Movie Collections (Boxes etc.)

[Lasse]

Hi there,

I bought DVDpedia a few years ago and back then I was missing one specific (and for me important) feature: Include several different films into one entry, e.g. if I have a box for "Die Hard 1-5", I could either treat the entire box as one item (i.e. one film), or make every single film its own item, giving no indication that these are actually one collection.
This might be even more important for shows, for example "The Outer Limits", which has a different cast for every episode (as you probably know ).
My question is: Is something like this implemented in the latest version, or is it planned in a future release? I have downloaded the demo, but I couldn't find a way to do this, but maybe I'm just blind?

Any info on this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[DanThe]

Hi Lasse,

I have just started with DVDpedia. I was using a database that had the features your looking for but after all the years of using it in Windows, 3 years with the Mac version has pushed me to look elsewhere and find something that does not try to imitate the GUI of the Windows counterpart. After just a few weeks with DVDpedia, it has grown on me and I like the speed and stability. Enough with the history.

Now for definitions. I consider a box set as a package with it's own barcode like The Ultimate Matrix Collection. Each movie inside the box can be bought separately and each has it's own barcode. The Bourne Trilogy is another example of this.

What I do not necessarily consider a box set is a collection that contains all the movie discs in the one package. An example of this is the Die Hard Collection (mine only has the first 4 movies).

Now how do I compensate for the features I no longer have? The box set was one of those features that I no longer have and after thinking about it for a while I came up with this workaround.

I decided to use one of the Custom fields and rename it to Box Set. Then using the barcode of the box set itself and the barcodes of each individual movie inside the box (in your case Die Hard) and enter these into DVDpedia. Then I would edit the first one and enter the box set name into my new Box Set field. Afterwards I'd edit the rest and select the box set name from the Box Set field dropdown. At that point I can use the search field to search for the box set name to see all items of that set.

Now how do deal with my none box set Die Hard Collection? I haven't decided yet but I have narrowed down my choices to a few options. The other app I was using previous supported adding multiple discs and each disc had it's own fields including being able to enter TV episodes for each disc.

Using the Die Hard Collection example I could use the Comments or Summary fields to list each movie disc with information unique to each disc.

When it come to TV shows, I decided to create a document (Pages, Text or PDF) with all the disc and episode information in it and name it Disc Guide for Star Trek TNG Season 1. Then I would use the Link feature to link to that document. PDF is better since you can view it within the app. Hopefully the scroll issue will get fixed soon.

If anyone have a better way or suggestion, please let me know.

Hopefully you can use one of these workarounds. Sorry for the loooong entry.

[Rigido]

Hi,
this is a very long requested feature, and the answer is always the same (I think): do you know you can link movies each other (and even re order the links)?
As for a "Die Hard 1-5" collection I did the following:

1. Add an entry like "Die Hard 1-5" with few details and "Boxset" or "Casket" or whatever as CASE
2. Add every movie on the box
3. Link movies each other and all the movies to the boxset (I don't remember the right procedure, it should be a Nora post somewhere on the blog)
4. I set the Ordering Title for each entry as "Die Hard 0" (for the boxset), "Die Hard 1", "Die Hard 2", etc.

Doing this you'll have a "Die Hard 1-5" entry, on the Details view (it depends from the theme you choose) there will be a small box with the links to movies you linked. You can use the "Case=boxset" as condition for a smart collection...

Ciao.

PS: Here it is the BLOG entry

[DanThe]

Thanks Rigido!

I'm still transferring a lot of my data over to the pedia DBs so the only box set that I could do testing with was in CDpedia. It's Grand Funk Railroad's Trunk Of Funk box set which contains the first 4 remastered albums by the group.

I went to the blog link and tried linking these. So Cool! I was so impressed at how the box and the 4 albums are now interlinked. I'm all smiles over here.

It would still be nice to see a box set feature plus another on my wish list is multi-disc support for both DVDpedia and CDpedia. Yes I know that you can split tracks to another disc in CDpedia but that's about it. Today, movies and music not only have multiple discs but they also come in multiple formats (i.e. Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy or Blu-ray 5.1 audio + CD). It would be nice to be able to label these discs with their corresponding formats. But I digress...

Thanks again.

[Lasse]

Thanks for your replies and ideas, both of you. The linking looks interesting, I think, I should give it a try. And maybe I'll start my collection in DVDpedia again.

[Waldbaer]

...
It would still be nice to see a box set feature plus another on my wish list is multi-disc support for both DVDpedia and CDpedia. Yes I know that you can split tracks to another disc in CDpedia but that's about it. Today, movies and music not only have multiple discs but they also come in multiple formats (i.e. Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy or Blu-ray 5.1 audio + CD). It would be nice to be able to label these discs with their corresponding formats. ...

Well, for the online doghouse database, I remember to keep it simple just using the main format, e.g. Blu-Ray, even if there is a DVD and Digital Copy included, too (such may be mentioned under Extras instead). But for your own database, you may just write what you want, so where exactly is the problem?

[DanThe]

I've been sitting on the fence on how to respond to the last post. I chose not to until I had a better grasp of using the Pedia apps. To better illustrate why better disk support is needed, I give an example focused on disk support in CDpedia.

Here is some history of how I got into the Pedia apps. When I moved to Apple products, I was happy that my music DB app (which has great disk support) was available for the Mac. I was happy until I started using it. In the end it had become unstable and unreliable plus the DB load time was horrendous (8 to10 seconds). So after purchasing CDpedia I did an XML export of my previous DB and imported it into CDpedia. Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I'm really enjoying my experience with CDpedia. I have a long road ahead in transferring data that did not import into CDpedia.

It was great that my track listing imported until I started editing albums that had more than one disk. Here is an example of a double CD album. What happened in the import was that track 1 from both disks appear together then track 2 from both together... so on and so on... This means that I have to go split all the tracks into disks.

This is not to complicated with a double CD which leads me to my example of where it get complicated. Pink Floyd's box set called "Oh By The Way" has 16 CDs containing a total of 148 tracks. Tonight I tried to split these tracks into the the 16 discs while trying to keep the sequence of first album, second album, etc... Needless to say that one little mistake of clicking the wrong track and you have to start all over again.

Now if a disc field existed where you could label it with say CD1, CD2, etc. then drag and drop the tracks to there respective disks would be much more easier. This is the feature that I really miss from my previous DB app.

Another thing is that the template shows all the tracks in one list so there is no way to visually know where track 1 of the second disk starts. Yes you could create a template to do this but not everyone has the skills or even the time to do this. It gets even more complicated with LPs making a come back. Not only can you have a double LP but each LP has 2 sides. Yes my previous DB could do disc headers as well.

My workaround is to create a disk guide text file showing where the splits occur in a multiple CD or an LP which I then add to the links for that album. I'm lucky that I can cut and paste that information from my previous DB into the text file but it still involves a tremendous amount of work.

I hope that this clarifies the why of having better disk support for multi-disk albums or box sets. This disk support can also apply to DVDpedia. For example a television series has episodes that are distributed into several disks.

[Waldbaer]

Now I understand you much better.
It thought you were only referring to the "format" field, but your request for more detailed disc handling is far more detailed now. I support this, the track handling in discs is not really great at the moment, although it works. I personally workaround these issues using iTunes and then importing albums just from there. But that of course only works as long as you have everything there, which might not always be the case.

I already imagine how this could work in the GUI: In the Track list, you could add a spacer of more or less this format:
--- [LP Side] CustomName
A Click on "[LP Side]" would open a dropdown list to select if it's a new CD/DVD/BluRay/LP/LP Side/Download/Book and CustomName would be just a text field to enter whatever you wish (e.g. "Bonus-DVD", "Booklet", "UltraViolet damn copy protected download link"). Tracks would be ordered via drag&drop just like now, only the the counting begin again from one after each spacer. To insert such a spacer, just add a button to the + - below, e.g. +M for media or something like that.
Maybe you could add another field such as "included media" which acts like the discs: Automatically inserted according to the tracks list (e.g. "2 CDs, 1 DVD, 1 Booklet), but editable to anybody's wish. "Format" would become "Main Format" with just the types allowed as in the online database (dropdown list).

What do you think?

[DanThe]

It's been over a year using the apps. I'm still manually transferring the data that did not import into CDpedia from my old database app.

I'm enjoying the apps and I'm getting more skilled at using them. Disc handling is still very high on my feature wish list but I have found a work around.

I have create a disc guide template in the Pages app. I do not need to create a guide with single CD albums except when a song has sub-tracks. The viewer in my old DB app displays the disc information the way I want to see it so I'm able copy/paste this information to a disc guide file that I create in Pages. I then export the guide to PDF which I then link to the album in CDpedia.

It's a lot of work but at lease I retain the album disc information that was in the old DB. I'll be using the same workaround with DVDpedia once I start the transfers of my movies.

I love the smart collections. They are helping me keep track of the transfer process. Once this huge job is done, I will be a little more present in the forum.