

The next issue, is that so far we have no rules for how to fill out the rest. This would be the best way to move forward, so that more than one plugin could recognize and use the new profile IDs.

We had a thread long ago where some suggestions were made along those lines. What I mean is something like (by example, this is NOT a proposal):

_F for films, or movies. This leaves 14 characters plus locality to create unique IDs
_M for music. Same thing, you have 14 characters plus locality to create a unique ID.
_V for videos or VHS maybe. Maybe the UPC would follow, if you can fit into 14 characters

For those of you who don't know, today's database keys (20 bytes max) are restricted to:

Manual profile ID: M[Number].Locality
Disc ID: I[Disc ID].Locality
UPC/EAN: [UPC].Locality
Alternate UPC: V[Encoded ID].Locality      (used only by plugins and internally within DVDP)
Custom profile ID: _[custom ID].Locality  (not yet being used)

I believe that Encoded ID and custom ID can both be:
"base-64 encoded, so can contain numbers, upper and lower case letters, as well as '_' and '-'" (also see Ken's note following)
Thanks for your support.
Free Plugins available here.
Advanced plugins available here.
Hey, new product!!! BDPFrog.
 Last edited: by mediadogg
Invelos Software, Inc. RepresentativeKen Cole
Invelos Software
Registered: March 10, 2007
United States Posts: 4,282
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Case isn't a distinguishing factor, so "_ABC" is a collision for "_abc".  Also avoid using characters that are invalid in a file name.
Invelos Software, Inc. Representative
DVD Profiler Unlimited RegistrantMark Harrison
I like IMDB
Registered: March 13, 2007
Reputation: Great Rating
United States Posts: 3,321
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Quoting mediadogg:
Quote:
But no plugin has yet to be released to support it, although I and maybe others have some ideas on the drawing board. What is needed is a creative person to lead an effort to guide the developers on what to implement.


A group effort on a plugin?  That's an interesting idea.  Could be a fun project to work on.  If this ever gets going, I'll sign up.
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Create fake parent profiles to organize your collection.
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantmediadogg
Aim high. Ride the wind.
Registered: March 18, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
United States Posts: 6,396
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Quoting Mark Harrison:
Quote:
Quoting mediadogg:
Quote:
But no plugin has yet to be released to support it, although I and maybe others have some ideas on the drawing board. What is needed is a creative person to lead an effort to guide the developers on what to implement.


A group effort on a plugin?  That's an interesting idea.  Could be a fun project to work on.  If this ever gets going, I'll sign up.

Great! It has worked well for me in the past. The one I remember most vividly was when we collaborated on the "schema" for Collectorz and DVD Spot import by BulkEdit. Also, I originally wrote the printer plugins without even owning the devices, thanks to heavy user involvement in testing and label creation. DVDPca ws another one - users provided key test cases, validated results, and more.

I agree that such a project would be fun. If nobody beats me to it, I will start a thread in the plugins forum sometime. But anybody is welcome to do it.
Thanks for your support.
Free Plugins available here.
Advanced plugins available here.
Hey, new product!!! BDPFrog.
 Last edited: by mediadogg
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile Registrantmediadogg
Aim high. Ride the wind.
Registered: March 18, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
United States Posts: 6,396
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Now that BulkEdit has the ability to create custom IDs easily, I have been thinking about some prefixes I want to use, so I will share them in case I get some other ideas. The prefix would be followed by a unique code that is valid in the associated environment. Some of these could have longer aliases when the movie ID is known to be short enough to fit. For example, _YT could easily be _youtube since the movie codes are relatively short.

__  (double underscore - suggested to reserve this prefix for plugins internal use)
_NX (Netflix)
_VD (VUDU)
_ID  (IMDB)
_.EXT (where "EXT" is replaced with actual file extensions, such as _.AVI, _.WMV, _.ISO, _.MPG, etc.
_AZ (Amazon Prime)
_MA (Movies Anywhere)
_IT (iTunes)
_HL (Hulu)
_VM (Vimeo)
_YU (Youtube)
_SL (SlingTV)
_DT (DirectTV)

....

Any and all comments welcome.

Just as with Custom Fields (see SideCar and Alternate Titles plugins), this information can be stored and manipulated within the local database, but as yet cannot be contributed.

Some previous thoughts on this topic.
Thanks for your support.
Free Plugins available here.
Advanced plugins available here.
Hey, new product!!! BDPFrog.
 Last edited: by mediadogg
DVD Profiler Desktop and Mobile RegistrantStar ContributorDJ Doena
Registered: May 1, 2002
Registered: March 14, 2007
Reputation: Highest Rating
Germany Posts: 6,737
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I would not use ID for IMDb simply because it is ID. Rather IM or something.

Also you need Kickstarter. Maybe _KS?
Karsten
DVD Collectors Online

    Invelos Forums->DVD Profiler: Desktop Feature Requests Page: 1 2  Previous   Next