Hello.
I'd have a request for a feature request on AniDB. I am not sure if it had not been proposed before, but I haven't found it, so I'm going to post it.
Because I own a standalone DVD player (that one of a kind connected to TV used as DVD player with more or less efficient support of AVI/DivX) and a good CRT television with better video experience than any of computer displays I've already met, I've been glad every time I realized that one file with anime works well on my DVD player and also I've been sad when I saw it wasn't able to play a movie that shoud have no problems (pure XvD without QPEL or GMC in right resolution and bitrate). So, my request would be to have among a lot of values that we are able to set for an anime file, a choice to set the playability on the standalone DVD player. I am aware of lot of ways of doing this: there are a lot of MPEG4 decoding chips on the market that verschiedliche DVD players use, so a movie that can be played by one player (using one type of chip) can not be played by another (using another kind of decoder chip), I am not going to propose the way of doing this, but I have some ideas:
1. Let user in general to say that he was able to play the file without specifying the player brand/mode.
2. Let user to select a brand of his DVD player expecting that players of the same brand would use the same chipset.
3. (imho the worst) Let user to select a specific chip used, but I am afraid that most users would not know this.
4. (imho the best) Let user to select from a specific brand/chip used (I am convinced there is not hunderts or tens of them, but just few) informing user, in which players he can find this chip. For example:
[ ] Playable on my DVD player
My DVD player type:
[-------------------------v]
-ESS Vibrato (Sencor 6xxx/7xxxx etc.)-
-Sony ultimate H264 chip (Sony THEBESTPLAYEREVER123)-
-Nintendo Wii-
-iPod (iPod 5G, 5.5G)-
Just for information: my DVD player is the Sencor 7102 (I think it's branded with this number just in the Europe) equipped with the ESS Vibrato chipset that means no QPEL/GMC for me. A friend of mine has bought a player from some "noname" asia brand that obviously use the ESS Vibrato chip too (the playback experience is exactly the same with the same files).
Okay. I hope I wasn't much confusing and also that this request has any chance to be fulfilled. Thanks for any response.
[Edit: I would like also to mention that sometimes it is useful to have this kind of information for each track in the file. For example: file no. 16970 (1st episode of Inuyasha from a4e) has a video track compatibile with my DVD player, but the audio (Vorbis) and the container (OGG/OGM) are not - and these are important information for me because just audio reencode is less time-consuming than audio+video convering etc.; but i'm for the opinion that even the fact to have this information for the whole file can be useful) - what information users give, that the db will have, just give them an option to fill them in (for the whole file and for just one track)]
[REQ] File attribute fort standalone player support
Moderator: AniDB
This falls WAY outside of the realm of AniDB. A good portion of people have problems playing certain files on their PC's, let alone getting them to play on another system. Also, gathering the type of information necessary to figure out which files will play where and what the specific requirements for each player would be near impossible.
What you should do is to find a tool that will tell you the details you need to figure out if a file will play (like avdump or the new G-Spot Beta). Then you can transcode whatever will not play.
If you need a particular field (especially if avdump supports it) that you need to figure out if a file will play that is not part of the database, then you can request that particular field be added to the database. Something on this scale though would not even be considered.
What you should do is to find a tool that will tell you the details you need to figure out if a file will play (like avdump or the new G-Spot Beta). Then you can transcode whatever will not play.
If you need a particular field (especially if avdump supports it) that you need to figure out if a file will play that is not part of the database, then you can request that particular field be added to the database. Something on this scale though would not even be considered.