I've just released a new version 1.7.0.0.
It contains the ability to use the IMDb ID as fake birth year if a real one is not available.
I've decided against the use of the roman numerals because - to be honest - I don't trust them to be constant enough for our purposes.
Since the numeric range of the DVD Profiler birth year fields allows numbers between 1 and 65536 (64K) I've decided to use the last five digits if possible, else four digits.
Here are the release notes from the readme:
- Bugfix when alerting about a new birth year
- New option to save the Log permanently. The default is OFF.
- New option to use fake birth years. The default is OFF.
If this option is used, all cast and crew member which do not have a birth year of their own (because birth years are generally not read from IMDb or IMDb has none for that particular person) get a fake birth year based on their IMDb ID.
This way you can distinguish between people who appear to be identical from DVD Profiler's point of view (see also the ReadMen of "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" farther down).
Bevor you start using the new fake birth years, you should use the programs "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" and "Compare ProfilerXML and Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" to compare the local cache of "Cast/Crew Edit 2" and your local DVD Profiler data and clean it if necessary. - New version of "Compare ProfilerXML and Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" (1.2.0.0) which can handle fake birth years.
- New version of "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" (1.3.0.0) which can handle fake birth years.
ReadMe of "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache":
WARNING: Do NOT run "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" and "Cast/Crew Edit 2" at the
same time.
DVD Profiler can distinguish people only by four criteria:
Last Name
First Name
Middle Name
Birth Year
If these four things are all IDentical DVD Profiler cannot tell these two people apart.
"Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache" helps you to find such possible collsions.
In the tab "Everything IDentical" you see all the entries that could be such mismatches.
"Could" because of the introduction of fake birth years, derived from the IMDb ID of the
actors/actresses.
The comparison if two actors possibly clash is done under the exclusion of the fake birth year and
only looks at the "real" data.
But IMDb is not perfect either. Sometimes they create a new actor page for an actor that already
exists.
When they notice their mistake, one of the IDs is forwarded to the other, pretty much transparent to
the user (only visible in the URL of the website).
By the time IMDb notices their mistake, you might already have both IDs in your local cache.
Until now this wasn't a problem because of DVD Profiler's concept. It simply merged these two entries
again.
With the introduction of fake birth years it might happen that this one person is actually
consIDered two different people in your local database.
Here's an example: The actor Benjamin Hoffman was listed under the IDs nm2200880 and nm1887263 in
my local database, but both IDs led to the latter one, see: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2200880/
To find these possibly IDentical people, switch to the "Everything IDentical" tab and check if
the pairs are actually only one person. If so, simply remove the outdated ID.
If this outdated ID already has a fake birth year assigned you should check your DVD Profiler
database and merge the actors there, too.
Another interesting case was Elizabeth Rodriguez whom I had as nm1879985 and nm3318694 but both
IDs led to nm0735300 which I hadn't.
So I saved and closed "Check for Duplicates in Cast/Crew Edit 2 Cache", opened "Cast/Crew Edit 2"
and scanned one of her works that has few cast in it (for time-saving purposes), in her case
"Beadhead" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165634/
Now I had three IDs of hers in my cache and could savely remove the two outdated ones.
