Bruji News

We’ve just released a new version of the Pedias, 4.6.8. It’s mostly for Lion-related bug fixes but if you’re running DVDpedia then you will also want this for the fixed IMDb search plug-in. There have been a few changes on their site lately and fields such as Duration and Rating weren’t being imported along with the other data.
Use the programs’ “Check for Update” command found under the program menu to download the latest version.

App Store users – 4.6.8 has been submitted and should be released soon. Thanks for your patience!

Update 2/9/11: The App Store updates have been reviewed and released.

In case you’re wondering how the Pedias will fare when Lion comes roaring into the Apple world, they are all 100% ready. We’ve been testing the latest version of the programs on the latest Lion developer release and everything is running smoothly.

We have yet to work out how we’re going to tackle Lion-specific features such as the new Full Screen View and how it’ll work with the already existing Full Screen View in the Pedias but we’re very excited about all the new possibilities. Now all we need is 10.7 released!

Update: Just fixed two small bugs related to Lion compatibility so make sure you download the latest version (4.6.7) for the programs if you’re on Lion.

Version 4.6.5 is just a small update but it fixes some nagging bugs, especially for the RTF text export (which didn’t encode correctly for diacritics and languages with characters not found in ASCII). The search plug-in architecture has also been completely revamped along with fixes to most of the plug-ins for retrieving more data, in particular larger cover images where available.

To get the update just run your current Pedias and use the ‘Check for Updates’ command found under the program name.

For Mac App Store users – the update has been submitted for DVDpedia, Bookpedia and CDpedia and hopefully they’ll be approved soon.

DVDpedia user Chas has written an info view template, with the help of Forum user Jonas, that includes some nifty links to Wikipedia and IMDb.

Just click on the little icons next to a name and the relevant page will open. Of course the possibilities here are endless – icons like these could be used for links to Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu… (Reminds me of the LeoTab info view template which incorporates a trailer and cover image search.)

You can download the template from our Extras page. I hope you enjoy it; thanks Chas!

Our first few weeks on the App Store have gone well and even though there have been some minor confusions both on our part and the users’, all in all it seems to be a good addition to our distribution channels.

The one niggle I have is about demo versions. We can send users from the App Store to our website to download the demo and try out the programs for free but then they have to delete the demo in order to purchase the full version from the App Store. This is not the best user experience, especially if users think that their data will be affected by the deletion of the program (it won’t – the Pedias keep their data separately from the applications for exactly this reason).

Of course the time-lag between submitting an update and getting it approved is also a bit of a stumbling stone because we never know how fast the process will be. With our latest update (4.6.4) now in review, the first one we’ve done since the release of the App Store, that’s not critical because there weren’t any major bug fixes included. But I can understand that it might be frustrating for Mac App Store customers to have to wait for an update when they know that it’s out and available on other channels. We’ll have to see how this plays out in the future.

What better way to celebrate the start of 2011 than with some excellent shots of DVDpedia in action, courtesy of DVDpedia user SP. He currently has 4365 movies in the program (total duration 631.92 days) and quite a sweet setup in his living room:

Can any one compete with this, setup and/or library-size wise? Let’s hear it!

Andrea Guglielmi, Italian DVDpedia user, created a plug-in for his favorite site DVD-store. He has spent a couple of weeks tweaking it to perfection and collaborated with DVD-store manager to develop the DVD-Store plug-in. They even went so far as to amend their search routine output to allow him to create the link back URL to DVD-store reliably so that clicking the title of imported movies opens directly to DVD-Store details page for a single movie and not search results. That is some outstanding support from a DVD website for a single DVDpedia user. Not only do they have good support and a big database they have some good prices on Blu-ray titles if you are living in Italy.

Kindly they have both agreed to share the plug-in with other DVDpedia owners, so our Italian users can jump right in by downloading the plug-in. We really appreciate Andrea’s work and DVD-store for providing access. This is Andrea’s second plug-in for DVDpedia (his first plug-in, included with DVDpedia, is for Terminal Video).

Yes, you read that right: wedding bells are sounding at Bruji these days. Conor and Nora are getting married this weekend and to celebrate, all the Pedias are 20% off from the 16th till the 23rd.

Since we’ll be a little occupied with non-Bruji things in the coming days, please don’t be upset if we don’t answer your email straight away. We promise to be back to our normal routine shortly.

There are lots of new features and great improvements in the latest version of the Pedias. Blazingly fast and updated iSight scanning, several new search plug-ins, including The Open Movie Database (more about that a little lower down), a searchable and sortable HTML export template “FancyIndex” written by Pedia user April King and an automated Delicious Library 2 importer so there’s no need to export your data to DL 1.5 XML format anymore before importing data into the Pedias.

For a full list of what’s new, check out the release notes: DVDpedia, Bookpedia, CDpedia, Gamepedia. To download version 4.6, use the ‘Check for Updates’ menu command found under the program menus or use these direct download links: DVDpedia, Bookpedia, CDpedia, Gamepedia.

A little more about the open movie database (TMDb): this is a very exciting new project put together by Travis Bell and as the name says, it is a movie database along the lines of the IMDb but even better it is open for users to edit and add to, much like Wikipedia.

Anyone can enter new information, improve listings and thus make it better for everyone. And now DVDpedia can tap into that movie goodness thanks to the included API that makes it easy to access the site and download information.

Travis and others have been working on the API for many months now and with version 2 (just released), it’s become a very powerful search engine indeed. At the moment the search works only on titles but we’re hoping that this will be expanded in the future to include broader search options such as actors and directors and the option to mix keywords.

Enjoy version 4.6!

The Pedias have been recognizing barcodes from images since back when the external iSight was the hottest new gadget. The code has withstood over the years and being open source has been used in several other projects. However, with the semi-newer Mac Book Pros that not only have a fixed focus iSight but also a lower capture resolution the code was not handling well. (All built in Mac iSights are fixed focus, impressively the iPhone 3GS does have focusing capabilities and hopefully these will make it to the Mac line in the future too).

One of our fellow developers, Chris Karr, decided to improve the situation and spent Christmas building a new recognition engine from the ground up.

His new code is built with the idea of incorporating my old version as well as new solutions in a structure that allows the insertion of different scanners for the same image and then pick from the best results. Chris is using OpenCV, an extensive image processing library, to handle his video and prepare the frames for scanning. I’ve been trying to improve on his results but have had little success in bettering his already impressive work using OpenCV to which I am not accustomed.

My original scanner works directly by accessing the incoming QuickTime buffer and I am no expert on video but working with QuickTime I’ve come to learn its ways as well as the UYVY native format. So I decided to blend the new and the old. I did this by taking some structure ideas from Chris (in order to clean up my code that’s looking a bit messy due to all the optimizations) as well as the new excellent barcode scanning library called ZBar that Chris is using as one of the scanners and keeping my Quicktime capture. With these changes I was able to improve the current version.

The result of all this mixing is for the moment a new impressive scanning engine for the Pedias. In the long run hopefully we’ll be able to bring all these improvements together with Chris’ version of the framework that is better structured for future improvement and make even further advancements. In the meantime if you’re looking for a scanning engine take a look at Zbar as it even has an iPhone project included in the source (the old barcode scanner code has been very popular with users wishing to port it to the iPhone, this new project will save developers a lot of work).

I want to thank both Chris Karr and Jeff Brown, the creator ZBar, for their work in building great tools for the Cocoa community.
Go ahead  and play with the latest Pedias and let us know if the iSight’s even more magical than before (now scans upside down codes as well).