Singing Potatoes
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Friday, 2 May 2008
Quick-and-dirty coding project of the day
The Shocker

Every so often, I look at our DVD collection and say to myself, "I really ought to catalog those one of these days", and then fail to do so because, quite frankly, it's a tedious task, and I usually have more appealing things to do than write down a couple hundred DVD titles.

This morning on TotalFark, someone linked to this item and asked if anyone had any experience with it; it's a barcode scanner for cataloging DVD collections (scan in the UPC symbols from your DVDs, then connect it to your computer and use the accompanying software to look up all the UPC symbols).

Now, one of my work projects involves the use of a USB handheld barcode scanner. And Amazon lets you look up products by their UPC symbols. So I plugged the barcode scanner into my Eee PC and scanned all the DVDs into a text editor, then wrote a short PHP script to read the list and look up each UPC symbol on Amazon, grab the title out of the results page, and write it to another file.

Less than half an hour's worth of work, including the time it took to scan 253 DVD boxes, and I had our whole collection cataloged. (Three UPC symbols weren't in the Amazon database, so I had to type those titles in manually, like a savage.)

Go ahead, laugh at our tastes in film and television.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
I don't have the scanner, but I do have the software and I get an awful lot of use out of it. Whenever I want to add a movie, it searches several online resources like amazon.com, imdb, etc. that I specify and collates all that info.

It's a very handy program. I also use their Comic Collector database.

I all that info using ListPro into my PocketPC so when I'm at Best Buy I can be certain I'm not purchasing a film I already own.
Posted by Darren on 2 May 2008 15:17
If only I could get you to show the same initiative for washing the dishes...
Posted by Mrs. Godfrey on 2 May 2008 16:59
I didn't realize that "Beastie Boys" and "Criterion Collection" could go together...
Posted by Zach on 3 May 2008 21:07