Writing a film identifying application, thoughts appreciated
Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2018 10:42 am
Hello all, first i would like to wholeheartidly thank the OSdb developers for your great work with this open database, and especially the video hash feature, it has been more useful to me (and thousands other users) that one could imagine.
Currently (and thanks to your API), my application can identify the user's (mostly .avi) films and download details for them (from IMDb), and also download posters, backdrop art (for the HTPC frontend) background, and of course synchronized subtitles in the language of his/her choosing.
But something's still missing from the whole picture, and i think your database is the only open database in the world which (with a small modifying) can provide the whole set of benefits of video hash identifying.
So let me explain: Currently the benefit a user has from linking a unique hash to his/her video fils, is that he/she can download perfectly synced subtitles for this film, and that's great.
But there's another benefit the video hash feature can provide: identify a movie from it's video hash and download details for it without requiring the user to provide any info for this film to the program.
You may wonder of course why one would want to download details for a film without providing it's name to the application.
The answer is this: An important feature for Home Theater applications is to able to show a set of details about a film in their graphical interface. But downloading those details isn't always straight-forward and a lot of times those users have to resort to complicated methods like tag masks, regural expressions, html scraping for the application to be able to effectively filter their video files and download relevant information.
Currently thanks to you my application is able to identify most of the films in .avi format, but a lot of these users' films are in .vob, .iso and .mkv container format, and most of these films are not recognized by OSdb (because they are not contained.
So the idea is this: If you would kindly allow users or applications (through your API) to upload their video hashes along with their relevant film details without requiring the user to supply a subtitle , mine and other applications could provide a semi-automatic upload feature, increasing expontentially the number of films which are inlcuded in the database, and effectively identifying most films in any video format.
From my side, i am implementing a semi-automatic subtitles uploading feature in my application, which combined with the film details uploading mechanism, will potentially increase the number of subtitles included in the database by a fair amount.
Please let me know your thoughts about this idea, and thanks for reading.
Currently (and thanks to your API), my application can identify the user's (mostly .avi) films and download details for them (from IMDb), and also download posters, backdrop art (for the HTPC frontend) background, and of course synchronized subtitles in the language of his/her choosing.
But something's still missing from the whole picture, and i think your database is the only open database in the world which (with a small modifying) can provide the whole set of benefits of video hash identifying.
So let me explain: Currently the benefit a user has from linking a unique hash to his/her video fils, is that he/she can download perfectly synced subtitles for this film, and that's great.
But there's another benefit the video hash feature can provide: identify a movie from it's video hash and download details for it without requiring the user to provide any info for this film to the program.
You may wonder of course why one would want to download details for a film without providing it's name to the application.
The answer is this: An important feature for Home Theater applications is to able to show a set of details about a film in their graphical interface. But downloading those details isn't always straight-forward and a lot of times those users have to resort to complicated methods like tag masks, regural expressions, html scraping for the application to be able to effectively filter their video files and download relevant information.
Currently thanks to you my application is able to identify most of the films in .avi format, but a lot of these users' films are in .vob, .iso and .mkv container format, and most of these films are not recognized by OSdb (because they are not contained.
So the idea is this: If you would kindly allow users or applications (through your API) to upload their video hashes along with their relevant film details without requiring the user to supply a subtitle , mine and other applications could provide a semi-automatic upload feature, increasing expontentially the number of films which are inlcuded in the database, and effectively identifying most films in any video format.
From my side, i am implementing a semi-automatic subtitles uploading feature in my application, which combined with the film details uploading mechanism, will potentially increase the number of subtitles included in the database by a fair amount.
Please let me know your thoughts about this idea, and thanks for reading.