Can you create new Standard Media Types for the following?:

Digital HD
  Ultraviolet
  iTunes

Digital Copy

These would really help because there's no way to transfer a custom media type from the desktop, up to the on-line, and back down to a portable device.

Thank you for your consideration.

Lack of UltraViolet and Disney Movies Anywhere support is definitely a problem that will only get bigger as time goes by. iTunes, Amazon Video and Google Play Video can be thrown in there as well. The fact is that a lot of content is moving to the cloud and disc use is tapering off and users need a way to catalog these movies. There are two reasons for this:

1) Many people have movies both on disc and in the cloud
2) Many people have movies in the cloud through more than one licensing scheme

This makes it difficult to put together a consolidated inventory, so you can figure out what you have and where it is. I now have over a thousand movies in the cloud and less than 500 exclusively on disc. I have at least a few hundred movies both in the cloud and on Blu-Ray. Right now, the only option for handling all this is Excel.

What you need to do is generate a durable surrogate key for each movie based on a composite key. One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key. All you would have to do to generate the key would be to do a select distinct on Title, Year of Release and Studio and then create a Cartesian product of that, Format (SD/HD) and Provider (iTunes, UV, Vudu, etc.). The resulting generated key would be unique and your problem would be solved.

This is what happens when you talk to an enterprise data architect about unique identifiers.

Quoting scurtis_34471:

Quote:
One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key

Well, that sounds great, except... If you have followed the forums for any lenght of time you should know that there are often confusions or disagreements about the following:
- Name, for example "T4xi" or "Taxi 4", "Ghosts of Mars" or "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars", etc.
- Year of Release; Festival showings or theatrical showings
- Studio name, for example MGM or Metro Goldwyn Mayer or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Fortunately many of these are settled by the rules or by built-in contribution filters, but it just goes to show that uniqueness may not be as easy to achive as you think.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
Quoting scurtis_34471:

Quote:
One thought would be Title, Year of Release, Studio, Format and Provider. That should provide a unique key

Well, that sounds great, except... If you have followed the forums for any lenght of time you should know that there are often confusions or disagreements about the following:
- Name, for example "T4xi" or "Taxi 4", "Ghosts of Mars" or "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars", etc.
- Year of Release; Festival showings or theatrical showings
- Studio name, for example MGM or Metro Goldwyn Mayer or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Fortunately many of these are settled by the rules or by built-in contribution filters, but it just goes to show that uniqueness may not be as easy to achive as you think.

This is a classic master data management problem that can be fixed with a little data governance and the right software.

I'm not claiming it is necessarily simple. I'm mostly just being a huge data geek, since that's what I do.

Another hidden enhancement is just waiting to be exploited. At developer request, the profiler database now supports custom Profile IDs! This feature has been tested to at least know that they can be created, saved and restored with the database, without crashing the main program. These new profile ID classes support locality as well.

But no plugin has yet to be released to support it, although I and maybe others have some ideas on the drawing board. What is needed is a creative person to lead an effort to guide the developers on what to implement.

What could be done with it:

- new classes of profile IDs could be created, that serve as valid keys in the DVDP database
- examples might be media-related keys, movie keys, etc.

The major limitation is that all these custom keys must start with an Invelos mandated prefix, "_". This now reduces the profile ID by 1 character.

The next issue, is that so far we have no rules for how to fill out the rest. This would be the best way to move forward, so that more than one plugin could recognize and use the new profile IDs.

We had a thread long ago where some suggestions were made along those lines. What I mean is something like (by example, this is NOT a proposal):

_F for films, or movies. This leaves 14 characters plus locality to create unique IDs
_M for music. Same thing, you have 14 characters plus locality to create a unique ID.
_V for videos or VHS maybe. Maybe the UPC would follow, if you can fit into 14 characters

For those of you who don't know, today's database keys (20 bytes max) are restricted to:

Manual profile ID: M[Number].Locality
Disc ID: I[Disc ID].Locality
UPC/EAN: [UPC].Locality
Alternate UPC: V[Encoded ID].Locality      (used only by plugins and internally within DVDP)
Custom profile ID: _[custom ID].Locality  (not yet being used)

I believe that Encoded ID and custom ID can both be:
"base-64 encoded, so can contain numbers, upper and lower case letters, as well as '_' and '-'" (also see Ken's note following)

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
But no plugin has yet to be released to support it, although I and maybe others have some ideas on the drawing board. What is needed is a creative person to lead an effort to guide the developers on what to implement.

A group effort on a plugin?  That's an interesting idea.  Could be a fun project to work on.  If this ever gets going, I'll sign up.

Now that BulkEdit has the ability to create custom IDs easily, I have been thinking about some prefixes I want to use, so I will share them in case I get some other ideas. The prefix would be followed by a unique code that is valid in the associated environment. Some of these could have longer aliases when the movie ID is known to be short enough to fit. For example, _YT could easily be _youtube since the movie codes are relatively short.

__  (double underscore - suggested to reserve this prefix for plugins internal use)
_NX (Netflix)
_VD (VUDU)
_ID  (IMDB)
_.EXT (where "EXT" is replaced with actual file extensions, such as _.AVI, _.WMV, _.ISO, _.MPG, etc.
_AZ (Amazon Prime)
_MA (Movies Anywhere)
_IT (iTunes)
_HL (Hulu)
_VM (Vimeo)
_YU (Youtube)
_SL (SlingTV)
_DT (DirectTV)

....

Any and all comments welcome.

Just as with Custom Fields (see SideCar and Alternate Titles plugins), this information can be stored and manipulated within the local database, but as yet cannot be contributed.

Some previous thoughts on this topic.