* The Movieman places SpikyCactus on the Blocked Users list * 

Good thing you can't submit them to the online db! 

I bought about 12 digital movies last month on Amazon that were 99 cents each to own.

Some of them were released on Blu-ray & DVD, but I basically got them all free by applying my "No Rush Shipping" credits on them. Most of the movies I've never actually seen before, so I just treated them as rentals... and did even buy a couple of physical copies soon after!

* Shaking nervously at the prospect of incurring the wrath of our Titans (Movieman  ) *

In case someone is interested:

A couple of years ago (I think), I lobbied Ken for a way to incorporate "user defined profile IDs" into the database. Long story short - he did it.

So the database can handle a profile ID that starts with "_", followed by 15(?) other characters (don't remember the restrictions on the character set). This offers the opportunity for a whole class of semi-official profile IDs that can be created, that can never conflict with UPCs, manual IDs or Disc IDs. (Ken has also created an Alternate ID system, but I think those are always tied to official UPCs).

My original intent back then was to someday offer a plugin to allow the use of this hidden feature, and to also suggest some kind of naming scheme for encoding digital media, movies or whatever. Alas, based on my age, health and other factors, I doubt that I will ever follow through with that idea.

So, if there is anybody out there with plugin skills and a desire to mess with that feature, go ahead a take a whack - I have no plans!

Back when that feature was put in, a couple of us including DJ Doena did some testing, and I think we confirmed that those profiles behaved just like UPC/EAN profiles. You can use them and treat them like any other profiles, with cast, crew, images, reports, filters, flags, HTML sections, database backup/restore, etc. Not sure if they can be contributed or displayed online.

Just FYI.

Quoting Wigram:

Quote:
Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:
A couple of years ago (I think), I lobbied Ken for a way to incorporate "user defined profile IDs" into the database. Long story short - he did it.

So the database can handle a profile ID that starts with "_", followed by 15(?) other characters (don't remember the restrictions on the character set). This offers the opportunity for a whole class of semi-official profile IDs that can be created, that can never conflict with UPCs, manual IDs or Disc IDs.

Thanks for reminding us of this hidden feature ((link to your original post for ID format details). Anybody ever designed a way to easily create such profiles?

I just tested using BulkEdit to load XML. It mostly works. I would need to fix a couple of things if anybody wanted to use it more extensively. I could also fix the CSV Import to recognize the new format.

Edited: Some good news!

Minor Problem: No custom plugin exists, but BulkEdit can quickly create such profiles. A few bugs need to be fixed.

(Corrected) No problem: DVD Profiler will not save a cover image for these profiles (WRONG! just make sure that the profile id includes only windows compatible characters)

Minor problem: Online Collection only partially works. (WRONG! just make sure that the profile id includes only windows compatible characters). Only thing missing is cover image because the web site gets them from a cloud URL, not your hard drive.

Does anybody want me to make those relatively easy fixes to BulkEdit?

Here is a link to a sample exported XML file that BulkEdit can upload. It contains three profiles to "Wish List", one each for Netflix, VUDU and Amazon Prime. The URL for the movie is stored in My Links as a trailer, but f your browser cookies are set, you can actually play the movie from there. The sample XML uses  these profile IDs (edited to make compatible with windows file names):

Netflix Profile ID (sample format): _NFLIX=80119234
VUDU Profile ID (sample format): _VUDU=8739
Amazon Profile ID (sample format): _AMZN=B073RQ7KP4

Yes, locality can also be added.

Screen shot with cover scans pasted.

Screen shot of BulkEdit completed import. (Cover scans were added afterwards)