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Hi,

I would like to know if DL2 will have Australian lookup support. There is a huge fan base for Delicious Library in Australia, however, us Aussies find it tedious and annoying to constantly look up Amazons information for when we manual scan.

There are a couple of programs out there for the mac that are similar to Delicious Library that "DO" support us Australian bar coding and information, however, we would like to "SEE" Delicious incorporate this into DL2... please ;-)

cheers
wil

The short answer is: no, but

That is to say: no, but we have added the extensibility necessary for some enterprising Aussie to add support, much as Morbus Iff is doing for comics.

I'm with wgill. I haven't bought a version of DL yet but, mucking about with a demo version, I must say hearing "lookup failed" all the time can get very annoying. In fact lack of support for Australian/New Zealand barcodes is one of the reasons why I haven't bought a copy of DL yet. I've resorted to using DVDManager for all of my DVDs and Facebook's Visual Bookshelf for all of my books. That shouldn't have to be so.

As I see it...If I can't use the "ease of use" features within the application that others are able to use straight out of the box, without a guarantee that someone will come up with a plug-in allow me to use those features for my locality, then why should I bother A$45 for this?

You're right. If you're from Australia, and you're looking for a way to catalog your DVDs, there's no reason to buy Delicious Library. For books and such, which are not happened by regional barcodes, Delicious Library and Australia get along just fine. For DVDs, though? Nope.

At least, until some Australian web guy wants to hack up a plugin. Why has that not happened yet? Do Australians not know how to code?

(I'm just kidding, but seriously, some Aussie scripter out there should contact me.)

I'd love to help with something like that but, alas, I'm not a programmer. I think another problem that would be encountered would be with finding a suitable database of Australian barcodes. I don't know what online store you could use as there is, to my knowledge, no central UPC database for Australian products.

Contacted...

Maybe there'll be an Australian Amazon by the time DL2 is out.

I seriously doubt that. I'd love there to be an Australian Amazon, as there should be, but I daresay we'll be waiting a long time for that. We've already waited years for it.

rahook is this still on your radar? Should we expect support for R4 lookups when DL2 is released?

My current workaround is to Google the UPC code (right-click/search with Google) and then cut-and-paste the title from the results into the Amazon search. Not pretty (or accurate) but good enough for now.

Not sure of A&R/Dymocks/Fishpond provide lookup services?

Alas, I'm not a programmer. But I'd love to help with something like that but, I think another problem that would be encountered would be with finding a suitable database.

@rahook - have you had any success developing an Australian lookup plugin?

Hey guys, any news on Australian lookup, can somebody help us to script this if all possible?

cheers

I wish I could help! But I'm not a coder... its on my list of this I want to learn.

If such a plugin was to be made for Australia, what data sources could be used? For example do you have something that is equivalent to Amazon?

Additionally if there is an sample script that could be used as a launching board for development that would be handy.

The big, crippling issue is data. Although it seems like Price Crawler does have a bunch of information, including the barcode!.

PriceCrawler� (DVD Plaza)

I was trying to find out how to get at the DVD Profiler online database, but as far as I can tell it all comes back from their servers encoded in some propriety binary format. I'm tempted to create and host a DVD equivalent for CDDB / FreeDB.

If DVD Profiler could use the iSight to scan the barcode, it would be a winner. I'm running XP in VMWare anyway, may as well use it for something other than work related applications

UPDATE: I think I have a datasource. We'll see what I can get from it

JBHifi has barcode searching. I've written something to pull some basic info from their website, but it can be changed to pull a lot more.

Here's an example link which returns some XML

Cloverfield (2 Dvd)

This certainly looks promising - .. Alot of Aussies waiting for it ;-)

Let us know how you go mate, and I'm sure you will have a lot of testers

cheers

waiting for info from dl :-(

Just an update. Will have a hack ready that should be working be the end of today! Just about to start testing at the moment...

I have a semi working solution

Things scan and look up correctly, but when you add a new item, everything in the library is replaced with that.

So for example, starting with an empty library, I add cloverfield. It adds correctly. Then I add a second DVD, for example Garden State. That adds correctly, but now Cloverfield is also Garden State. Strange. As I continue adding, everything changes to whatever the last DVD added was.

Anyone have any ideas?

Actually that semi working solution is a working solution, but DL uses the ASIN (amazon's internal unique product identifier) to index things, and probably link back to the amazon product page. That is what's causing this duplication. I'll try to find a work around for it today, but I'm away for the long weekend so the earliest something may be available will be Wednesday next week.

If I release a working version, does someone want to donate towards buying me DL2?