Import problems from DVD Profiler

[ScuseMe]

Hi,

New user here. I've been looking for a program to replace the DVD Profiler program on the Win side; I think I may have found it in DVDpedia.

I'm trying to import my DVD Profiler database into DVDpedia using the procedures suggested here - I export an XML file from DVD Profiler and copy it over to the Mac side along with the DVD artwork. When I do the import thru DVDpedia, the data seems to be moved over correctly, but some of the text is garbled with special characters.

For instance, the summary for The 'Burbs comes over as :

Summary: <b>Tom Hanks</b> portrays suburbanite Ray Peterson, whose plans for a peaceful vacation are disturbed by a creepy new family on the block, in this outrageous suspense-comedy directed by <b>Joe Dante</b>.

Evidently, the BOLD escape characters are not being recognized. I tried changing the embedded XML encoding from encoding="windows-1252" to encoding="UTF-8", and saving the resulting XML file as UTF-8, but that only helped part of the problem - the apostrophes (such as in the word date's) translated correctly, but the special characters representing BOLD (as above) did not.

Any ideas as to what I can do to clean up my text? I don't relish manually changing over 500 DVDs

Thanks.

Mike

[ScuseMe]

I figured out what my "problem" is. I didn't realize that DVDpedia doesn't support special text highlighting (bold, italics, underline). So, to get around my special character problem, I deleted them with TextEdit before doing the import.

I'm hoping that eventually DVDpedia will support special text highlighting.

Mike

[Conor]

Thanks for the feedback Mike. Our summary fields is indeed text based as it keeps things simple for search and data storage. But we are considering formatting for certain fields in a future version.

For the encoding it's a known issue that the Mac OS X does not recognize the DVD Profiler encoding as UTF-8 even though it's in that encoding. If we force it for the DVD Profiler import then it breaks for those that have saved the file through an intermediate Mac program that does set the right encoding. We left it up to the Mac to try to figure out the proper encoding. Haven't tried it out in Snow Leopard to see if the encoding is read properly. I also updated the next version to automatically strip out the HTML formatting for the summary field from a DVD Profiler import.

[paalf]

Hi

I am struggeling with a similar problem. I have imported succesfully from DVD Profiler, but due to using Scandinavian languages in most of my summary fields from DVD profiler some letters are not showing (or to be precise, they are showing different characters for the letters in question). Is there any way to acually edit the import file to switch those special characters into correct letters? Im not expecting DVDPedia to actually support this by default, but are just asking for some advice on how to do it. Googeling for 2 hours has just left me confused.....

[Conor]

Download the free program like TextWrangler and then open the XML file with TextWrangler and re-save it with "Save as..." and set the encoding to UTF-8. This will update the file information to be correct for the Mac. Actually it's possible that TextEdit might work as well, I have never tested it out. If you have problems after trying a re-encoded import of he XML please email us the file and we will test it out.