MovieBrainz?

Sorry I didnt make my point very clearly, I dont in any way think movies are more important than books.Why I think moviebrainz would be more useful is because movies are usually available in digital form, whereas most books are not so BookBrainz cant be used to automatically identify my books at best have to manually scan the barcode, at worst I have to manually search for it.

Additionally there are already some public systems in many countries that keep a decent record of books, better than movies.

So thats all I meant really

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I suggested this as there is a huge community of people worldwide using movie and tv show databases. For movies, we have IMDB which fails most at use of API. There is also TMDB with a good API and is a solid general solution. For tv shows, that is where a lot falls apart. It was my intention on the topic to have tv shows and movies combined but together, as there can be relationships between them. With tv shows, there is a major lacking of quality service. Arguably the best available is TVDB. A bit of experience using the service and any interaction with the moderators will explain quickly why there is a need for something more - this same general opinion can be found throughout the internet, even some that specifically name moderators.

This brought my idea for a Brainz as a solution. The concept here (MusicBrainz for me mostly) is solid and one of the best there is currently. In my opinion, many of the, let’s call them problems, at places like TVDB would be solved simply by putting these policies in place. My suggestion came from a functional need in the global media community, and yes, a bit of personal interest and desire as well – I want something that actually works.

I’ve used the TVDB and TMDB a bit lately to get the movies and series on my computer to show up in Kodi and both are a pain in the butt (mostly TVDB though). I would love to have MetaBrainz solution for that, but someone has to make it and I’d rather not see any resources diverted from MusicBrainz to such a project (development is slow enough already).

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What is useful is really much less relevant than whether there’s anyone who wants to work on the project. If someone stepped up and said they wanted to work on “MovieBrainz” or “(Video)GameBrainz” or whatever, we’d be happy to help them. Someone did step up and wanted to make BookBrainz, hence BookBrainz is now a thing. Even though we have big name corporate supporters, MetaBrainz is not itself a big corporate enterprise, so as much as we’d like to be able to direct the future of what projects we have, it really all depends on whether anyone in the community actually steps up to take on the tasks.

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I would love to work on MovieBrainz, but my motivation was somewhat crushed by the statements of how much work it is. I am left with the opinion that more than a someone is needed for a project like this. Not to mention the need of editors to add the data. The main reason that one of the prior mentioned resources is the best out there is because of the mass amounts of editors adding data, not by any means is it the brains (no pun intended) behind the operation. In the current community, simplified, you have a choice between a good source of data but a poor operating environment, or a poor source of data with a better environment (commonly lacking API though). Combine the mass editors with the quality community centered environment and it should crush everything out there right now. Just my opinion.

I’m pretty sure the editors for a “MovieBrainz” would be there, but it would require somewhere for them to do their edits. One of the reasons BB isn’t seeing much activity right now (even if it is seeing some!), is that BB is still very(!!) rough around the edges and doesn’t lend itself to a very smooth editing experience. MB certainly also has some rough edges, but it is still possible to do more things more smoothly than what is currently possible with BB. Hopefully BB will eventually trump MB’s editing experience, having learned from MB’s shortcomings, but it is not quite there yet. Maybe if you start a MoB (VideoBrainz? FilmBrainz? There’s probably a better word than “Movie” that would encompass TV series, possibly music videos, and possibly YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/… videos), other people will join up. I can’t remember who originally started BB (@LordSputnik, maybe?), at one point it was led by @ocharles, and now it has a dual lead in @LordSputnik and @LeftmostCat. But someone needs to actually do the initial spark before a fire can catch on.

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Forgive me if Ive missed something but for me I think the problem with BookBrainz is theres no obvious use case for adding data apart from the pleasure derived from contributing to the db in the first place. Add data to MusicBrainz and you can tag your songs, add releases to Discogs and you can sell your records, but what can you use BookBrainz for ?

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Some people can be as OCD about the books they have as we are with our music. And of course the number of e-books keeps increasing, and it would be nice if there was a reliable way for Calibre (and similar software) to download data about them.

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I see what you mean by your statements here. MovieBrainz is not so good a choice. Maybe Video or Cinema, etc. HollywoodBrainz maybe?!? I would think that only movies and tv shows… music video would make more sense going into MusicBrainz, in my opinion. The artists and copyrights would all be a match there, along with the performed recordings. Unless maybe someone would somehow integrate the two databases.

The use for MusicBrainz and movie/tv Brainz is for sure different. But you could have users scrobble their boook reads to BookBrainz one day too, just like music and movies and tv shows are scrobbled today. Then, books become functional just the same :slight_smile:

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Some of my friends are having so many books that they need to keep listing their collections to be sure not to buy duplicates. There’s actually a lot of people collecting books. For many of them would be happy to use BookBrainz for listing their collection when the service supports collections. I believe it would be also useful for libraries to have one more service for helping with cataloging (like they already do with worldcat.org). For my studies it would be useful to have a service listing table of contents of books. Databases of local Universities don’t always include this data and I’ve been lately wasting some times with googling it.

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Well Im glad it useful to you i was just saying it didn’t seem the most useful offshoot we could have had. I myself also have quite alot of books (about 3000) but Ive never had a problem knowing if I have already have a book, much more of a problem is actually finding a book on a shelf that I known I do have, and BookBrainz doesnt help me with that.

I’ve actually already dabbled in MovieBrainz prior to joining BookBrainz - I did a very minimal amount of work on a schema definition in https://bitbucket.org/LordSputnik/vbschema .

My current plan is to get BB out of alpha and then generalise the code to an extent where it’s fairly easy to make new, specialised *Brainz sites - VideoBrainz, PhotoBrainz (helpful for visual machine learning?) and ElectroBrainz (electronic components, manufacturers, suppliers) would be three of my favourites.

If/when this happens, creating VideoBrainz will just be a case of deciding the entities, properties and relationships, and updating some display templates.

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It would certainly be technically possible to create an ePub (etc.) tagger. Or perhaps a plugin for Calibre to retrieve/use data from BookBrainz. (Currently Calibre is pretty awful in this respect.)

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@LordSputnik

The link provides: “You do not have access to this repository.”.

For the same reasons that I use MB: avoid buying twice the same edition (happens), discovering stuff related to the things I know and like.

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Fixed now, was private. I defined some entities in there and some pseudo-RDF tables.

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@LordSputnik - how do people collaborate on topics like this? I may not have a ton of time, but I can contribute to what you have already started.

HollywoodBrainz would be worse than MovieBrainz. :stuck_out_tongue: A minority of video produced is actually from California, or even the US, even if it may not seem like it from the Western English speaking world. :wink:

I think I’m leaning towards VideoBrainz, which additionally uses a 2-letter abbreviation we do not have in use just yet.

A lot of relationships pertinent to music videos are not really directly relevant to MusicBrainz though: non-musician actors and extras, dancers, choreographers, video technicians/engineers (lighting, video editing, …), directors, script writers, scenographers and prop makers, … - basically a lot of roles that are 2nd nature to movie, tv series, and other video production.

You can always link them up. You can currently link to MusicBrainz entities from BookBrainz entities, and to BookBrainz entities from MusicBrainz entities. (Just like we can link to IMDb, Wikidata, and a bunch of other sites/databases.)

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Made by @stanislas for Google Code-in 2015.

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Note that Stanislas’ Calibre plugin is currently broken due to us closing down the old web service. However, it worked well when the WS was around and functionality should be restored as the new API is built over the next couple of months.

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