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Cover Art update
CraigNZ [Avatar]
Newbie Joined: Apr 23, 2011 19:29 Messages: 27 Offline
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PDVD 14 gets about 50% of my movies cover art correct. For those in error it seems you have to manually right click on the cover art and manually update it by first finding the cover art on the internet and downloading an image.

My question is, does anyone know of a 3rd party application which can scan a folder of DVD movies and for each one:

a) display current cover art image PDVD would use,
b) have an option to change it
c) display a list of available images from online movie databases
d) replace the image in the folder
e) do the above steps in automatic mode using advanced analysis of the DVD folder and maybe even open the DVD files to get movie information.

For example, is this something My Movies would do? Not sure if it would update the movie folder so that PDVD can then use the new image.

Thanks
CraigNZ [Avatar]
Newbie Joined: Apr 23, 2011 19:29 Messages: 27 Offline
[Post New]
Maybe another way to look at this is, can we use another program to catalog the DVD information and then use a 'migration' utility to transfer the information from the DVD catalog database into PDVD?

I think PDVD gets its cover art from a file in the movie folder, and some DVD catalog programs do the same, seems an easy translate would be to reformat/copy/move the DVD catalog program artwork file to the PDVD artwork file.

Checking to see if anything like that exists, or if one of the DVD catalog programs already does that. Obviously, would be nice if PDVD did that, but it would need to search multiple artwork databases and give many more options for cover art than presently exists, maybe version 15?
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Sounds like a good idea, but I don't know of any automated cover art programs.

I had ~2000 movies (VOB files plus an RTF synopsis plus a cover image) stored in separate folders on 12 TB of disk space, and spent a good number of hours updating and correcting the thumbnails on the movie tab under the media files section on PowerDVD13. Then I made the mistake of "upgrading" to PowerDVD14, which promptly erased the entire PowerDVD13 installation folders including the cached movie database information files. Thanks for nothing Cyberlink! So then I started the tedious process of PDVD14 searching all my movie folders and rebuilding the movie file database. I was about halfway through when I quit for the evening, the next morning I booted up and launched PDVD14 and it had lost all the database information from the day before, although I had added all the location folders and they were still listed as such. Then PDVD14 got stuck on the "Preparing the media library" step and remained there for over an hour until I turned it off in disgust.

Contacted tech support and they told me to upgrade to the latest update, which I did, still same "Preparing.." screen. So I exited, uninstalled PDVD14 and then reinstalled it from scratch plus the update. That seemed to work so I started adding in all my movies once again, got halfway through and then started getting "Cyberlink media parser sandbox server has stopped working" error message popping up more and more frequently. I'd either click the Close program button or X out of the message. When PDVD14 finished I went back and checked - many movies were missing. Guess those were the ones where the sandbox server quit. So I closed out PDVD and rebooted, launched it again and now all my movie files are missing once again and PDVD is stuck on the "Preparing.." screen. I'm running Win7 Pro 64-bit on a 3770K Ivy Bridge system, 16GB memory, AMD 7970 video card, all latest drivers and Win updates incl. SP1, so I don't think the hardware or software is the problem.

I'll give PDVD14 one last shot with tech support, then I'm going to ask for a refund and go back to PDVD13. This alpha-level of quality is ridiculous..
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Update - tech support had to kick my issue to the next level, so no resolution of my library media issues so far. In the meantime, I uninstalled PDVD14 and ran the registry cleaner for it and then reinstalled PDVD13 - no problems - and despite my fear of having to rebuild my entire library, somehow or somewhere 13 found the file so I had all of my 2K movies reappear. Perhaps it was running a system restore that I did right before installing the PDVD14 "upgrade".

So I will continue happily using 13 while Cyberlink sorts out the issues with 14. In fact, not sure why I bothered to "upgrade" at all at this point - I only have a 1080P TV anyway, and don't plan to buy a 4K display anytime in the near future. Guess I bought into the hype about smoother and better playback, but PDVD14 didn't work so I can't tell whether any differences from 13 or not.

I hate spending my hard-earned money supporting beta development, but I understand there may be compatibility issues although my hardware is only 2 years old. So I'll give Cyberlink a week or two more before requesting a refund.
[Post New]
PS - forgot to mention that I saw in another thread about renaming the movie art in each folder as "folder.jpg" for supposedly enabling PDVD to find and use the correct cover art. So I tried it on a couple movies but it didn't work. Might try experimenting with different naming schemes "movie.jpg", etc if I find the time.
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