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I'm not quite done with DpOscars yet. In the works:
- A tab for searching all winners in a selected category, sorted by year..
- Option in Collection to only show titles with winners.
- Possibility to select a profile in DVD Profiler from the Collections result.
If anyone has any requests, now would be a good time to raise your hand and say "Please, Sir!"  | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 327 |
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Turns out I did nothing wrong in version 1.0.0. Very wrong, in fact!
If you double-clicked a row in the expanded results in Person or Movie you should have gotten nothing. However, the nothing that you got was not the nothing that I had intended. Fixed now. Intrigued? Go ahead and try it. You'll either go "Huh?", or you'll get a knowing smile on your lips. Feel free to let me know which.
I also took the time to add star reviews to the Collection output:
You'll notice that this deviates from the most used star rating format. No empty stars. I did it this way because that's how Ken did it in DVD Profiler.
Quoting ObiKen:
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I was disappointed when I couldn't find any technical nominations for GSyren, as I believe this person deserved it!
Thank you, that's very nice of you! There are, in fact, only "standard" awards in the source file. I would have liked to see Ray Harryhausen's lifetime award, for example. But alas.
DpOscar 1.1.1
PS. I screwed up version 1.1.0. It was only available for a very short while, but just in case anyone was quick enough to download it, please go again! | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 327 |
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Thanks, Marty!
I must say I was surprised to see how many of my titles that had some kind of Oscar nomination. About one in eight. I might have to rewatch some of the ones that I have rated low, to see if I need to reevaluate them. Could I have been wrong on the first watch? Me wrong? Nah! Never happens!  | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 327 |
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DpOscars 1.0
A discussion about Tom Gaines' plugin Cinematic Collection Viewer planted an idea in my head. I didn't actually look at Tom's plugin, because I wanted to take an unbiased look at the Academy Awards (aka Oscars). Primarily I wanted to be able to find out which movies in my collection that had some kind of Oscar nominations (including wins, of course). And this program grew from that.
You can search for a movie, and see what nominations it had received:
You can search for a person and see what nominations that person had received:
(Isn't it a f***ing scandal that Thelma Ritter was nominated 6 times and never won Best Supporting Actress?)
And, most importantly (for me), you can load your exported collection and find out which of your movies had received nominations:
There is a gotcha here, though. A profile must have the nominated title either as its main Title or its Original title. And it must be spelled the same (not shift sensitive, though). So, for example, "First" and "1st" won't match. And the program won't realize that "Jungfrukällan" in my collection is a Best International Feature Film winner, since the name ("The Virgin Spring") doesn't appear in my Swedish profile.
The spelling also matters for the person search, and unfortunately the source that I base my database on isn't always consistent. So, for example, "L.B. Abbott" and "L. B. Abbott" are treated as two different persons. Does that problem seem familiar? Well, it's not too great a problem here, I think, but you should be aware of it when searching for people.
On that note, I should mention "Contains" vs. "Specified". The movie and person searches are done using SQLite SELECT statements, and SQL has two wildcard characters. Percent ( % ) and underscore ( _ ). Percent matches zero or more characters, and underscore matches exactly one character.
So, if you check Specified, "Wild%" will match any title that starts with that word, "%Wild" will match any that ends with it, "%Wild%" will match any that contains the word, and finally "Wild" will only match that exact title.
On the other hand if you check Contains then enter "Wild", it will internally be changed to "%Wild%", just for convenience.
You can use percent it inside a string as well, so for example "L%Abbott" will find both "L.B. Abbott" and "L. B. Abbott".
The underscore is perhaps less useful, but can come in handy in some cases. Search for "_._.%" and you'll find any names that start with two initials without any space between, like "L.B. Abbott".
Apart from that, this program doesn't have any bells and whistles. So double-clicking rows won't do anything. The database goes up to the production year 2023 (Awards presented in 2024), so this years awards are not included. | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 327 |
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Country of Origin (COO)
Enter the country or countries in which the main feature's production company/companies are based, in the order they appear in the credits.
The rules don't support any sources other than the credits. And if the credits are as ObiKen has listed (and I have no reason to doubt it), then I would have to agree with ObiKen; Germany-UK-France. | Posted: Topic Replies: 4, Topic Views: 544 |
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I have double-checked by downloading the zip file just to make sure I have the same thing that you do, and it works as expected for me. CoverInfo.exe is the file to run, and I have no idea why it wouldn't run for you, unless you have Windows 11 in S mode.
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Windows 11 in S mode is a version of Windows 11 that's streamlined for security and performance, while providing a familiar Windows experience. To increase security, it allows only apps from Microsoft Store, and requires Microsoft Edge for safe browsing.
You can switch out of S mode, but if you do, you can't switch back to S mode again. See here.
If S mode is not the reason, then I'm lost.  | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 777 |
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| That’s strange. I’ll have to check if I’ve done something wrong. I’ll get back. | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 777 |
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Academy Award nominations are based on the year the movie was released in the United States, not on its original release. So for "Voyna i mir" (War and Peace) this was 1968.
I have looked at two other lists of Academy Awards, and they both list 1968 for Bondarchuk's film.
The back of the English language Ruscico release that I have says "Mosfilm, 1965-1967" . This seems to have caused some confusion. Of the 32 profiles for War and Peace, five have 1967 as production year. The Criterion releases (both DVD and Bluray) state 1966-1967 on the back cover. The Bluray is listed as 1965, the DVD as 1966. All others have 1965 (including mine). Thankfully, none have 1968. | Posted: Topic Replies: 704, Topic Views: 78226 |
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I looked at the data file for the Academy Awards to see if there is any obvious connection to the movies release year, and I find that there is not. So I'll have to agree that it would be logical to show the award year.
If you want Tom to do anything about it, I guess it would be best to post a request about it in the official thread. | Posted: Topic Replies: 6, Topic Views: 800 |
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| Since you seem to be logged in, you should be able to find your registration key under Registration / My Registrations here on the web site. | Posted: Topic Replies: 2, Topic Views: 470 |
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| I assume that the Awards Tool lists the year of the movie's release, not the year of the award. The Academy Awards are always given for films released in the previous calendar year only. | Posted: Topic Replies: 6, Topic Views: 800 |
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| I think you'll find that CoverInfo does what you are looking for. It was originally developed to find undersized scans (that you might want to scan for yourself to get a better scan ), but works equally well for finding oversized scans. | Posted: Topic Replies: 7, Topic Views: 777 |
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TmdbInfo 2.11.1
I was wrong! Actually I think that I was initially mislead into thinking that this was how child windows would normally work. I should have done better research. Well, you live and learn. So I found a way to fix it without too much rewriting. I didn't even have to think outside the box. More like on the edge of the box.
Anyway, now the windows behave just the way I always intended. If you don't use dialog windows, any child window can be selected at will. Only the current window will stay on top, if that option is selected. | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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TmdbInfo 2.11.0
The window handling turned out to be a bit more complex than I at first anticipated.
After some thinking, I decided that what I wanted was for only the latest opened window to be topmost. That wasn't too difficult. What complicated things was that when that window was closed, the previous window should be made topmost. Anyway, I think I have it working OK now.
I have removed "Use dialog windows" from the options menu, and instead added this to Settings:
These settings will be remembered between sessions.
It should be noted that even when dialog windows are not used, the latest opened window will always appear on top of other windows in the program. This is how Windows handles child windows, and is not easy to get around. However only the current windows will be topmost versus other programs (if Set current window topmost is checked).
Clarification: This is how Windows handles child windows when Owner is set - which I need in order to be able to know what the previous window was in order to set it topmost when the child is closed.
Edit: I may have an idea how to get around the Owner limitation. I will test it, and if it works you’ll see version 2.11.1 here soon. No promises, though. | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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Quoting TraunStaa:
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Thanks for the latest updates, Gunnar.
Is it just me, or is 'Stay On Top' no longer working, be it with 'dialogs' or without? As soon as I click into the DVDP window, all Tmdb windows are reduced to the taskbar...
Hm, I guess I didn't think that through. I'll have a look at it. Thanks for the heads up, TraunStaa! | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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TmdbInfo 2.10.0
I thought I was done with TmdbInfo. I was wrong. I found that when I got a lot of matches on a search for a movie, just Title and Year in the search result wasn't quite good enough. So I added Director and Genres. And just for good measure, I added Genres to TV show results as well.
And now that I could see the genres in the search result, it occurred to me that when searching for some titles that yielded a lot of results, I might want to exclude some genres that I weren't interested in, like Animation and Documentary. But of course I couldn't add an option to exclude just those genres, so I added the possibility to include/exclude any of the genres that TMDb uses. And of course it turned out that TMDb uses different sets of genres for movies and TV shows, so I had to create separate lists for those. When some genres are excluded, the word "Genres" in the header is enclosed in brackets, to remind you that not all results are shown.
When I was looking at the detail record for movies or TV shows, I noticed that I would usually get a list of similar titles. I thought that was cool, so I added a tab for those. Looking bit closer I noticed that I would usually get a lot of such titles. Often several tens of thousands. The actual search record would only contain the first page of 20 titles, though (phew!) and I could request more pages if I wanted. But I thought 20 titles would be enough. It turns out, though, that TMDb's idea of "similar" is a bit strange. For some of the titles I could see a little bit of similarity, but some titles just made me go "What???." So this wasn't as useful as I had hoped, but seemed more like a semi-random selection of titles. Still, many of those titles piqued my interest and made me look closer at them. So not entirely wasted.
"My Dinner with Andre" is similar to "King Kong"? 
Also, I decided to make a change to how the various windows are opened. The option to keep windows on top wasn't really working the way I had intended. So I changed that. Now you get a choice of opening windows as dialogs (meaning that the latest window opened is the only window you interact with, until you close it), or opening them as individual windows that you can select at will. Just try both variants and see which one you like best. And finally I tweaked the sizing of the windows so they should always be wide enough to show all info.
Now I am done with TmdbInfo. I think ... | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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TmdbInfo 2.9.1
Just a small tweak to make TV Show images load faster. | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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TmdbInfo 2.9.0
I hadn't planned on releasing a further update to TmdbInfo unless it was for bug fixes, but two things happened to make me change my mind.
First there was mediadogg's comment on the column width. I looked at it, and saw that it really needed to be fixed in order to make the info easier to read.
Then there was a feature that I had tried to implement, but never got to work the way I wanted. But I just happened to test this idea with Microsoft's AI agent, Microsoft Copilot, and it showed me a really elegant solution. So without any further ado, here is Cast gallery, available both for movies and for TV show episodes.
 | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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Thanks mediadogg.
Easy browsing among movies/tv shows and persons was my main objective. I wish it could have been done with IMDb, since their data is more extensive, but alas that’s virtually impossible. Still, TMDb gives us pretty good data. A bit sparse on older titles. I took a look at a show I watched here in Sweden when I was just a child, "Colonel Humphrey Flack" from 1953. Very little info. To be fair, IMDb doesn’t have a lot of info, either, but it has more. I guess the main reason is that you’ll have to find the show in order to transcribe the credits. Also, these old shows had pretty sparse credits to begin with.
Looking at Alicia, I can see why a wider info column would be useful. I shall definitely look into that! | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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TmdbInfo 2.8.0
Just a few new features and user interface improvements.
The search options have been expanded.
The number of movies and TV shows are shown in the Person window.
Where you would have to double click to open a link, there is now also a context menu item to do the same.
The default sorting in the various windows has been updated.
The help file has been updated, and includes a note about an anomaly in the TMDb search results. See the topic "Where to start." | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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You should use episode dividers both for the seasons and for the individual episodes.
That goes for both cast and crew. | Posted: Topic Replies: 11, Topic Views: 2033 |
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| An overview should describe the story of the film(s). This just describes the physical contents of the package. I'm not sure if I would call this a tagline, but it's not an overview, in my opinion. | Posted: Topic Replies: 5, Topic Views: 1384 |
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TmdbInfo 2.7.1
Fixed a problem with the country list for "Where to watch". | Posted: Topic Replies: 45, Topic Views: 7264 |
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Quoting WoJe:
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Incomplete: yes. But XSD can be used for code generation. Assumptions about me: false
The generated code wouldn’t be any more complete than the XSD, so you would have to modify it manually.
Since you don’t have a Profiler license, I assumed you were not familiar with the peculiarities of the Profiler export XML. Maybe I was mistaken. Anyway, good luck with your effort, whatever you need the XML for. | Posted: Topic Replies: 16, Topic Views: 3966 |
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Quoting WoJe:
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I use DVD Profiler XML built my own XSD now.
I don't think you appreciate how complex the Profiler XML is. Deconstructing a sample XML file into a schema will give you an uncomplete schema. It will almost certainly have minOccurs="0" for each node, and maxOccurs="unbounded" for nodes with child nodes. That would not reflect the true structure of a valid XML export.
An XML schema is meant for validation. It can only tell you if an XML document meets certain specifications. It doesn't tell you how to create an XML document that satisfies the requirements for a specific application.
I don't know how well mediadogg's BulkEdit plugin works in this regard, but it certainly seems like a much more likely way to succeed, and I know that mediadogg will help you in any way he can. But this does of course require that you buy a Profiler license, but that just $14.95 so if this is important for you, it's worth it. | Posted: Topic Replies: 16, Topic Views: 3966 |