Conor wrote:No problem. The US ASIN would not have caused any problems with the credits, as it would cause the search to fail on the lookup at Amazon UK. DVDpedia would fail to download both any extra credits or the UK rating that you wanted to add with the Amazon search pass. But as you mentioned you been a DVDpedia user for a very long time, so there might be a small difference in older entries that we are overlooking. I myself can't remember all the changes since 3.6, let alone before that. Keep an eye on it and if you get the same issue in the future let me know.
The misspelling would be an issue, bad on Amazon for not knowing the man's name. The good news with that it Amazon information is easy to spot as they would be missing a role, since Amazon does not carry that information.
Hi Conor,
I've done some work on this, and there *is* a problem but its not Bruji's fault! What's happening is I get the Credits from IMDb and then I do a second pass getting further info from Amazon UK. This then adds spurious names to the Credits list. As you say, it appends them to the end of the Credits and has Actors' names but no roles as Amazon does not carry role info. This happens on about 15% of my movies. What is happening is this:
1. In a lot of cases, the Actors added by Amazon are in the movie but are not in the principal credits on IMDb. As you know, unless you set it otherwise, DVDpedia brings in the first slug of Credit names from IMDb, not the entire Cast. These Actors are added by Amazon without a role, at the end of the Credits in DVDpedia.
2. Surprisingly perhaps, IMDb does not always include obvious actors in that abbreviated list - possibly because they are using the cast names in the order they appeared in the movie credits. So, for example, Jack Nicholson is NOT listed in the IMDb abbreviated credits for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but he IS listed at Amazon as an actor, but without a role. So he gets added at the end. Similarly, Kevin Spacey is not included in the abbreviated credits list on IMDb for the movie Se7en but again Amazon lists him, without a role, at the end of the Credits.
3. Sometimes Amazon just adds the names of Actors who are not actually in the movie at all. IOW, just a simple error.
4. Sometimes Amazon spells the Actor's name wrongly. For example, they sometimes spell Nicolas Cage as Nicholas Cage. In this case the incorrect entry gets appended to the Credits in DVDpedia. Also, Amazon does not include accents in names so it adds Penelope Cruz whereas IMDB correctly lists her as Penélope Cruz with an accent on the second letter 'e'. These are again, just errors on Amazon's part.
5. Sometimes Amazon gets confused with Chinese names and will list Gong Li as Li Gong, and again he gets added to the end of the Credits.
6. Sometimes Amazon will add the names of three actors in one line - eg Al Pacino|Robert de Niro|Val Kilmer - with the | symbol separating the names. This appears to be entirely random.
The problem this causes is that once I have added Credit information from IMDb, I cannot then do a second pass using Amazon info (say for UK BBFC classification data) because the Credits then get mashed in at least 15% of my database entries. The only way to correct these mashed entries is to go through the entire database looking for them and then correct them manually because there is no global delete of Credits in DVDpedia. Any second pass from Amazon will always append spurious and unwanted data to the end of the Credits. Obviously, I want Credits information from IMDb as they include roles (and are way more accurate than Amazon). But also I do want some info from Amazon UK - especially the BBFC movie classifications which are totally different to US MPAA classifications.
Life is complicated isn't it?
Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how to overcome this problem?
Kind regards,
Keith
