[jubilex]

Some of them give away the entire movie. This one for the Black Hole literally goes up to the final shot:

http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9570

While this one for Iron Man helpfully allows me to just skip right to the climactic fight without having to worry about missing anything:

http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1726

It's too bad, because otherwise I prefer themoviedb scraper to the imdb one. Much better identification of movies for the most part. But these ridiculous, spoiler-heavy plot synopses make it unusable for me.

Anyone else?

[Jezz_X]

LOL yeah a little too much detail in that maybe you should take it up with them ?

[ibixat]

You can edit the movie DB if you sign up for an account. I don't know how they'd respond to editing an overview to make it ... well an overview instead of a plot vomit. I agree that whoever wrote those overviews doesn't have a firm grip on what an overview actually is. I believe that some skins do allow you to hide the plot of unwatched movies, maybe that would help you out some?

[Jeroen]

I agree, although it's even worse on thetvdb. And on many occasions I tried to shorten them up, trying to stay true to the original, only to see them reverted again and again so I just gave up eventually.

I don't understand the need for these step by step descriptions, noone is going to read all of that on the tv screen. A good plot description imo is 5 lines max.

Another thing I can't stand is including cast credits in the plot. Any proper mediacenter app will have specific fields for that info.

Unfortunately, themoviedb used to have a good limitation on the amount of characters for the plot description so you had to keep the plots compact. They seem to have changed that. They also used to remove fanart with text on it, but that also has been dropped it seems. I can't stand fanart with crappy logo's or text on it, it looks tacky.

[/rant]

[krish_2k4]

some of those long plots are taken from imdb 'plot summarys' which reveal all too!

[jubilex]

You can edit the movie DB if you sign up for an account. I don't know how they'd respond to editing an overview to make it ... well an overview instead of a plot vomit. I agree that whoever wrote those overviews doesn't have a firm grip on what an overview actually is. I believe that some skins do allow you to hide the plot of unwatched movies, maybe that would help you out some?

Yeah, but I need *some* plot overview so girlfriend/guests can browse movies and decide what they want to see.

Plot overview should be about two sentences, tops.

Compare imdb's overview of The Black Hole to themoviedb's linked above: "A research vessel finds a missing ship, commanded by a mysterious scientist, on the edge of a black hole."

Or Iron Man: "When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil."

Those are exactly what a plot overview should be.

So I'm just going to have to stick to the imdb scraper even though it does a really shitty job of identifying movies a lot of the time. For example, how in the hell does it take a file called "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" and decide it must be "The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas"? Or decide that "Crank 2" must refer to "The Making of Crank 2"? Or that "Buckaroo Banzai" refers not to "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai", but to "Buckaroo Bard"?

[ibixat]

Yeah, but I need *some* plot overview so girlfriend/guests can browse movies and decide what they want to see.

Plot overview should be about two sentences, tops.

Compare imdb's overview of The Black Hole to themoviedb's linked above: "A research vessel finds a missing ship, commanded by a mysterious scientist, on the edge of a black hole."

Or Iron Man: "When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil."

Those are exactly what a plot overview should be.

So I'm just going to have to stick to the imdb scraper even though it does a really shitty job of identifying movies a lot of the time. For example, how in the hell does it take a file called "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" and decide it must be "The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas"? Or decide that "Crank 2" must refer to "The Making of Crank 2"? Or that "Buckaroo Banzai" refers not to "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai", but to "Buckaroo Bard"?

I know the feeling, that's why I started using ember myself, I got to pick my poster eaiser, get nice high quality posters and fanart etc without any logos or words on the fanart etc. It just left me feeling more in control of what shows up, then I just add the stuff to xbmc using the ember created nfo and images and it all works out, I also use zeeb to rename my movies. My movies get named <Title (release year).ttxxxxxxxx.resolution.mkv> etc... so for example the movie priest from 2011 in 720p is "Priest (2011).tt0822847.720p" tt0822847 is the imdb ID number for the movie. Makes it super easy when I use ember and it almost never picks out the wrong movie. You could rename them using zeeb alone, adding the tt# to the end, then when it searches for the movie on imdb if it's wrong you just choose to manually enter the name, delete all but the TT# from the search text and it will find it exact match every time.

[The_Dogg]

I agree too, both tmdb and thetvdb have some pretty bad plot summary. I guess that's the price to pay to have a community driven website.

but I wonder why post this here? both of them have forums to address this

[voochi]

I changed Iron Man for you. I havent seen the other movie so I can't change it.