DVD Catalog/Publish with EMDB

1. Description
2. Process/Implementation
3. Tuning / Customization

Description

This page basically describes how I catalog and publish DVD's. I used to use DVD Profiler, and was very hapy with it. However, over time they decided to charge for collections over 50 dvd's. That wont cut it for me. So the search began. This was a while ago actually, and somehwere in my blog, Im sure that data is listed. I did a bake-off, and ultimately settled in on DVD-Attache. And for the most part, its good. There are some issues I'd like to see fixed, and I wish the HTML reporting were better - but it is free, and it does work.

Note that my requirements are not TOO heavy, but are key ones. I need to see the dvd cover image, have some plot summary, and allow some sort of new-title-search. But also *very* important is to be able to export to an html page. That last feature is the one that rules most products out.

So after updating my collection over the last few days - and adding some 100 missing titles, I decided to search for an alternative. I found something that has some promise. Its calle "Eric's Movie DataBase" or EMDB - version 0.62. This page describes how to get that online, and how to convert the 347 title collection from DVD-Attache to this.

Process/Implementation

There were actually very few steps to get this going. Its bascially download, configure, and use. So without further ado, here are the steps :

Download the EMDB Software.
Extract the emdp.zip somewhere - I chose my c:\install\DVD\emdb folder.
Double click on the setup.exe file to have it begin setup.
Basically, pick the destination folder, choose quick launch and desktop icons, and let 'er rip.

That basically gets the product installed. Now we need to populate it. For me, in my situation, its a highly modified export from DVD-Attache, and an import into EMDB. So follow these steps :

Launch DVDAttache, and exported to html
Launch Excel, and open the index.html that we exported
Format the first column (dvd title) as text, with no wrap
Save it as CSV type (I chose "dvd_titles.csv")

Because Im a Unix/Linux bigot, I did some additional parsing in the shell, because I learned from my first failed import, that there is some additional text manipulation that saves a ton of work. So I did the following :

cat dvd_titles.csv  | sed -e 's/(.*)//' -e 's/\"//' -e 's/,.*//' -e 's/Collectors Edition//' -e 's/Special Edition//' -e 's/WideScreen//' -e 's/FullScreen//' > dvd_titles_filtered.txt

With that out of the way now, we have a few more edits - if there is anything left in your titles like dashes, quotes, "... editions", or other - try to strip it out. That way you can use the automation features. Failure to do that causes the updater to choke in the extra characters, and forces manual updates only. So that being said, we can resume where we left off ...

Launch the new EMDB v0.62
Click on Options, then Import - and import the new text file (former csv) - choose to "replace"

It will very quickly import the titles, since thats all we have (no other columns in our export file)
Click the Options again, then General - and click on the "IMDB Update for all movies".

This will automate a search of each and every title against IMDB's list - and see if there are matches it can use to pull in plot summaries, casting, and all kinds of other info. Note that anything that causes a title to fail matching here, causes this to stop the automation. Also, if you have any gaps in the numbering, that causes issue. In my 347 titles, I had removed title 49 after realizing that it would cause issue. That causes my collection to abort the IMDB refresh at less than 25% through. So I built a dummy back in as title 49 and that helped. But it can be a challenge.

Now its time for the html export. So lets do that now :

Go into Options
Select Export
Set the html area to "5" latest additions
Finally click generate

That creates an html file (and subdirectories to hold the images and sub pages) in the area where the application is installed (in my case "c:\apps"). Then just copy that over to the web server, and its good to go. Note that it makes for about a 4mb copy, with ~350 titles.

One important point - since this uses IMDB for its "data source", you wont get different covers for "Platinum Edition", "Special Edition", "Widescreen", "Flatscreen", or other types of special sets. You basically just get the title of the movie, and whatever the original cover of release was. Its acceptable enough though, because the generated html pages are quite nice and make up for it.

NOTE : I did lose a few titles that IMDB doesnt know about - like "Shania Twains Platinum Edition", but thats ok for now.

Tuning / Customization

At this point, I dont have alot of customization tips, since I've only been using it for a little while so far. But its got promise from what I can tell. So if you have the password to my private site, you can compare the results :

Oh wait - there is one customization tip - I do edit the "index.htm" thats generated, and update so that I remove "Eric's" name from the page, and put in my own - since its my page. I also remove "EMDB" as the title, and replace with "My DVD Collection". But each time the html is generated, it has to be done again.

So here are some shots of the html and a few of the features.