RE: OT(ish): Whole house movies (and a possible project)

["Graham Howe" <graham@xxxxxxx>]

> > Recently I have had conversations with a couple of guys 
> here about how 
> > we would like to control movie viewing. The consensus seemed to
be 
> > some sort of front-end application that could scroll through a
> > database of movie information and would, at the click of a 
> button or 
> > press of a finger, play the selected movie.
> 
> Keith had something like this at London, a Divx jukebox.
> 
Yes he did, and that is far closer to what I would like to see than
DVDProfiler. However I think I am right in saying that Keiths jukebox
was quite limited in terms of fields on the database, it was of course
extremely powerful in it's searching capabilities.

> > one excellent source is DVDProfiler. It has a huge database 
> that has 
> > all of this information for an enormous selection of films. It
also 
> > has some nice browsing and maintenance software. However it 
> is Region 
> > 1 biased, so for example the cover shot for 'Lock Stock and Two
> > Smoking Barrels' is completely different to mine.
> 
> Most films have the region 2 version in the DVD Profiler database
too.
> 
Which is not much use if the UPC is shared.

> > possible. I am also pretty sure that UPC code is not unique.
> 
> However, as you say, the UPC is not unique.  Some of my DVDs 
> were starting to appear as German titles as they had the same 
> code.  The "internationalisation" of DVD Pro has been a
> promised upgrade for over a year now without any sign of it.
> 
I think the right approach is not to use the UPC has the main 'key'. I
would prefer UPC to be seen as a 'search term' so that when I scan the
barcode I am presented with a list of matching disk, I then tick the
one
I have.

> > 5. The front end application: my preference here is for a web
based 
> > application that can easily port to different devices. The 
> DVDProfiler 
> > front end is very nice, but it is not web based
> 
> There is an online web based version of your collection if 
> you register.
> 
Yes, that is how I found it in the first place by looking at someone
elses collection. But there is a difference between viewing a
collection
as a single list of links and actually having an interactive web front
end.

> > so you could not easily put it on a PDA for example.
> 
> Dunno about easy, but some people have put it on their PDAs.
> 
I doesn't look very flexible in terms of formatting.

> > favouring a bespoke application and for maximum portability I am
> > leaning towards a web based front end. This means that my 
> devices of 
> > choice will be laptops, PDAs, web tablets and so on.
> 
> Yep, this is defo the way forward.
> 
Certainly

> > Now this is where I am starting to think about a new group
project.
> 
> Has this group ever finished a project yet? :)
> 
Stuff like this is never finished, the whole point is that it should be
designed to grow.

> > The second significant task is the population of the database.
The 
> > databases I have seen out there (IMDB, DVDProfiler and others)
are 
> > very impressive, but as I have already explained, none of 
> them would 
> > work for me or quite a few others on this list. So the only 
> option is 
> > to populate our own database
> 
> Hmmmm..this is a MAJOR task.  I recom DVDProfiler has 
> everything you need...IF you can use their DB?
> 
I don't think it would be at all easy to use their database and anyway
all you actually get locally is the stuff that you have selected. Also
you are still left with the problem of putting the commands and links
in
so that the source can be controlled, there is no appropriate field in
DVDProfiler. I don't think that populating a central database would be
a
massive task if lots of people joined in, after all this is how all of
the 'media' databases started out originally. It might be possible to
'rip' data from other online databases, but like I said, the real
problem is that they are often not so good for non-region 1 stuff.

Graham

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