Awwwww, it's too hard. GIVE ME A BREAK, mh.

Skip

Skip, how long do you need to enter 50 cast members with their correct first, middle and last name and their role and their attributes (voice only, uncredited, credited as) in DVDP? My program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

How long do you need to check 100 listed crew members if they fit in one of the categories of DVDP, and then enter them correctly with first, middle and last name? Again, my program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

I didn't say it's TOO hard, but it sure is harder than clicking one button...

Again, I think it's the best possible starting point. There's no point in writing off existing information per hand.

Yesterday I updated about 100 of the DVDs in my DB, because your "great and perfect" online database was missing cast & crew either totally or big parts of it (especially for very new or region 2 DVDs, the online profiles are often lousy). Could you imagine how long it would have taken me to edit all this manually? With my program I was done in two hours. The results were great! I just had to adjust a few items manually.

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:

Tigi:

That's a different from what he is whining about,  btu Copy and Paste is better than nothing.

Skip

Actually no, Skip. We were talking about the same thing - having cast and crew credits per movie, not per DVD release. It would be great if every profile (no matter which locality) for a movie would link to the exact same film credits. That would also be good database design, btw.

The only problem, as I had pointed out, would be the rare case of localized credits.

Quoting MHoefler:

Quote:
Skip, how long do you need to enter 50 cast members with their correct first, middle and last name and their role and their attributes (voice only, uncredited, credited as) in DVDP? My program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

How long do you need to check 100 listed crew members if they fit in one of the categories of DVDP, and then enter them correctly with first, middle and last name? Again, my program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

I didn't say it's TOO hard, but it sure is harder than clicking one button...

Again, I think it's the best possible starting point. There's no point in writing off existing information per hand.

Yesterday I updated about 100 of the DVDs in my DB, because your "great and perfect" online database was missing cast & crew either totally or big parts of it (especially for very new or region 2 DVDs, the online profiles are often lousy). Could you imagine how long it would have taken me to edit all this manually? With my program I was done in two hours. The results were great! I just had to adjust a few items manually.

First, we are forbidden to use IMDB by Ken.  Period.

Second, don't blame DVDP for the lousy profiles.  YOU are a user, and users put those profiles in there.  If they're not right, it is the users fault, not the program.  BTW, I quit using IMDB years before I ever heard of Profiler because their data is so full of crap.  But you go ahead.  Sounds to me like you deserve each other.

Quoting MHoefler:

Quote:

Regarding IMDB: imho this is not "data scraping", because it's no robot that collects thousands of profiles to use them on another website or commercial application or something like that. It simply does what everybody does manually: writing off the cast and crew. The data must come from somewhere - you can not seriously ask from us to watch the end credits in slow motion to read and write off the credits?

Just because you don't believe it is 'data scraping' doesn't make it so.  This little program is a 'data gathering and extraction tool' which IMDb specifically says you can not use to copy their data.

Quote:
Nobody can forbid me to copy and paste the name of actors and crew members - after all it's not patented information and the end result will be the same if I copy them or write them manually.

Again, just because you don't think they can doesn't make it so.  As I said, if you want to use this tool, go right ahead.  What you should not have done is used Invelos as the site to distribute it to others.  Create your own site with your own forums and put your own butt on the line.  Leave Invelos out of the line of fire.

Quoting MHoefler:

Quote:
Skip, how long do you need to enter 50 cast members with their correct first, middle and last name and their role and their attributes (voice only, uncredited, credited as) in DVDP? My program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

How long do you need to check 100 listed crew members if they fit in one of the categories of DVDP, and then enter them correctly with first, middle and last name? Again, my program needs approx. 1 second! Manual review (and corrections if neccessary) afterwards takes about a minute.

I didn't say it's TOO hard, but it sure is harder than clicking one button...

Again, I think it's the best possible starting point. There's no point in writing off existing information per hand.

Yesterday I updated about 100 of the DVDs in my DB, because your "great and perfect" online database was missing cast & crew either totally or big parts of it (especially for very new or region 2 DVDs, the online profiles are often lousy). Could you imagine how long it would have taken me to edit all this manually? With my program I was done in two hours. The results were great! I just had to adjust a few items manually.

MH:

Under 3.0 a profile takes me an average of about 3 hours to complete, time well spent. And as I said, IMDb is the SINGLE most inaccurate source for data that there is, I would prefer to enter data from scratch than to unscramble the absolute mess that is typical of IMDb.

And to be clear you can scrape as much data as you want and use it locally, DO NOT CONTRIBUTE, KEEP IT OUT OF THE ONLINE. That way if you ever caught scraping data from IMDb its your baby to rock and not ours because you refused to follow the Rules, we have enough users doing that already. Perhaps you should read the IMDb Terms of service sometime, their data IS copyrighted and it is ILLEGAL to copy their data without permission.

Skip

mum the word, sh.

Problem is, that only about 10% of the online profiles are (almost) complete and (mostly) error free. 60% are quite usable (but far from perfect!) and the rest is lousy! Sorry to say that, but that's the truth, at least in my experience (RC2, German).

I DO NOT want to change or edit the 70% good ones! I just need a quick way to improve the 30% bad ones or add missing ones.

For me, collecting DVDs is a hobby, not a full time job. Some days I buy 10-15 and when I come home, I want to enter them in my database. But I will not spend 45 hours for that like Skip (great effort, congratulations!) - period! After all, the online database (which enables me to add titles to my collection quickly) was the main reason why I bought this program and not some other. I'm sure 99% of the people using DVDP think the same way. That's a fact, nothing more and nothing less.

So still, using IMDB data to turn an absolutely unusable online profile into something that quite accurately represents the DVD I've purchased, makes a lot of sense to me (and I'm sure to thousands of other users as well). However, I do not have the time to make each profile absolutely perfect, please understand this, but IMDB does get the most important cast and crew members correct and that's the important fact for me.

So why not give the users a way of quickly importing movies without much hassle? If everybody thinks the data is not good enough for online contribution (which is not true, btw.) then ok, disable the contribution button or something like that. It would also be nice to have some flags for each profile, like "Verified", "Complete", etc. This would make it much easier to choose from the available profiles and to check which ones need improvement. BTW, the bad bad IMDB does feature this!

Why does everybody keep saying "no", "it's not allowed", "my momma told me not to", etc. instead of thinking about ways to improve the current situation? The quality of the online contributions is a problem. Some kind of automation can make it better! If everybody quit complaining about the bad bad IMDB and instead use some energy to find a good way of using existing resources, the project would actually move ahead and we would all profit from a better online database.