Bruji

Hi Conor, Nora,

I add my movies using IMDb as the principal source. Occasionally, I use Amazon as well - for example, Amazon UK has the correct British Board of Film Classification ratings for the UK. So my normal workflow when adding a movie is to initially use IMDB, then to delete the Rated field and run a Get Advanced Info (or use the gear wheel in the Edit pane) to bring the Rated field info in from Amazon UK.

Unfortunately this has a catastrophic side effect: on the Amazon UK pass, additional Credits information is added to the Credits. The problem is, the Credit information from Amazon is of poor quality and often just incorrect, or it will give the Actor's name but not the Role played. And because it ADDS the data to the existing correct IMDb credit data, it results in a mess.

I'm not sure what the solution to that might be - but this is what I have just had to do: I ran a global edit across all my movies to delete the Rated field and then used Amazon UK just on that one field to add the correct UK rating for every movie. So far so good. Then I noticed the problem I described above and on going (manually) through the entire database I found it affected about 210 movies. I thought "no problem - I will do a global delete of the credits in those movies and then re-add them using IMDb" but of course there is no global delete for the Credits or Links fields. I had to go through all 210 movies and delete the credits manually and then globally re-add them using IMDb! it took a while!

So, is there a) a potential solution to the problem or b) is it possible to add a global delete of the credits field?

Many thanks for listening.

Kind regards,

Keith

The credits are built to get the most information possible. It matches incoming information to the present information, adding missing roles to actors without them. Amazon not having roles should not be an issue as they can be filled later. In your case because IMDb was the first search, then the actors from Amazon should be ignored as they should match actors in the present credits. Amazon having incorrect actor names or a different spelling would be an issue as that would seem to DVDpedia to be a new actor. But actor names are quite standard due to the actors guild, could you let me know some of the movies that this was an issue for so I can try it out. If there are any misspelled actors from Amazon they should be easy to spot as they would have no role and be at the end of the credit list. So although I don't think a global delete of credits will be necessary, it is an interesting idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

Conor wrote:The credits are built to get the most information possible. It matches incoming information to the present information, adding missing roles to actors without them. Amazon not having roles should not be an issue as they can be filled later. In your case because IMDb was the first search, then the actors from Amazon should be ignored as they should match actors in the present credits. Amazon having incorrect actor names or a different spelling would be an issue as that would seem to DVDpedia to be a new actor. But actor names are quite standard due to the actors guild, could you let me know some of the movies that this was an issue for so I can try it out. If there are any misspelled actors from Amazon they should be easy to spot as they would have no role and be at the end of the credit list. So although I don't think a global delete of credits will be necessary, it is an interesting idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

Conor, thanks for this. It's odd. I have just tried adding a couple of movies at random using IMDb first and then a second pass from Amazon UK and there has been no issue at all. I wonder if something has changed from way back - I've been using DVDpedia for a while now, and it may be that the movies affected were added some time ago and something at either Amazon and IMDb has changed. Either way, I cannot reproduce the problem now when adding new movies! What I was getting were some Actors' names but no role, some Actors duplicated but one would be without a role and in some cases there would be the names of three principal actors all together in one Field, eg "Robert De Niro Al Pacino Val Kilmer" like that all on one line - more like it would be from a 'starring' info source.

I've just had a thought and tried something else and this may explain it. If I add a Movie via IMDB I will get a US ASIN number from IMDb. If I then do a UK Amazon pass, that ASIN may well be different, and so may the UPC too - would that matter? In the past I used to add movies via Amazon in the first pass and then via IMDb in the second pass. I stopped doing this when Amazon became stupidly intransigent over Pocketpedia and I discovered that if I used IMDb as the primary source, my Pocketpedia still worked properly (Pocketpedia2). So this might explain the issues I was having.

Certainly I can confirm now that if I add first via IMDb and then a second pass from Amazon UK, the credits are not affected in any way. I'm sorry to have troubled you with this unnecessarily. It was only an issue for me because I updated the entire database in one go and ended up with over 200 movies that had strange entries in the credits. Adding new movies isn't an issue anyway because it's easy to make small changes if anything odd shows up. Currently, the state of my database is exactly how I want it!

EDIT: Found one that gets it wrong - Kick-Ass - this adds the actor "Nicholas Cage" from Amazon UK whereas of course he is called "Nicolas". Not the issue I was experiencing - they weren't all misspellings AFAICT, but something to look out for as you say.

Kind regards,

Keith

No problem. The US ASIN would not have caused any problems with the credits, as it would cause the search to fail on the lookup at Amazon UK. DVDpedia would fail to download both any extra credits or the UK rating that you wanted to add with the Amazon search pass. But as you mentioned you been a DVDpedia user for a very long time, so there might be a small difference in older entries that we are overlooking. I myself can't remember all the changes since 3.6, let alone before that. Keep an eye on it and if you get the same issue in the future let me know.

The misspelling would be an issue, bad on Amazon for not knowing the man's name. The good news with that it Amazon information is easy to spot as they would be missing a role, since Amazon does not carry that information.

Conor wrote:No problem. The US ASIN would not have caused any problems with the credits, as it would cause the search to fail on the lookup at Amazon UK. DVDpedia would fail to download both any extra credits or the UK rating that you wanted to add with the Amazon search pass. But as you mentioned you been a DVDpedia user for a very long time, so there might be a small difference in older entries that we are overlooking. I myself can't remember all the changes since 3.6, let alone before that. Keep an eye on it and if you get the same issue in the future let me know.

The misspelling would be an issue, bad on Amazon for not knowing the man's name. The good news with that it Amazon information is easy to spot as they would be missing a role, since Amazon does not carry that information.

Hi Conor,

I've done some work on this, and there *is* a problem but its not Bruji's fault! What's happening is I get the Credits from IMDb and then I do a second pass getting further info from Amazon UK. This then adds spurious names to the Credits list. As you say, it appends them to the end of the Credits and has Actors' names but no roles as Amazon does not carry role info. This happens on about 15% of my movies. What is happening is this:

1. In a lot of cases, the Actors added by Amazon are in the movie but are not in the principal credits on IMDb. As you know, unless you set it otherwise, DVDpedia brings in the first slug of Credit names from IMDb, not the entire Cast. These Actors are added by Amazon without a role, at the end of the Credits in DVDpedia.

2. Surprisingly perhaps, IMDb does not always include obvious actors in that abbreviated list - possibly because they are using the cast names in the order they appeared in the movie credits. So, for example, Jack Nicholson is NOT listed in the IMDb abbreviated credits for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but he IS listed at Amazon as an actor, but without a role. So he gets added at the end. Similarly, Kevin Spacey is not included in the abbreviated credits list on IMDb for the movie Se7en but again Amazon lists him, without a role, at the end of the Credits.

3. Sometimes Amazon just adds the names of Actors who are not actually in the movie at all. IOW, just a simple error.

4. Sometimes Amazon spells the Actor's name wrongly. For example, they sometimes spell Nicolas Cage as Nicholas Cage. In this case the incorrect entry gets appended to the Credits in DVDpedia. Also, Amazon does not include accents in names so it adds Penelope Cruz whereas IMDB correctly lists her as Penélope Cruz with an accent on the second letter 'e'. These are again, just errors on Amazon's part.

5. Sometimes Amazon gets confused with Chinese names and will list Gong Li as Li Gong, and again he gets added to the end of the Credits.

6. Sometimes Amazon will add the names of three actors in one line - eg Al Pacino|Robert de Niro|Val Kilmer - with the | symbol separating the names. This appears to be entirely random.

The problem this causes is that once I have added Credit information from IMDb, I cannot then do a second pass using Amazon info (say for UK BBFC classification data) because the Credits then get mashed in at least 15% of my database entries. The only way to correct these mashed entries is to go through the entire database looking for them and then correct them manually because there is no global delete of Credits in DVDpedia. Any second pass from Amazon will always append spurious and unwanted data to the end of the Credits. Obviously, I want Credits information from IMDb as they include roles (and are way more accurate than Amazon). But also I do want some info from Amazon UK - especially the BBFC movie classifications which are totally different to US MPAA classifications.

Life is complicated isn't it? Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how to overcome this problem?

Kind regards,

Keith

It's unfortunate that Amazon has so much incorrect information. I thought about adding a global delete of the credits, but no matter where I try to stick it (a command, in the edit multiple window) it complicates the UI and could lead to confusion. So for now I have created a plug-in that will add a menu command to the plug-in menu named "Remove All Credits". You need to download beta 14 and then you can download the remove credits plug-in and unzip and double click it to install into ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia/Plug-ins. Restart DVDpedia and then you can use the remove credits on a selection to be able to repopulate credits from IMDb.

Conor wrote:It's unfortunate that Amazon has so much incorrect information. I thought about adding a global delete of the credits, but no matter where I try to stick it (a command, in the edit multiple window) it complicates the UI and could lead to confusion. So for now I have created a plug-in that will add a menu command to the plug-in menu named "Remove All Credits". You need to download beta 14 and then you can download the remove credits plug-in and unzip it and drop it into ~/Library/Application Support/DVDpedia/Plug-ins (create the Plug-ins folder if necessary). Restart DVDpedia and then you can use the remove credits on a selection to be able to repopulate credits from IMDb.

Conor - that is wonderful - thanks so much.

Please be aware that I am now running Beta 14, so if we can fix this issue of the program hanging on a global IMDb records update, please don't remove my new-found wonder plug-in that lets me delete Credits at will!

Kind regards,

Keith

I am constantly improving the plug-in interface. So the new technology will stay in and will be part of the next official release, even thought it might only be used by the remove credits plug-in. So upgrade to beta 15 without worries to fix the hang.

Conor wrote:I am constantly improving the plug-in interface. So the new technology will stay in and will be part of the next official release, even thought it might only be used by the remove credits plug-in. So upgrade to beta 15 without worries to fix the hang.

Hi Conor, the Beta 15 is updating IMDb even from Smart Collections, to perfection. The 'Remove All Credits' plug-in is working brilliantly. What can I say? Thanks so much for fixing not one but two problems of mine, both in the same day.

Kind regards,

Keith

For anybody using CDpedia there now is a companion Remove Tracks version, unzip and double click to install.