DVD collection

[rabbitslayer]

I have seen a bunch of old posts around here that talk about old STVs out there to import either DVD Profiler or Cayars STV for DVD ripping and such...

I just got enough room that I feel comfortable ripping DVDs to my HD.

What is the best process out there? I know the SageTV Apendix I that will play dvds that you directly copy from the DVD. But, I like the idea of having the same amount of information on my recordings as I would on my DVDs. Is DVD Profiler my best option?

What other options are out there for storing DVDs and grabbing good information for display in the Sage menu?

I also use SageMC BTW... I know that might make a difference.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by rabbitslayer

...I just got enough room that I feel comfortable ripping DVDs to my HD. What is the best process out there?

Rip DVD (I use DVD Decrypter and DVD2One but there are many options)
Put the resulting files in a movie folder (this folder will be a video import folder)
So for each movie you'll have the following folder:

\\movietitle1\video_ts\

And in that video_ts folder you'll have all of the ripped DVD files including the vob, ifo etc files

Originally Posted by rabbitslayer

I like the idea of having the same amount of information on my recordings as I would on my DVDs. Is DVD Profiler my best option?

Yes DVDProfiler is the best option imo. Mainly because it works best with SageMC.

What other options are out there for storing DVDs and grabbing good information for display in the Sage menu?

You could just do a IMDB search from SageMC, but it's not my preferred way of doing this.

Hope that helps

[Addict]

Does DVD Profiler automatically parse a directory of ripped DVDs and apply data to them? I would really rather avoid digging up UPCs or manually entering all of them.

How frequently does SageMC check the DVD Profiler data and update itself?

Thanks...

AL

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Addict

Does DVD Profiler automatically parse a directory of ripped DVDs and apply data to them? I would really rather avoid digging up UPCs or manually entering all of them.

No it doesn't unfortunately. You have to manually enter them, enter the UPC or put the DVD in the drive and let DVD Profiler decide what movie it is based on that. I WISH it could do this or better yet if SageMC could do it

How frequently does SageMC check the DVD Profiler data and update itself?

I'm honestly not sure - I have a feeling it doesn't update itself automatically so I do it manually whenever I add a new movie.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Brent

No it doesn't unfortunately. You have to manually enter them, enter the UPC or put the DVD in the drive and let DVD Profiler decide what movie it is based on that. I WISH it could do this or better yet if SageMC could do it

The ideal solution IMO would be for the STV (whichever) to query the online DVD Profiler database, however to the best of my knowledge, there's no way to do that.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Brent

No it doesn't unfortunately. You have to manually enter them, enter the UPC or put the DVD in the drive and let DVD Profiler decide what movie it is based on that. I WISH it could do this or better yet if SageMC could do it

Originally Posted by stanger89

The ideal solution IMO would be for the STV (whichever) to query the online DVD Profiler database, however to the best of my knowledge, there's no way to do that.

That would be nice, but unless someone does a screen-scraper I can't see that working.

The way Beyond Media's DVDLibrary plugin worked you put your movie files and folders in the "video" directories and clicked on a "search for new movies". It then would search for any movie file/folder that had no cover or metadata. For all of those found, it would update them with the data found on the net. I'm thinking it mostly used IMDB for metadata and IMDB, Amazon and a few other places for covers. You could optionally verify each match or let it automatically match them all up and then review to be sure it didn't mismatch anything. The main difference from the existing SageMC IMDB search is that it worked on an entire collection at a time and only added those that hadn't been updated with metadata & covers yet.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Brent

That would be nice, but unless someone does a screen-scraper I can't see that working.

There's nothing to scrape, DVD Profiler isn't a website, it's a program/"data service". The only thing that makes it sub-optimal is that the "data service"
is only accessible via the DVD Profiler app. Unfortunately nobody else has the same sort of data with the same sort of completeness/quality in a directly downloadable form.

It's really meant to track your owned DVDs, and specifically DVDs (they've added HD DVD and Blu-ray now too), and not just as a "movie database" like IMDB. One of the biggest differences is that means that it tracks things like which audio tracks are on the movie, length, DVD release date, specific release cover art, etc. For me, that's a great advantage because while for movies I rip movie-only, I do treat them as "DVDs" on my server, and I want the release-specific metadata associated with it.

Of course that also means it's a multi-step, manual process to incorporate the metadata. You need to tell DVD Profiler about your DVDs (scanning the UPCs is the easiest and fastest way) after which it retrieves the latest info on the release (including cover art), then you need to export the database to a useable XML file, and finally have Sage import the data from the XML file.

It's not the one step "click it and go" solution many want, but I use DVD Profiler to track my DVDs anyway, and I don't rip on my HTPC, so for me the only extra step is the XML export.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by stanger89

There's nothing to scrape, DVD Profiler isn't a website, it's a program/"data service". The only thing that makes it sub-optimal is that the "data service"
is only accessible via the DVD Profiler app. Unfortunately nobody else has the same sort of data with the same sort of completeness/quality in a directly downloadable form.

I guess I was thinking you were talking about the user pages such as this one which you could scrape right? Now that I think about it though, I'm not sure this would eliminate any steps so never mind...

It's really meant to track your owned DVDs, and specifically DVDs (they've added HD DVD and Blu-ray now too), and not just as a "movie database" like IMDB. One of the biggest differences is that means that it tracks things like which audio tracks are on the movie, length, DVD release date, specific release cover art, etc. For me, that's a great advantage because while for movies I rip movie-only, I do treat them as "DVDs" on my server, and I want the release-specific metadata associated with it.

Understood. I just see a big benefit to have a more simple import process. Don't get me wrong, I love what I have. I just sort of miss the one click and your done import I had with Beyond Media.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Brent

I guess I was thinking you were talking about the user pages such as this one which you could scrape right? Now that I think about it though, I'm not sure this would eliminate any steps so never mind...

Well you could, but then you'd have to have a list of user's pages to try, because odds are there isn't a collection out there that has all the same movies you do, there certainly isn't a collection that has every movie everyone has.

Understood. I just see a big benefit to have a more simple import process. Don't get me wrong, I love what I have. I just sort of miss the one click and your done import I had with Beyond Media.

Wasn't saying it was optimal, just sort of explaining why DVD Profiler is the way it is. It wasn't designed to be use the way we're using it. If there were a way to connect to the DVD Profiler database directly, that would be great, but AFAIK that interface isn't publicly documented.

[rabbitslayer]

So it sounds like DVD Profiler is bet for the metadata on the DVDs... that is what I was assuming.

I was using DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to the HD... Since I am using an external dvd player (zoom) will the movies in the import directory load in that?

[QueOnda]

I've been looking at my movies 2 using the database portion of it, instead of DVD Profiler.
I just don't understand how to get info into sagetv. My movies 2 can export to xml. Please point me in the right direction

[stanger89]

AFAIK, there's nothing for Sage that understands the MyMovies format (unless it happens to write a format compatible with DVD Profiler's XML).

[stuckless]

That would be nice, but unless someone does a screen-scraper I can't see that working.

The Batch Metadata tool includes a screen scraper metadata service for dvd profiler urls. It can be configured with multiple urls, so in theory, if you collected enough urls, you could do fairly well on the matches.