MovieBrainz?

48

I have 2 points on that. First one is that I would agree that there can be as many releases as needed, but a change in the mentality is what I mean there. A release in MB is a FULL release. I am thinking more on the Discogs and AllMusic method where there is a master release, then versions under it. In this way, there would not be duplicate information, like track lists, added, just a more elaborate version of a release event. I am not really aware of any of the current resources going to that level, typically a movie is indexed as a movie, the barcode and all of that is not considered. Release country to country is a release event with a date, certification and type.

Second is that on a digital level, most of that does not even matter. If I have the movie in a language, I have that movie in that language. So, although I do respect the details noted in the prior, for my purposes, all I need is the movie to be listed. Meaning, I can look and see “Movie A” and say… yes I have it and yes I watched it. It does not matter for the purpose I mentioned whether or not the movie has barcode 123 or 456, or came in a DVD case or jewel case, all that matters is “Movie A”. Having said that, I am not at all disagreeing that more detail would make the implementation here stand out, as long as there would be consideration for those who want to use it for purposes that do not want that detail. Example, maybe one could reference the “release group” for those purposes and not a specific release under it.

That is one area that MB fails for half of what I use it for. If I am making a playlist for an event, I do not need to be worried about a label or country or what sticker is where, I just need to know “Song A”. Personally, if I made it for myself, I would make a release group for “CD1” separate for a 12 track standard issue and a 15 track deluxe issue. Under each group would be the different meta data for the barcode and such, but the meat of the release would be in the group and the release nuder it would be an enhanced release event if that makes sense. Just an idea that may accommodate all users.

49

To further elaborate on my prior post, in the MB example, that concept would solve the M4A vs MP3 digital release issue. I could look under the 12 track standard issue and see it was released digitally. Look at that, it would say available in M4A 256, MP3 320 and MP3 192 … then state the references as to where they are. There is no need to have multiple duplicates differing only in source and file type (or barcode) when the music itself is the same… same recordings, same order, etc. The track list and the meat is just kept at the high level.

Maybe that mentality can be used here?

50

From my experiences with My Movies - having a barcode is an excellent way to find the metadata that matches what I have; if what I have is a DVD. If all I have is an MP4 file of the movie; then I would want to look up the metadata about that Movie - not for the DVD. If you follow what I’m saying. By modeling things properly in the database, it makes the job of finding what you’re looking for work better. That, and some kind of “disc signature” method as well.

I should also mention - my digital content retains all the various language tracks of the original. So it’s not correct to say that my digital version of “Avatar” is the english one. It actually retains all of the languages of the original DVD. But from a practical basis, I do take your point. But how do you add to your collection? How do you match up your collection with data in our service? I think we’ll need that extra detail to be able to find things from multiple different approaches so that many different cases can be handled.

1 Like
51

I agree with all you say, your point taken as well. When I add to my collection, I do not keep what I do not need when doing digital. So I keep the movie with only the language and subtitle (if any) that I want.

Next, I will add a sample structure, in simple form. I believe that what you reference would be a level C in that example, the most specific release. What I refer to in my above example would be a level B reference, caring that it is a directors cut for example, but not what country or barcode it had on it.

In your above example, the digital release you have that retains the DVD content exactly is not really a digital release in my opinion, but a copy of a DVD/BluRay, etc. The release I refer to where I strip out unwanted stuff, is not referencing a release at all, thus the level B reference. The level C ones tie it down. To me, a digital release would be what I bought from iTunes for example. So you might get the M4V file with the iTunes extras folder for example.

Looking at the view, you would see this:

Music
A: My Band
B: Release 1 target
B: Release 1 deluxe
B: Release 1 standard
C: Date, country, barcode, language, etc

Same concept adapted for Movies:
A: My Movie
B: Theatrical
B: Extended
B: Directors Cut
C: Language, country, date, certification, etc.

One could look and quickly see what editions of a movie were made, and what releases are available for each.

52

In my thought, release events would have to rethought. You could tag release event specific. So for you, could could tag each of those separate, or at the high level, ie not separate.

For users, I am sure there are many that want to tag something but do not know or do not care of the specifics, they just want it tagged in general, so they only need to really tag at the deluxe, or directors cut level, noit the label and barcode leve.

Does that make sense at all?

53

Continuing the discussion from How to start a new project: VideoBrainz:

Ok. Now I am extraordinarily confused. Gonna go away, scratch my head a few thousand times with the hopes of articulating my question better. Because I don’t see it the way you do at all.

54

I found that comment a bit off, for lack of a better way to put it. It i loosely mentioned here, but not very clear. First is to go to the IRC:

It is left to me as well very unclear, but step 1 appears to be go to the IRC and talk about starting a project for VideoBrainz. At this time, going there, we can present the general concept as outlined here. We have the general scope and a list of interested participants. It all needs refining, but we have more than just I got an idea to discuss.

There is also this, where a concept was already started:

1 Like
55

I think ultimately my confusion comes from the fact that I come from a very different world than many of those who are part of the “MetaBrainz establishment”. In my world there are established processes where project proposals are put together by interested parties and submitted to some power that can decide to allow the project to go forward or not. And if it goes forward there is a discernable lifecycle the project goes through and resources provided.

What are the processes in MetaBrainz? Are there any? Or is it simply to convince those with power over the website to support your idea? And what does “support your idea” mean? I suppose what I want now is a place where ideas can be recorded and refined. Some place to store and refine simple documents (perhaps no more complicated than Wiki pages or a text file in a GitHub project).

I can go ahead and create a GitHub project for VideoBrainz on my own personal space and invite others to join me in refining the ideas there. It would come with issue tracking and a place to experiment with ideas. But is that the right thing to do? Is that the proper thing to do? Are there better ways? How have other projects started? For those who have been through creating MetaBrainz projects; are there lessons learned? What did you do? What went well? What didn’t go so well?

I’m trying to do what’s right and that fits into the culture of MetaBrainz. But I have no idea what that is. Can someone help me understand that and give me guidance. I’ve never used IRC before, and when I visited there yesterday there were very down and dirty discussions concerning builds and such going on. It didn’t feel right to jump in with my questions in the midst of what was going on. Again - I don’t know the culture.

2 Likes
56

I cannot agree with you more. The main reason I have not gone there is simply that IRC is a demotivator for me. In my understanding, we simply go there and toss the idea out and where it currently stands - before going much further. From there, we can see what kind of support is available… from my understanding at least.

For reasons I do not understand, having this conversation on the IRC is different than having it here, I am assuming.

57

I’ve gone out on a limb and created a GitHub organization called videobrainz and have invited @thwaller and @Zastai to it. Nothing is there yet, but I plan to create a design project to hold our early concept development work. If anyone else is interested in joining in the fun please let me know or stop by the organization on GitHub.

https://github.com/videobrainz

3 Likes
58

Have joined. The wiki tab doesn’t seem to be working; I suppose we could start by each having a markdown file in the tree to use for braindumps, but that would unnecessarily pollute the commit history.

59

Try again. I’m still a bit of a newb with regards to managing GitHub projects. I just enabled write access for all members to the project.

60

Yes, coming on IRC to propose your idea. More specifically, it would be good to have a topic for discussing it at the weekly (Monday) #MetaBrainz meeting. (I also provide notes of these meetings here on the forum: https://community.metabrainz.org/tags/metabrainz-meeting-notes )

It definitely isn’t the worst way to get started. :slight_smile: Actually poking around with some code and getting some schemas set up would make it much more apparent to @Rob (and possibly the MetaBrainz board? Not sure if they’re needed to “officially sanction” a new *Brainz project… they’re probably not :stuck_out_tongue: ) whether the project is viable.

@LeftmostCat and @LordSputnik are the leads of BookBrainz, so maybe they have some input here?

What “fits into the culture” would be joining us on IRC and hanging out. Don’t necessarily jump into the discussion right away, esp. if you don’t feel comfortable with it. We, MetaBrainz, would definitely appreciate if all leaders of the MetaBrainz projects were available in at least the MetaBrainz IRC channel. All the MeB employees are there, as well @alastairp of AcousticBrainz and @LordSputnik and @LeftmostCat of BookBrainz - not to mention other community members, incl. people from other projects/companies (we have someone from Kodi, the lead of FanArt.tv, someone from BBC, and others hanging out in there).

Feel free to poke me anytime on IRC, and I’ll help you get started once I’m around. :slight_smile: (Note the “once I’m around” - I’m online on IRC 24/7, but I’m obviously not sitting and staring at IRC all the time :wink: - so hang around and I’ll reply when I am.)

4 Likes
61

I’ve got a few bits of input here:

  1. We own the domains moviebrainz.org and videobrainz.org. What are the goals for your project? Which of the two names is more appropriate?

  2. The MetaBrainz team members (especially myself) are on a moratorium for creating new projects. However, this does not apply to new projects being created by the community.

  3. The board does not need to be involved in this decision, especially since this project is in it’s infancy right now. We’ll need to wait and see if the project really does become mature enough to launch. Many projects that start like this have high goals, but actually seeing the project through to an initial launch is quite a challenge and a lot of people tend to not get that far. This isn’t a reflection on your abilities to deliver, but a cold hard look at the history of people promising things and then not delivering much. So far, BookBrainz is the only real project that came out of the community without direct initial support from MetaBrainz.

  4. Please participate as Freso suggested – if you continue to be part of the project and get to a point where something needs to go into an alpha/beta for a wider audience, we can provide server space and a logo.

4 Likes
62

Just adding a few thoughts of my own:

  • For all intents and purposes, a video is a video regardless of whether it contains two people having intercourse of the one kind or the other kind, so putting up some kind of barrier as to what can and can’t be added to VideoBrainz based on morals alone is arbitrary and, IMHO, against the “spirit” or “idea” of MetaBrainz (capturing all information!). A discussion similar to this was had not too long ago in another topic here on the forum.
  • There are a variety of “ranking” systems out there. These could well be used to limit information from minors or people who do not with to see things of various natures. That said, my vision of VideoBrainz is that it contains information, textual information. The title of “Girls Gone Wild” (or whatever) is not by itself NSFW (IMHO at least :slight_smile: ), though the cover art of it would likely be. VideoBrainz is unlikely to get cover art in its first iteration. BookBrainz still doesn’t have anything for covers.
  • I want to be able to add <30 second YouTube clips. One of my favourite YouTubers, frezned, had (he has taken down all his videos :cry:) a lot of videos which were very short, but in some cases very well produced. They would fit well in a series of some form, which the current offers (notably TVDb) out there are unable to fit. I’d also want to be able to capture information about remixes of e.g.,
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNhaLUT520
  • I want to be able to catch all the information about videos. Who are the background dancers? Who did their makeup? Who did the choregraphy? Who were the runners of the set? (Did the runners later “graduate” to more “important” positions on film sets? If we don’t know who the runners were, we’re unable to derive this information.)
  • Related to the above, I also want for VideoBrainz to capture music video information. A lot of information about music videos are not relevant to MusicBrainz but would naturally belong in VideoBrainz - e.g., cinematographers, dancers, choreographers, runners, … (Maybe I already mentioned this elsewhere in the thread - if so, sorry for repeating!)
  • One of the things that make MusicBrainz great, is that MusicBrainz focuses on capturing the data. MusicBrainz does not care about how people use this data, and this usage agnosticism allows us to capture some advanced data that might be hard to translate to a direct use case - but it also means that the data is usable by both Spotify for improving their internal data, by BBC and other radio stations to basically replace their internal databases, by “end-users” looking to tag their files, by music analysts/researchers/academics to do some advanced analyses of music data, etc. Be very wary of linking how you structure the data(base) with your perceived use cases. (This is, IMHO, one of the flaws of TMDb/TVDb - it is, as I see it, very much being modelled for use with Kodi, Plex, and similar media centers, rather than being data-first centric.)
3 Likes
63

@Freso- that is a lot of thought. In order…

  1. Agree with that statement, as long as the video qualifies as a video by specification, content, morals or any other opinions on the actual content should not matter. Just like explicit lyrics in audio, it is just labeled as such, it is not excluded.

  2. True. For the purposes I proposed, cover art would be needed, at least as a reference, or the usefulness would be reduced and possibly bypassed for the current options. Agree on adult content, the images are more the concern over titles.

  3. Clips is way out of scope from my original thought, but can be accommodated. TVDB does not do this really, but IMDB and TMDB do, short film or video flags would apply. A series name can also be applied, like the Star Wars series as an example. Would that satisfy your interest on this point?

  4. That would be great and easy I think. In the “crew” section, or whatever it may be called, you could add as many roles as you like and assign as many people to those roles as you like. We could define core roles, like director, writer, producer, etc, but there does not have to be any limit on who can be added.

  5. Yes, agreed. Although I typically see music videos in a class of its own from video and audio, I think it could fit in just fine. The alternative would be something like… MovieBrainz, TVBrainz, ClipBrains, VideoBrainz, ShortFilmBrainz, etc.We could separate, or work to be all inclusive of video. Thinking about BookBrainz, it is only books, not flyers, magazines, comics, etc correct? I wonder how we decide this. Is BookBrainz a “printed on paper item” listing or a listing of “books”? Would VideoBRainz be a listing of anything with video, or a clearer definition of a video similar to now MusicBrainz uses bootlegs, where a bootleg could be excluded even though it has full artwork and pressed CDs, but it is not really available sort of thing. What qualifies the video content to be included?

  6. I will be light on this one, because I somewhat disagree on parts. MusicBrainz does not do well with fitting my needs, being a person who collects music, plays music, performs music, etc. It is great as an encyclopedia type reference, but near useless for tagging to me. Reason is when I make digital files, I do not need or care to tag what CD by what label and what barcode the digital copy came from, I want to tag the “12 track deluxe release”. MB is by far the best I have used, which is why I support it. The reason is not due to the fact that I can actually use the data, it is that I like the data. I tag myself in MP3TAG, then import and modify it to how MB wants it, then leave it be. Personally, I do not feel the data is “data-centric” I say this because, for example, if it was data-centric, we would differentiate between a MP3 release and a M4A release. I also think the database structure is missing a tier of data in the release area that moves it away from being data-centric. I feel it is less object orientated than it could be, making it less data-centric than it could be. Just the opinion of one person, not complaining.

I think you are correct, it cannot be designed for one use only, because even that one use will change over time. Just like in MB, the lacking of structure for digital releases will show its ugly head at some point, but it was designed around physical releases which is clear as the only thing not physical in the medium options is “Digital Media”, the rest is all physical variations. But we would also need to consider that data is only valuable if it can be used. If no one can use the data, demand and draw lack and the marketplace will evolve to satisfy its own needs. Meaning, someone else will provide a solution to meet real needs, even though its quality will likely be lesser. Give and take, the exact reason that TVDB is number 1 to its alternatives… it fits the need of the consumer, but is less than perfect in many ways.

64

From the BookBrainz front page:

From discussions on IRC and elsewhere, this includes comic books, colouring books, fliers, etc. (There was at one point a great discussion about what the tag line should be, debating on whether to use “book” or “literature”, since neither of the two felt like they fully encapsulated the goal. It seems like they went with “book” in the end, likely for the simplicity of it.)

In the same vein, while MusicBrainz’ primary focus is music, it also deals with audio books and other forms of audio that could arguably be said to not be “music” per se (e.g., recordings of steam trains in Denmark and nature sounds and… whatever the heck this is).

3 Likes
65

I see. I would second my agreement that VideoBrainz is best option so far given this.

66

So conceptually speaking, we have AudioBrainz, VideoBrainz and LiteratureBrainz. Given the structure of 2 of the 3, I agree to match it with focus and intent.

67

Couple things. #1: I’ll try to be there, but I’m on the east coast in the US and I’ll be at work at the time of the meeting. I should be able to participate; but work will have priority. #2: How does a topic get added to the meeting agenda?

I’ve setup a GitHub organization here: https://github.com/videobrainz. @thwaller, @Zastai, and myself are set as owners. It currently has one project under that to aid in the early discussions.

and

These give me a very clear picture of how things should move out. Thanks.

This is very much understood and appreciated. Both @thwaller and myself have indicated that we don’t think we will have the time to bring this to light by ourselves. But, here we are, and currently things are moving ahead as our time and abilities allow. So, we’ll see how far we get. I’m hopeful this idea will see the light of day, and for the time being at least, I’m doing what I can to move the idea forward, as are others.

2 Likes