CATVids 9th Life is an online program written in April 2026. This software is not connected in any with FNProgramvare and is not endorsed by or affiliated with them in any way. CATVids 9th Life gathers details on a movie when a user inputs an IMDB title number and arranges those details ready for import in to CATVids software.
Why? FNProgramvare ceased operations around 2013 but owners of their software have been lucky to continue to receive updates over the years. One of the powerful features of CATVids and other FNProgramvare software is Download from Internet which allows users to add a title to their catalogue, getting numerous details of that title from the internet. CATVids uses its Internet.dll file to manage the Download from Internet and users have been very lucky over the years to receive updated versions of Internet.dll from the developer Fredrik. The updates have been necessary because Internet.dll tries to download details from external websites and when those websites inevitably change their layout it can cause incorrect data or "no match".
CATVids does two searches per title in its Download from Internet - one for Video data and the other for Contents data. It tries to get Video data from Amazon and Contents data from IMDB. In CATVids, Video data refers to the physical or digital media details including picture of the media, title, production company ( such as Criterion etc ), release year of that media, type of media ( HD Blu-Ray, DVD etc ), while Contents data refers to the title details including production year ( year the film was released ), director, composer, genres, keywords, film crew, actors etc, etc. The Contents data is, therefore, the bulk of the information that can be downloaded.
In March 2026, with the help of ChatGTP, I got in to some very geeky investigation as to why CATVids Contents data was returning "no match" for every search. We confirmed that IMDB was receiving the request for information but refusing to reply with anything other than a "we are waiting for you to prove that you are a human" kind of message. I then learned that IMDB has a strict policy against this kind of gathering of details, which is referred to as scraping information from a website.
It became clear to me that an alternative to scraping IMDB would be necessary to get Contents data downloading again. CATVids 9th Life uses TMDB to gather Contents data. Having CATVids 9th Life registered with the TMDB API means that it is gathering Contents data via an approved method, not scraping. This means that CATVids 9th Life should not have the same kind of problem that Internet.dll has had over the years.
Why does CATVids 9th Life use text import? You may ask why I have developed this software instead of trying to rewrite Internet.dll. The only way to rewrite the Internet.dll is with the original source code of CATVids, which I of course do not have. CATVids does allow importing data from an Excel Spreadsheet or Text Files. There is also an option for transferring between different CATVids databases and there was a CATVids Importer that could import from some other similar applications. Text import is the most accessible method and gives us the same options as Excel Spreadsheet import.
CATVids 9th Life and Video data. CATVids 9th Life does download Title and cover image. However, it does not search Amazon for any specific type of product. Therefore, the CATVids 9th Life will not set the media type, media production year or media production company. In my opinion, CATVids has always been hit and miss with downloading Video data since it relies on you seeing and selecting the correct version of the Blu-Ray disc etc from the options provided by Download from Internet. Once a title is added to the CATVids database, we can easily set the media format and as at May 2026, CATVids can still search for and download cover art where we can choose from a list of HD Blu-Ray vs 4K Blu-Ray vs DVD etc covers. My priority for CATVids 9th Life has, therefore, been to download as much Contents data as possible and make sure that the same film Title has been set in the Video data. I do include the option to download the movie poster which will be added to your imported title if you do download it and save it to the correct folder.
CATVids 9th Life Contents data vs Download from Internet. The CATVids text import allows us to download a lot of information but it does limit our options. For example, I have found that I can import multiple cast and crew members but I can not assign a character played to a member of cast. Not having the character names is a bit of a shame but at least we can get cast and crew names. TMDB does have the cast character names but CATVids gives me no option to add those to a text import.
CATVids 9th Life Version 1.x no support for TV Series. Sorry, but the TMDB searches and the CATVids import will require different software to be written to enable importing data for TV Series. It was important to get a first version of this software working on Movies before any development on the TV Series imports could be started.