The handling of UPC looks as working good. But the same filed is used also for the alternative Disk ID.

This will bring us to the same situation in the future that IVS was in.

A lot of duplicate profiles will be in the DB. This will make it hard contribute additional entrys or HQ Covers.

If its possible to split this information and stor it in to seperate fields its faster to (and effective) to bring all the informations together.

A little example:

a search for a UPC with no result (maybe it was a annoncment of a upcomming DVD)
Then I seach by Disc ID  with a result. I download the Profile. Include the UPC and contribute it as an update.

Then we have all together in one profile. After this point this profile will include all the additional information contributed bay the community.

I hope my ID is not to complex to handle it.

Tony

Hi Skip again you are the first!!!

short comment:

if you are right then DVD Profiler can not work as a stable product.

But the reality is that I find my DVD by searching with UPC sometimes.
If not I will find it by title. Then I overwright the Disk Id by the UPC, make some additional entries and contribut it.

The result:

One Actual Profile (UPC with additions and so on) and
one with Disk ID and maybe some missing or wrong parts.

The fact is that only over the UPC you can identify the Vendor, the edition and the locality about a product. (This is the main reason to use UPC = Identify a product.

my Idea is to use Disk ID make it possible to enter annoncements and so on to the database. Also making entries for DVDs I dont know the UPC.

In the livetime of a Product a other person have the UPC and can ADD it. In the moment its result in a seperate entry. This means if I update my Collection I will never get the new information.

Tony

I think the main reason for this is that, like every database, DVD Profiler needs some unique key for every record in the database. For DVD Profiler this is the UPC field. At some point, it was decided to also support disks without UPC and there the Disk ID could be used as the key.
Personally, I see this as a dirty hack though... It would indeed make more sense to have them in separate fields and maybe use the two fields combined as the primary key. This would immediately solve the problem with two different DVDs having the same UPC. The primary key would still be different because the Disk ID is different.
The main disadvantage however is that then everybody would have to use the Disk ID as well which is difficult because:
a) not everyone would have a DVD-ROM in their PC and/or willing to everytime enter the disk in the drive.
b) there would have to be a convention with multi-disk sets on what disk to use.

Edit: now I realize that in fact it is UPC/DiskId + Locality that currently is the primary key. In fact, I have a much better idea now...and will start a new thread on that .