IMDB.com (default info grabber)

[s7oneyuk]

roopert, This is actually due to a change that imdb have done fairly recently i think. They basically hide some of the plot from the title main page so as to avoid any spoliers. Let me have a look at what can be done to overcome this. Might slowdown the grabbing process as we might have to scrape the details from several sub pages for each movie. I much prefer the movie-xml approach to grabbing details - dont like all this source screen scraping business we do for imdb - but the imdb content is more rich and accurate.

to answer your other question - i think the answer is no. Once you are in the GetDetails function of the grabber routine, there is no way to prompt for the summary information you want to display from a pick list. Let me work on pulling the full summary from imdb when the spoiler alerts are seen which should be enough for you. Of course, you can always have multiple grabber scripts selected in your configuration and if you don't like the content from the 1st one you could select the second etc.

[roopert]

True.
The movie-XML site is getting more members as we speak and soon pretty much of the information we be very accurate. The only issue is the escape character problem, if you can fix this, then we got a very good script. Keep up the good work

[ltfearme]

Is there any way when using this script to force the 'Search for Images' functionality to also get posters from Movie-XML?

[s7oneyuk]

the "Search for Images" function has hardcoded references to Amazon and IMPAwards - not sure of any way to add additional sites to this logic. as for the escape character problem with the moviexml script - i'll get on it.

[emphatic]

s7oneyuk: I tried your script last night and the search results were much better than with the built in script. However, some titles (remakes) were a bit tricky to get.

For example "Assault On Precinct 13" only showed the remake from 2005, and I wanted the info for the 1976 version. So I had to change the title to assault. And for "Sleuth" I wanted the remake from 2007, but instead only got the 1972 version. And there's not really much you can do about a title with just one word. I'm guessing "Alfie" would be another problematic title.

Maybe I'm missing some setting for what titles to show? I'm gonna add the regular script back as a backup option for now, just to get Sleuth 2007 into my database.

This script is awesome, thanks.
Emph

[s7oneyuk]

ok - i might change the script to help with this. Currently it will only add the files that are listed as "popular titles" to the list of files. In the examples you give this means you are getting the 2005 remake of assault on precinct 13 only - however under "exact matches" it also lists the 1976 version. I'll change the script to include all the "popular" titles along with the "exact matches" titles in the list - this should improve the selection process for you and enable you to select the version you want.

[gamejester]

Nice script good work.

roopert - Had a bit more of a look into matching local files to see how this is stored in the database.
It looks like the only thing held in the DB is a URL to the location where the file was ripped from, it is then copied to the \MP\Thumbs\Videos\Title dir and named $Title$L.jpg; MP then looks for a file of this name to display when you show IMDB information on a movie. (corret me if I am wrong as I am not at home so not opened up the code).

So if you have have high res local covers (that are better than those on movies-xml ), there seem to be a few options:

1. Copy them up to movies-xml so everyone can make use of them
2. I (we) create a sctipt that looks locally in the movie DIR and sets the movieDetails.ThumbURL to a local folder location - but we would need to test that this is handled by MP ok.
3. If 2 is a no go, add a section to the script that pre-copies the .jpg from your folder to the thumbs folder (and re-names) before a movieDetails.ThumbURL search is performed and skip it; this should then just pick up the locally moved file.

If we are going to cope with local files may I suggest we support two formats.

1. Movie in its own folder
\your media\movies\whatever\The Matrix\anything.jpg

and

2. all moveis in the same folder
\your media\movies\whatever\The Matrix.avi
\your media\movies\whatever\The Matrix.jpg

Also we've been working over at the meedios forums on adding support for mistakes, quotes, dvdids, allmovieids and trivia.

This stuff is also available on IMDB; but to support it we would need to add a few more fields to the movieinfo table in the DB.

Does anyone want this stuff?
and if so if I(we) where to add it does anyone know which coder maintains the videos part of MP as I do not want to tred on anyones toes + as videos is a core part of MP I assume as we are going for a stable release, now is not the right time to add this.

The other thing that could be done to enhance the videos info is file information, like you get from My TV series (HD 720P, 5.1 sound, etc...).
If we are going to extend the movieinfo table to incorportate extra IMDB info we might as well do the files table at the same time to incorporate videoWidth, videoHeight, videoCodec, videoBitrate, etc...
We can then use MediaInfo.dll (like MyTVSeries) to populate that info into the table.
This would be pretty streight forward as others have alreay done all the coding work but on its own would not be any good as GUI changes would have to incorportated and skin changes to read the new values...........so a fair amount of work there I guess.

[Sutekh]

Hi All,

I just started playing with the csscript method outlined in this thread and seem to have found a major problem with it. That is, MP is filtering the search string before passing it to the csscript's exposed methods. Looking for the movie "Bruiser (2000)" as my files are named in IMDB directly, or passing it via the URL - "http://us.imdb.com/Tsearch?title=Bruiser (2000)" - brings the correct match. However, using MP, it must use some sort of regular expression filter on my files turning "Bruiser (2000)" into "bruiser" - lowercase and without the year. This now brings back all sorts of horrible matches.

How do I force MP to NOT filter my search queries? That is something that should be left in the customising of csscript files. I am a confident C# developer, is this something I can change myself?

Simon

[s7oneyuk]

Sutekh, this is IMDB not doing a very good job on the matching of film names. Currently if you seach for "assault on precinct 13 (1976)" it will still report the popular title as "assault on precinct 13 (2005)" - so the addition of the year is pretty pointless (and the title you have as your example brings back some really weird suggestions ). in the version of the script i am writing at the moment i will strip any years from the title name to search for and will also bring back the list of films from both the popular list and the exact title list. This should fix your issues.

[gamejester]

yeah IMDB search is a bit off!
You where searching for
"http://us.imdb.com/Tsearch?title=Bruiser (2000)"
Which did bring back the correct films, however this cannot be used generically as it is a category 'all' search, whereas we need to perform a 'title' specific search so that we can fall back from 'popular' to 'exact' to 'partial' etc....

If you perform this search again, with or without the year, specifying title in the drop down it produces the same results as the csharp script; ie pull sin the weird popular titles................Bruiser is just an anomoly.

IMDb Title Search

FYI - the info in IMDB is less accurate now than that in movie-xml IMHO as there has been a massive db update recently; try using that search and you get bruiser back first time.