Tips & Tricks for Adding and Importing entries
You can update information for manually added entries as well. All the information the program needs to update an entry is the title. For greater accuracy and easier matching, it will also take the director and theatrical release field into account when doing a search on IMDb.
Remember that using the gear button in the edit window to update information will give you the option to review the data before adding it while using the 'Update from >' menu command found under the Movie menu will automatically download the information for the first result returned.
DVDpedia is part of the Services menu (found under the main menu of most applications) with a search option which means you can highlight text in a program and go into the program's main menu to choose Services > Search Selection with DVDpedia to start a search with your selected text in DVDpedia.
DVDpedia will accept any highlit text dragged over its dock icon to start a search, much like the Services menu option described above. (For example, you're reading an article online which mentions a movie you want to add to your wish list. Select the title, drag it over the DVDpedia icon in the dock and the search will start automatically.)
To make your search more successful, use the 'Limit To' drop down menu in the search window when available. (Not all search sites provide this option.) When set to "Title", for example, the search returns only results that match the title entered into the search field.
By default every search on Doghouse is an 'AND' search. If you want to modify this, use the following options:
OR = | , e.g. hello | world (search for 'hello' or 'world')
NOT = !, e.g. !world (search for hello without world)
FULL PHRASE = "", e.g. "hello world" (search for that exact phrase 'hello world')
FIELD START = ^, e.g. ^hello (find entries that start with 'hello')
FIELD END = $, e.g. world$ (find entries that end in 'world')
To add more than one result from the same search, go into the DVDpedia menu > Preferences and under the General tab uncheck the option to 'Return to search window automatically after add'. This will keep the add window open until you close it.
You can download crew data directly into specially named custom fields if you want to keep them apart from the general credit info list. Just change the title of the custom field to match the title on IMDb, i.e. "Cinematographer" or "Composer". The same is true for "Color" under the technical specs.
If you prefer seeing the Metacritic rating (as listed on IMDb) you can use the same trick with the custom fields. Name a field "Metacritic" and searching the IMDb site will download that information.
If you'd like to keep track of the height and width of your imported movie files, name two custom fields "Video Height" and "Video Width" and the program will add the information automatically to the fields when you import a movie.
DVDpedia can also import your file size and resolution info when you import movie files. Rename your custom fields "Megabytes" and "Resolution" to automatically add this info when you import a file. If there is no data specified the fields will remain empty. Note that when you're importing entries that are already in your DVDpedia database and you tell the import to skip those entries it will still update the info for the newly named custom fields.
Since searches by UPC (barcode) are much more accurate than searches by keyword, you can choose to have the program automatically add the first search result to the database, without reviewing it. To do that, go into the DVDpedia menu > Preferences and check the option "Add first search result automatically". This combined with the preference to "Return to search window automatically after add" speeds up your scanner/iSight searches greatly.
If at some point you want to disable the preference to add the first result temporarily (i.e. only for one search) hold down the Option key when you press the 'Search' button in the search window. This will override the 'first result' preference and give you the option to choose the result to add.
By default, DVDpedia checks for duplicates during scanning so that you don't accidentally add the same entry twice. Howerver if you want to add more than one copy of an entry via scanning (for example, for a lending library or video store), open the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and type in the line below, followed by a return:
defaults write com.bruji.dvdpedia "Scan Duplicates" -bool YES
If you'd rather not get any audible feedback from the scanner when an entry has been found in the background (that little 'ding' sound) you can turn this off by opening the application Terminal found in Applications/Utilities and typing in the line below, followed by a return:
defaults write com.bruji.dvdpedia "NoBeepOnAdd" -bool YES
If you have a built-in iSight but would prefer to use an external camera for scanning, plug in your camera and then press the 'iSight' button in the search window. This will bring up a dialogue where you can choose which camera to use for the future. If you want to change this setting at some point, hold down the Ctrl key and then press the 'iSight' button to bring up the dialogue again.
If you don't have much personal data to import from another program then a quick way to move your data into DVDpedia is to simply export the UPC or IMDb field as a tab or comma delimited file and paste that list into the 'Add multiple' feature in DVDpedia. This can also be done with only the Title field but the UPC or IMDb numbers will get you more accurate results when you search for advanced information.
Instead of choosing a site from the magnifying glass in the search window or the gear button in the Edit window, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-[digit] to choose the site. The digit depends on the order of your sites in the Preferences > Sites.
For example, if your sites are ordered like this in the Preferences:
Then a search on Doghouse would correspond to the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-1, a search on IMDb would correspond to Command-Control-2, a search on TMDb would correspond to Command-Control-3.
