paperclip vs. QT icon

[PauHana658]

I bought a license for DVDpedia yesterday and have spent all day today importing data and trying out various features. I've been thoroughly impressed with its usability and capabilities vs. DL2. This is much closer to what I had in mind when I decided to catalog my media collection.

Got a question/problem, however, with the links to imported media files. As I wrote in the forum earlier in the day, I finally figured out how to import a list of movies along with their associated paths. Whew! Most now have a small paperclip to the left of the name of the movie in the main list. A few have a QT logo. Looking at the files in the finder, I realized that those with the paperclip have iTunes icons associated with them, while those with the QT logo have QT icons in the finder. The QT logos seem to be AppleTV-ready files, while the iTunes logos seem to be iPod (Best)-ready files.

The problem, however, is that I've only been able to play two of the movies with paperclips from within DVDpedia. All the others with paperclip icons fail to enter the play window of DVDpedia. The files with QT icons open in QuickTime Player and play fine.

I've compared the links for the paperclip media and the QT media, and the links have the same format. I've even added a link via the "Link File" option in Edit DVD. The two links look identical, but the original link fails to launch while the new link opens in QuickTime Player. Copying and pasting the new link into the original link appears to change nothing -- they still look identical -- and yet both links now open in QT Player.

I'd actually prefer that all of these links launch within DVDpedia for browsing purposes, as I'll be using DVDpedia's Front Row plugin to actually watch the movie. How can I tell DVDpedia to play all of these links within DVDpedia, including the QT links?
And how can I get these paperclip media to launch properly for all of the movies?

Thanks!

[Conor]

As I mentioned in the reply to your other posts, it's actually unusual that DVDpedia is playing your movies inline. It's doing this because it's not recognizing the files as movies. The QuickTime icon means that DVDpedia thinks the link is a movie, those with paperclips are generic links. Since re-entering the link forces DVDpedia to realize that it's a movie it must be a bug with the tab delimited import where the original links where created. I have been trying it out but have been unable to replicate it so far. In the meantime download this version of DVDpedia and without the other DVDpedia running, run this one once. On startup it will go through all your movies and calculate if the link is a movie file or not, so it might fix all those links that are not launching. You can then run the regular DVDpedia after quitting this one, as you don't need it to do that calculation every single time. I will continue to try to replicate the import issue with the links. The bad news is that the real behavior of DVDpedia is to run the links externally and there is no preference to turn that off, that should start happening once it recognize them as movies. As I mentioned in the other post it takes up a lot of memory and tends to choke the web view, with the new version of Safari coming soon will try it again and might include it.

[PauHana658]

Problem solved! I went back to Excel, saved the iTunes export list as plain text, and imported that into DVDpedia with excellent results. The vast majority of movies were assigned the QT icon, and clicking the links opens them in QT player. A few were assigned the generic-link paperclip, but this was due to quote marks being inserted for unknown reasons at each end of the link. After removing the quote marks, DVDpedia recognized the links as QT links, assigned them the proper QT icon, and played them properly in QT player. Excellent!

Still, it certainly would be nice to simply drag a folder of media files into DVDpedia and have the names of the files imported along with the proper path. Whether or not DVDpedia could play them would be a secondary issue -- it would play those that it recognized, and bring up an warning when it couldn't. Of course, since I am continually adding new content to the hard drive, it would also be nice if I could again drag the entire folder into DVDpedia and have DVDpedia figure out which files are new and need to be imported and which files have already been imported and can be ignored, exactly as iTunes does when I drag a folder into it.

And by the way, all of this newly-imported media play back fine in Front Row, thanks to that amazing plug-in. As soon as I finish tweaking all of the data in DVDpedia and I'm ready to start browsing and watching my movies, I'll make a donation to the developer. Between DVDpedia, Pocketpedia and this plug-in, I've got just about everything I want in a media browser/viewer/catalogger. The only missing piece, is, of course, the ability to stream movies via pocketpedia (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hint, hint!).