Suggestions : Using other Amazon sites...

Being a nasty, dirty Frenchman, I sneakily tried to import my 850+ DVD collection from Delicious Library.

While I was quite prepared to lose a few exotic titles and correct a few hundred, it turned out that I just had about 150 correctly imported and 700+ not imported.

From what I quickly tested, it seems related to the way the import is done, checking imported titles against Amazon.com/co.uk DBs, instead of simply adding the data supplied by the file (which is nice and dandy for such a social site, as long as your reference DBs are comprehensive enough).

Even those correctly imported are mostly unusable, as the titles are those registered with Amazon.com/co.uk and not the original ones and most informations are lacking or wrong (strangely, sometimes the same UPC is used in France and in the UK for two completely different editions of the same movie).

As is, listal is unfortunately unusable for my purpose (I can't say I'm thrilled by the prospect of manually entering the details of 850+ references, especially when I planned on moving other libraries later on).

Yet, a quick (and possibly dirty) solution (depending on the elegance of the DB schema) would be to add more regional Amazon stores (Germany and France come to my self-centered and selfish european mind, Japan would be a plus but may mean quite a lot of work on integrating mb characters to the code I guess).

Also, to avoid too many Amazon queries, allowing users to select which Amazon version to interrogate first would allow us to choose the most appropriate one as well as save bandwidth and resources.

The only inconvenient would be that you may end up with numerous copies of the same product, depending on the source of the information, which would lower the efficiency and relevance of matching libaries and tastes.

Thanks for your time and this great tool (even though I can't use it much).

Well, frankly, while it is an answer that does make sense from a developer's point of view, it makes absolutely no sense from a DVD freak's one.
Let me explain.

The same "product" may be distributed under various forms, you may end up with the same movie available in a French edition, a British edition, a Canadian edition and a Belgian edition.

While the cut on all four versions would be the same, the encoding might differ, also, the bonuses might be different, in some cases the French version would have dubbed bonuses while the Belgian would have subbed ones, the British edition would have the French soundtrack but no French subtitles and no options for French subtitles or dubbing on the bonuses, it may even replace some bonuses by others.
The Canadian version have a French dub, but it won't be the same one as the French edition.

All these factors make your vision of unified products a DB nightmare and an impossible task unless you want to lose an amount of information making the site useless for cataloging DVDs.

As far as I experimented, the only way to tackle these problems is to consider items as objects, every DVD inheriting from a particular movie cut, itself inheriting from a movie.

The real problem here is to juggle between the cataloging aspect of the site, and the social one.

From a social point of view, it makes sense to lose information and granularity for the sake of conformity and making connections between people easier.
From a cataloging point of view, the social aspects are completely irrelevant, they're a nice bonus but that should not be privileged at the cost of information.

A concrete exemple :
I imported Nikita, a Besson's movie.
Using Amazon's information, Listal's added it as "La Femme Nikita", which is indeed the US title for the movie... except... the cuts and encodings for the French and US versions are different, it's not the same product and not even exactly the same movie.

Well, at least that's my take on the topic.
After all, I only spent the last seven years coding DVD retail sites (and never managed to sell the idea of having them offering online cataloging, which was a pity with the DB we had, but they just didn't want to bother adding references they didn't carry, which was a stupid argument for people striving for ways to increase clients' fidelity and gather marketing data).

Oh well, guess I'll some day have to code it myself.

Thanks anyway for your time and answers.

Well, the market is saturated with products aimed at the casual collector for whom even directors are an optionnal information and relying upon Amazon's horrid and ill-conceived DB (in their defense, Amazon's never intended that use for their DB so they do have quite a few historical excuses).

It just would be nice to one day see someone trying to cater to the insane perfectionnist collector.
But enough of my search for a "perfect" solution which would satisfy about a dozen people over the world and swamp the rest over details they don't care about.

My main problem is that I simply can't use Listal as is, there are too many products "missing", not being imported automatically, and I don't really have time to import and fill them manually; especially considering that the DB might evolve, adding them manually now would mean "poisoning" the DB with would-be duplicates.

So for the moment I'll stay with an offline solution but regularly keep an eye on here as Listal seems really promising with simple yet useful features, an active community and an involved dev.

Hmm. I'm still in the middle of cataloging my DVDs, and I've added loads of items manually. Thus far mainly Nordic-only editions/DVDs or DVDs released by Nordic/Finnish/non-UK companies, since they're not duplicates in my opinion (even if a UK company had released the same movie). When the exact same edition has been released on UK R2, and the only difference is subs/audio/cover I've catalogued that, since the extras and transfer are the same.

Couple of months back when I asked if it's OK to add Nordic/Finnish/Hong Kong/alt.cover whatever DVDs into Listal, or would these be targeted as duplicates in the big clean-up the answer Tom gave was:

If it's just the cover that changes it's probably better I just add a feature allowing you to choose your own cover.

I have no problem with you adding custom dvds though.

Merging of DVD or any other item will never get rid of each individual item.

The DVD section will not be merged the same way as games or music as there is already a movies section. Individual dvds will always appear in the results.

source

How much info is kept when the items are merged is the big question though. I wouldn't want different editions/releases becoming just alternate covers.