How to import multiple IMDB links at once?

[ashcroft]

Hi there,

I'm seriously considering to buy DVDPedia as soon as I figure out how to import my existing movie database. Until now, I've been basically maintaining a number of text files with IMDB links. So all I want to do right now is to replicate these entries in DVDPedia in a serialized way. It would be totally sufficient if only titles and imdb-links were imported / re-created.

Here's an exemplary clipping from my text files:

---

Durst / Thirst / Bakjwi #vampire
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762073/

Drachenläufer (2007) - The Kite Runner
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419887/

Life in a Day - Ein Tag auf unserer Erde (2011) - IMDb #doku
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1687247/
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,766907,00.html

---

Now, the import assistant obviously can't process these data. If I choose "Edit > Paste", DVDPedia only processes the first entry. "Add multiple DVDs" also fails.

I would expect DVDPedia being able to extract all IMDB links contained in some text data and process them all by one. But I don't know how to get there. I don't think this can be so hard, since there are several extensions for Firefox and Chrome doing the same to open multiple links at once.

Anybody who can help me out? Thanks!

[Nora]

That's a very tricky thing to do... You could try to replace every other return for a tab or comma in an advanced text editor like BBEdit (if you can figure out a way to distinguish between the returns). Then the program would be able to import the file as a tab or comma delimited file and you could map the title and URL field to the correct fields.

[ashcroft]

Thanks for your reply!

Well, I've been thinking: "Surely it will be enough to import all IMDB links! That IMDB ID is the most unambiguous ID out there, so DVDPedia will be able take it from here!"

So with my limited search&replace skills I extracted some IMDB links and put them in a kind-of-CSV file like this:

----

IMDB-Link
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1174732/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490204/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0924129/
...

----

Upon import, DVDPedia creates entries for every line, unsurprisingly all with empty titles. [OBSOLETE] The actual problem now is that DVDPedia doesn't seem to be able to retrieve extended infos for these entries from IMDB.

I understand that DVDPedia actually only uses an entry's title field to search for extended info even if the IMDB field is already completed and explicitly directs to the correct title.

Do you guys think you could extend DVDPedia's functionality in this regard with the upcoming major update? From what I can see, DVDPedia is the most evolved movie manager for Mac out there. I would hate being scared away from it for the sole reason I can't easily migrate my long-time cultivated list of +2000 titles. From my amateur's p.o.v., it would take rather little effort to implement the required extensions. [/OBSOLETE]

And while I'm at it: I'd actually like it best if I could paste multiple IMDB links at once via clipboard to create new entries. My day-to-day use case scenario is that I have not only one but a couple of interesting links (recommendations by e-mail etc.) that I'd like to add to my wishlist in a single step. If the "Add multiple DVDs" dialog simply could interpret those (instead of names only), that would be great!

[ashcroft]

Okay, forget big parts of what I've been writing earlier. After fiddling around a little bit longer I just found that DVDPedia can retrieve extended info for multiple entries just fine IF the IMDB field actually contains only the ID (instead of a link).

So my import data now looks like this:

- [import.csv]--
IMDB
1438176
0816711
1605783
---

The working import procedure now looks like this:
a) Strip everything from the old data except IMDB IDs.
b) Use "File > Import" in DVDPedia.
c) Select all new entries in DVDPedia and run extended info retrieval.

I'm happy with that. One more thing: Extended info retrieval seems to download only data for fields which have been empty before. Maybe I'd like to update the ratings for a number of movies every once in a while. Is there a way to remove a single data for a selection of entries or delete all their extended info (without deleting the entries themselves or their IMDB IDs, of course)?

Thanks!

[Nora]

Glad to hear you figured out a way to import your data, thanks for sharing! DVDpedia will never overwrite data already present but if you want to update a field, simply delete the information in it and then do the advanced search to get the updated info again. You can do this for whole batches of entries too, just select all the entries you want to update, choose 'edit' from the menu bar and it'll bring up the multiple edit field where you can delete one (or more) fields for all the selected entries at once.

[ashcroft]

Thanks!