I've been a member of Invelos since 2008 and have multiple programs in similar vein. Out of all the programs, Invelos is the best (in my opinion) except for 1 aspect, not allowing imdb for cast/crew submissions. People argue imdb is full of errors but hell, Invelos profiles have even more. Different cast and crew members having the same name getting counted as the same person, people with typos in their name erroneously added, people using pseudonyms in credits getting in data base improperly and don't get me started on Hong Kong and other Asian films as Invelos is a complete disaster when it comes to credits of those films.

I’ve had numerous friends and relatives stop using Invelos recently for the simple fact new releases are not making their way into the database and they don’t have the time to add it in for themselves. The decline of physical media is part of the issue, but another is normal people do not have the time to add cast and crew credits. Adding a new profile by just submitting the technical specs is time consuming enough, but having to add cast and crew yourself without the convenience of copying from an already approved Invelos profile is maddening. Think about how asinine this is, having to put a movie in and pausing during the credits to manually enter the info into the database. For a television series, it’s an absolute nightmare and it takes HOURS to do this. Sorry, unless I’m getting paid, I have better things to do with my time than pausing film and television show credits manually add them in. Due to this, countless television series database entries lack cast and crew credits because of the time/effort it takes to watch, pause and manually enter in credits.

With imdb, the hard work is already done. An invaluable tool that many other apps of similar fashion automatically pull from. Not utilizing that information, with the downfall of physical media, is going to kill off DVD profiler. I’ve lost count of how many new submissions I’ve sat on because there isn’t another version in the database I can copy the cast/crew from, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pause a film/show during the credits to manually enter in. Many of the people that had the patience/where-with-all add cast/crew credits have jumped ship leaving the rest of us not being able to add profiles due to lack of time to submit.

I’m sill using Invelos for now, but I’m not sure for how much longer. If only Invelos could change their rule on imdb and update the program to automatically pull from that site. Sadly, the Invelos programmers have all but given up on the program with constant errors not getting fixed, long approval times for submissions and constant spammers in the forum.

I agree with Adicted2DVD. I to remember the Invelos predicessor.
I would rather have a user driven database, by fans for fans, than allowing IMDB and other info in.  Much IMDB info is not more accurate, there is just more of it.

Then again opinions are...

In case people wonder about getting information off the disc programmatically, I can tell you that for the most part "it is not there." I have (had? - not sure if it still works) a plugin called DVDPCa ("Contribution Assistant").

Its original purpose was to automatically pull profile information off a DVD and build an Invelos profile. I even had dreams of scanning the credit images and convert to text.

Needless it to say, I was not able to reach that lofty goal, even after many hundreds of hours of in-depth study of the DVD internal format and coding.

But I was able to:

- Get DiscID for DVDs (I don't remember if I got it for BDs)
- Find a very small amount of cast / crew info, when it was there
- Sometimes could get title and a some genre info
- Audio and video tracks
- Region info
- Subtitles info
- Some special features info
- Some guesses about extra video bonus features

Complications arose due to lack of standards for what data is available, and enforcing its availability. And sometimes there are even errors compared with what is on the DVD cover.

I borrowed code from the old open source versions of DVDInfo and BDInfo, and added a lot of my own code and research. And then there is the problem of encryption, so AnyDVD or something like it, must be installed for me to get to the internal data.

Feel free to mess with the plugin. See if it even still works, or whether it provides any value to you. If it crashes, I will fix it to the point where at least it runs - but I'm not sure I can do much more than I did originally in terms of getting profile info.

I just ran DVDPca for a random disc I picked out of my collection. It is the DVD disc A4E7E60D384E5317 from a multi disc collection that includes the BD also.

Here is a screen shot of the captured information. I use DVDFab these days, not AnyDVD.

Captain America DVD

Quoting AlunH:

Quote:
It wouldn't be free to pull information from IMDb.  Quite the reverse, in fact, and I've long suspected that some of the silence here has been caused by users pulling info from the IMDb in the first place.

I submit a lot of full casts to the database.  Sometimes I check the listings on the IMDb in case I've misread a credit.  I have yet to find a single IMDb entry that doesn't contain a mistake.

You are correct. In fact there are plugins which allow automatic review of IMDB information. However, the Invelos rules make it clear that submitted data must be verified and validated by actually watching the movie and credits or extracting the information from the DVD packaging in specific ways.

That being said, assuming the result of a submission is absolutely accurate, and if the corresponding IMDB entry is also accurate, then how can one tell how the entries were generated? IMDB cannot "own" the raw data, only the its digital encapsulation and presentation. That's my opinion, so as long as the process of transferring the data from all sources comes from diligent study and interpretation of publicly presented information, it seems to me to be perfectly legal.

It will not be long before a clever AI coder could make a script that says "Build an Invelos profile for UPC xxxxx released in Denmark in 1947", and a few seconds later the profile will be saved in your download folder. The AI would have as its database, the entire internet, so that its code would resolve discrepancies and perform the equivalent of a common name definition, birth year assignment and correlation among aliases.