CATVids 9th Life

CATVids stores Character Names in a separate relational table. CATVids text import gives me no way to add the character names.

No! Unlike the old Internet.dll which scraped the IMDB website, Ninth Life uses official Data Bridges ( TMDB API ). This means the connection is much more stable and won't break just because a website layout changed.

The IMDB Rating is itself, of course, slightly changing over time. However, Ninth Life does not and can not ( tecnically or legally ) get any information directly from IMDB. Ninth Life does get the current TMDB Rating and import that as the CATVids IMDB Rating, instead of just leaving that blank. Generally it seems that TMDB Rating is very similar to IMDB Rating, so we will see something like 6.5 instead of 6.7 for example.

The CATVids Internet.dll can only be updated/changed by someone who has the CATVids source code - Fredrik, for example.
I can figure out what the Internet.dll does but it talks to the CATVids.exe in precisely the way the programmer designed it to. Any attempt to write a new Internet.dll would certainly not work and would likely cause the CATVids application to crash.

The CATVids Text Import limits us to adding new titles only. It gives us no way of updating an existing title.

Adding support for TV Series will require a lot more coding, but I do intend on adding it to a future version. It was important to get the first version of Ninth Life working and Movies was the obvious starting point.

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.
CATVids 9th Life does download Title and cover image. However, it does not search Amazon for any specific type of product. Therefore, 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.