News/Changes

2007-12-10

I've been informed by an JMDB user that at least one old and abandoned language specific movie title file hasn't been uploaded to the FTP-Servers on 2007-12-06.

The no longer updated files include:

iso-aka-titles.list.gz - Last update: 1998-10-16 - NEVER SUPPORTED by JMDB
italien-aka-titles.list.gz - Last update: 2000-12-14
german-aka-titles.list.gz - Last update: 2005-05-20 - NOW MISSING

Those files have been replaced a long time ago by the aka-titles.list.gz which is supported and used by JMDB.

If you still use the default import settings you'll get an error message when JMDB tries to import new data. This is because the german-aka-titles.list.gz can't be found.
Just call the JMDB Setup dialog and deselect the italian-aka-titles and german-aka-titles entries from the IMDb-Import list and save the new settings.

2007-09-20

Finally 26 month after the last JMDB v1.30 refresh release and another 10 month after the last JMDB v1.35 beta 4 I've released the final JMDB v1.35 version which includes all improvements of the beta releases and some addons I added within the last 10 month! You can find a full list of changed at the download page and also in the history.txt supplied with the downloadable JMDB package.

Beside the really large list of internal improvements the language support has been extended and the documentation has been updated. The updated documentation also includes screenshots on this website.

2007-09-17

As I finally received the Spanish language update (many thanks to Delfi Reinoso) and end of last month also the Russian language update (many thanks to Vladimir Frelikh) JMDB v1.35 will be released this week!

I've already checked the Spanish language file and I'm going to do the same with the Russian file within the next hours. After that I'll build the new version and update some of the outdated screenshots. Then I only need to rebuild the different download packages which takes some time. As I also need to test them the release should be available within the next couple of days.

2007-08-20

Another language update: I just got the French language update (many thanks to Jean-Claude Vignoli). Now there are only two to go which are Russian and Spanish.
I received a message from one of the two Spanish translators, that he get's back to me in early September. So far I've not yet received any reaction from the Russian translator, so if someone out there can translate English or German to one of the not up-to-date or so far unsupported languages please contact me.

2007-08-15

With the help of another Swedish JMDB user I was able to update the not yet translated sentences to Swedish (many thanks to Johnny Johannesson). Still missing are Spanish (3 sentences), French (2 sentences) and Russian (8 sentences). If someone out there can translate English or German to one of the languages please contact me.
As only the few sentences above have to be translated this should take you only some minutes.

The missing translations are the only reason why the final JMDB v1.35 is not yet available. Last week I fixed another small problem with PostgreSQL as one of the text fields wasn't long enough to store a name.

2007-07-22

I've finally added the latest questions to the FAQ section and while updating some older questions.

2007-06-19

There is again some progress with JMDB. I've finally checked the language files and I also got an update for the serbian translation which is now up-to-date (many thanks to Marko Bastovanovic).

Yesterday and today I worked on the JTables to enhance the usability. If the query returns data the first row of the JTable listing the results will be automatically enabled. The complete row will be selected and you can now call the detail window by hitting the ENTER-key.
These changes are also available at the "Bookmarks" and also the other files using the MovieCollectionWindow (e.g. the "movies last seen in cinema" and "Videotapes" example lists).
The Setup window with the list of supported IMDb files has also been changed this way, but there the enter key doesn't do anything (to enable/disable files you still need to use the mouse - but I may change this until the release).

The last thing I'm looking at (again) is MySQL. Creating the indexes on the movies2actors table is really to slow. There are some known bugreports at MySQL (see bugs #9544 and #24495) but I hope this can be tweaked a little bit. My Core2Duo E6600 processor currently needs ~43 Minutes for each of the two indexes being created on the table (it has 8.117.322 entries with the IMDb data from 1st June 2007). Importing everything is faster than the index creation on this single table.

2007-05-15

On the entry page of this website I replaced the HTML-Table with a chart showing the growth of data since end of 1999. Unfortunately I didn't have IMDb data from 1999 and first half of 2003 at hand. The 1999 values are from the old JMDB website description. It's possible that I'll add some additional data when I access an old backup.

The chart was created as SVG image using an XML data file together with an XSLT definition file (plus manual intervention). I've added a GIF image for the browsers that don't support SVG images and tested different browsers. Unfortunately Opera 8.5 has the crappiest SVG output of all (Opera 9.x is ok).

2007-05-11

Congratulations to IMDb. They have finally reached over 1.000.000 movies with the update from 2007-05-04 with the last update. There are now among a lot of other data 1.003.933 movies and 1.307.677 actors and actresses (male=818.678, female=488.999) stored in the database.

2007-05-02

Looks like IMDb missed to hit 1.000.000 movies with the last update. On 2007-04-27 only 999.958 movies where included in the data (42 were missing) but with the upcoming update on 2007-05-04 they will finally get over 1.000.000 movies.

Beside the above information I added some additional information about the supported IMDb data to the first page of this website (minor changes will follow). I also added some flags showing which languages are supported right now.

2007-04-24

IMDb will hit 1.000.000 movies and progress on JMDB v1.35 BETA 5! [UPDATE]

Hi! I just want to let you all know that with the latest IMDb update (2007-04-20) there are now 994.818 movie entries. With the next update on 2007-04-27 IMDb should finally break through the 1 million movie entries barrier.

Last week a JMDB user also pointed me to a bug regarding the quotes. There are 25 entries in the current quotes.list which use more then 2 blank lines and so some information was missing in the detail window (of those 25 movies). Previously (since 2000) I assumed two blank lines mark the end of the quotes to the current movie. I changed the import to support more blank lines. This change will make it into the upcoming JMDB v1.35 BETA5.

Finally I'm currently testing different Java Versions. Currently it seems Java 6 (aka 1.6.0) needs round about 35% more memory compared to Java 1.5! If you currently run into memory problems you need to increase the memory parameter in the JMDB start script. Look in the FAQ (Question 12) for details!

[UPDATE]
I've finished the Java Version test. Java 6 (aka 1.6.0) needs the same amount of memory as Java 1.5 and Java 1.4 while storing the movies in memory as long as you use the Client VM (the information can be seen in the "About JMDB" window).

I've installed the AMD 64 Bit Java 1.6 package and then the Server VM will be used (see picture below). The Server VM is optimized for speed and not memory usage. The result is that it needs more memory compared to the Client VM. I've not compared both version directly, so I can't say if the 64-Bit Server VM is really faster.

Screenshot of JMDB v1.35 "About JMDB" window (development version 2007-04-17)

2007-04-05

Another small update2!

There's still no final JMDB v1.35 out but there will be another BETA SOON™. I've fixed some smaller issues, the new languages (French and Dutch) and also the updated start scripts for Linux and Mac OS X (plus Mac OS X icons) will be included in this (hopefully last) BETA release before the final version!

I had to update the serbian translation and now only some minor changes have to be made (removing debug message). I will also look into the slow index creation using MySQL that's currently bugging me. I already tried the MySQL setting "innodb_file_per_table=1" but that didn't have the effect I was looking for.
NOTE: That parameter tells MySQL to use one file for each table and not a single file for all MySQL databases and their tables. I you are using MySQL with the InnoDB storage backend (default on MySQL releases) it stores everything in one big file named "ibdata1"!

I hope to speed this up by the end of next week. I also have to check the memory usage once again. I think I can optimize that a little bit.

2007-03-10

Another small update!

My plan was to release the final JMDB v1.35 by now, but as you may have noted it's not yet there!
I'm still working on it and I'm almost there. Yesterday I fixed a really old problem introduced with the resume mode (3 years ago). It was no serious error but it was an error. So far no one has reported it and I also found it only by accident while working on a REXX script.

This REXX script may be interesting for some of you as I extract content from the imported IMDb data to generates a list of current movies shown at the cinema plus the upcoming movies for the next weeks.

The REXX script (more on REXX can be found at The Rexx Language Association (RexxLA)) can be run on Windows using the Regina REXX Interpreter or on eComStation (eCS) and OS/2 with the REXX interpreter shipped with the operating system. REXX is available on almost ANY operating system (even PalmOS powered handhelds like the PalmOne Treo's). Beside that it uses REXX/SQL, an SQL extension, which I've tested here with the MySQL driver.
This REXX/SQL extension isn't that portable (at least there are no precompiled binaries for Linux but the source code is available) but the script is only ment to be an example. The SQL queries should allow you to use other scriping languages and their database extensions to do the same as I did in REXX.

The script will be available on my private website end of next week. It's only a demonstration how to extract information from the database on your own without using our Java frontend once the data has been imported. Currently it will constuct two tables with data. One table lists the movies by releasedate and the other lists sorts the movies by rank - both include some addition information like the first three most important Actors/Actresses.
If you want to see the result for yourself you can go here (there is no offical link on my website yet):

German page: Kinoprogramm
English page: Cinema program

In the last two month I also got two more translations for the GUI. Beside the french language file, there is also one for the Dutch users. I've not yet heard anything new of the italian translation but another user did contact be because he wanted to do the Norwegian translation. Maybe this one get's finished....I really hope it as we now support eight some well used languages around the globe (English, German, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, French and Dutch)! This is great! :)