list of movies that are not properly recognized (4825-all platforms)
I have way too many movies to list... but, I came up with some things that are consistently annoying about boxee automagically importing movies.
(The end of the list, Items 6 and 7 are the meat of what's stopping automagification, but first I want to talk about some annoyances, #1 is duplication, which is just as bad as automatification not working, it is the creation of two entries for the same movie at the same path and filename)
1) Duplicates #1... It turns out that IF you have a TV show named with the same episode title as a movie then when boxee imports the movie it will make a duplicate database entry for the movie... so say you had "Show xyz - s01e01 - Flight of the Phoenix.avi" as a tV show episode, and you also had a movie called "Flight of the Phoenix.avi" well, boxee would create three entries, one correct one for the TV show, and two correct ones for the movie... unfortunately, because there are two movies of the same name at the same path with the same filename, boxee will display that movie above your normal movies and when you click on it, you'll get displayed two movies... you may go into either and tell it WRONG VIDEO then REMOVE... that will fix the problem... but this is very annoying, as boxee did it to a lot of my movies as I had already imported all my TV... so literally hundreds of movies you have to go in and remove a duplicate entry.
2) Duplicates #2... boxee also creates other duplicates at the same path and filename even when there is no tv show of the same name, I have no idea why it does this, but will be easier to see when the first problem is fixed. The reason this is so annoying is it can take ten seconds to display the movies list if you have a large collection, so everytime you remove a duplicate manually you have to go back to the movies list to pick another... this was very time consuming.
3) Valid Duplicates... boxee will create a duplicate for any movies that IMDB has of the same name... I suppose this is "correct behavior" for boxee... but I don't like it... in my movies I have "Planet of the Apes (1968).avi" and "Planet of the Apes (2003).avi", boxee puts them at the top of my list as "Planet of the Apes" and so its not alphabetical in my list, then I can go into that folder in boxee and see different movies with different covers, but because they have the same name they are not alphabetized correctly. Other common problems of this nature are with Miracle on 34th Street, Shaft, Ten Commandments, and a few others, I forget, but it's annoying. The only way I was able to get it to be "correct" in my eyes, was to remove movies that have the same title on IMDB... take my least favorite copy out of my movies folder.
4) IMDB Title errors... IMDB lists some movies wrong... sure, maybe they are the official name of the movie, but as far as I'm concerned they are wrong... big examples are Crocodile Dundee 2, where IMDB thinks there are quotations around the world 'crocodile' and that puts it unalphabetically at the top of my list... the really annoying thing is that IMDB doesn't think the first and third movie of this series has quotes around crocodile, so they get separated. Aeon Flux is another movie, where IMDB "correctly" titles the Ae as a greek character, and it causes it to alphabetically show up at the end of my list after Z.
5) IMDB articles... I know this has been talked to death, but I found it more than a little annoying... it doesn't just put a lot of my movies in the T section to be sorted by The, but it also separates movies from each other in the list... for instance, terminator 2 and 3 don't have The in front of them, but terminator 1 does "The Terminator" this puts them nowhere near each other in the alphabetical list.
6) Punctuation... Similar to faults with TV show automagification, boxee will have great trouble in importing movies with punctuation in the title... if it has a colon or comma in the title it will be hard... sometimes if there is a colon and adequate other text boxee can resolve it... however, anytime there is a comma, boxee cannot automagically resolve it, and a manual resolve must take place, but this works great through the menu, just sucks that you have to do it manually. I believe this is just with colons, commas, and periods... other punctuation like ampersands seem to be okay.
7) IMDB SLASH/YEARS... I noticed many movies that didn't automatically import were not unique in name on IMDB... however, the year in the filename should have resolved it... but it didn't... this is because IMDB didn't have the year listed as "Title (YEAR)" but instead had it listed as "Title (YEAR/I)" see the difference? IMDB puts a SLASH I or SLASH II behind the year in some movies... anytime the title is not unique, the year doesn't help boxee to resolve the movie automagically, if IMDB had a slash inside the year parenthesis.
Overall, I found boxee to be much worse at automagically importing my movies than my tv shows... this is because tv shows have season and episode in the title... its a lot easier for tv to be uniquely identified... but, also when TV failed I was able to find the faults easier and correct them, because I could see "Folder X" was Unresolved... I couldn't see that with movies... with movies I just have a C:\Movies folder... so boxee sees it as one folder to either be resolved or unresolved... i had no way of knowing which movies weren't resolved except to manually go through each one in the browse list... that sucked. Also, when i needed to make corrections to TV that was relatively easy... whenever I make corrections to my movies, I have to open the movies list again, which can take like ten seconds each time, and between automagic failures and duplicates, that was a lot of time spent editing the database through the boxee interface, largely because of this slowness in displaying the movies list.
my 2cents (exerpts from log file) - parsing empty posters failed
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