Article by Ey@el

The second part of this tutorial will be dedicated to the use of the HTML template I offered for download in Part One. Since the basic principle remains the same, you may follow these guidelines with any other template or even create yours and you may of course, edit/delete anything you don't like.

On the above capture, you can see which fields have been renamed in the (optional) alternative language file offered for download (see the first part of this tutorial).

Custom fields

On the right side of the above capture, all the custom fields you'll need to add to get the most from this display template have been tagged with red numbers.

To create a custom field, you need to activate the All Fields tab and right click a blank zone on the right which will bring a contextual menu. Left click on "Add a custom field".

A dialog box will open and the first field containing "Add new field". Select the second field labelled Tag and enter the tag name of your field which will be used by the program. As soon as you'll begin typing, a validation cross will appear on the right end of the field. Once you're done, click on it to validate.

You may now enter the name of your field as you would like it to appear in AMC (it may be different from the tag name), then its type plus many other settings such as auto-complete feature — same as for AMC's default fields.

Below is the list of the custom fields you'll need along with their number on the above capture (in red), tag, name and type you'll have to enter.

1

Tag: Status

Name: To watch

Type: Boolean

 

Check the box (true) for movies you haven't seen. In HTML display mode, this field will show as a movie camera icon (coloured if checked, greyed if unchecked) on the left end of the title.

2

Tag: Quality

Name: Quality

Type: List

 

Used for the quality of your movie (for instance: original, DTV, TV, DVDRIP, YouTube, etc.).

3

Tag: AlternateTitle

Name: Alternative Title

Type: String

 

Useful when some movies have different titles according to countries even though the language is the same.

4

Tag: Ratio

Name: Aspect Ratio

Type: List

The three possible values for this fields are: Cinemascope, 16/9, 4/3.

5

Tag: Standard

Name: Standard

Type: List

 

The three possible values for this fields are: PAL, NTSC, SECAM.

6

Tag: Region

Name: Region

Type: Integer

 

On HTML display mode, this field will show an icon so it must never be empty otherwise you will get an ugly missing image icon instead. To avoid ending up with an empty field, enter "0" a default value in the settings. I have provided icons for regions 0, 1 and 2 only. You may need to create new ones if you use different region for DVD's or Blu-ray's.

7

Tag: Color

Name: Colour

Type: List

 

The three possible values for this fields are: colour, black and white.

8

Tag: MediaUnit

Name: U (it's a trick so that this label won't show after you resize it as show on the above capture)

Type: List

 

The three possible values for this fields are: disks, tapes, size (MB). Actually, I use this field as a "dynamic label". Let me explain: for any movie on digital media such as DVD's, CD's, BR's, you need to select "disks"; for VHS you need to select "tapes", and for removable media such as external hard drives or USB sticks, you need to select "size (MB)". This field works along with default fields W (Size) and Y (Quantity). If your movie is on a physical media (digital or analogic), you need to leave the Size field empty whereas you need to enter its size if it's on removable media such as a HDD or USB stick. The actual principle is to display the number of disks (or tapes) when movies are on physical media and their size when they are on removable media.

All the other custom fields I have added are used to group and sort movies in list mode.

Default fields

Below is the list of the default fields you'll need to fill in to get the most from this template which have been tagged with blue letters. Some label may differ whether you use my alternative language file or not. It doesn't matter much since the template use the coded names which unlike custom fields cannot be edited. Just refer to their position to recognise them since that too cannot be changed.

Note: If you use scripts to retrieve movie details on the Internet, you may have to edit my HTML file to keep the same fields as your script. You'll find a detailed list of all default fields in the help file.

General specifications:

M

The Category label has been turned into a subcategory called Genre because I have named another field "Category" and I needed more space for genres!

N

Certification has been changed into Category (see previous field). For instance: Film, Short-film, TV series, Cartoons, Entertainment, Music, TV film, etc. I also categorise my other collectibles in the same fashion.

R

The video format field will display icons with the exact same name as the content of the field (which is how it works for any field you wish to display in graphic form). The image extension is defined in the HTML file. In this case, it must be PNG. A few icons are provided: MPEG2 (for DVD's), divx, xvid, h264 and analogic (blank icon for VHS tapes).

V

The language field will also display flag icons (with a blank icon for silent movies). For multi-languages (ie. french, english), the provided icon is named "french, english.png". If you enter "english, french", no flag will be displayed because the folder contains no such picture. Therefore you must enter names carefully and create any additional picture you may need.

No comments on other renamed fields or those used for other purposes which will be discussed in another tutorial.

Formatting

To edit this template, you may use the notepad or any plain text editor. You may also use the internal editor with AMC: just activate HTML display mode, select a movie in the list then activate the HTML page by clicking on it and right-click to launch the context menu and click on Edit.

If you wish to change colours, background images, fonts, margins, widths, heights, etc. on the HTML page, you need to look in the area between the Style tags (lines 6 to 87). In order to make it easier, I have grouped properties per type: pictures, colours, borders, formatting, alignment, margins and metrics (widths and heights).

The reason why I have defined a width and height for the left column (leftcol) is purely aesthetic since my screen width is rather small (1200 x 1024). You may certainly wish to edit/delete these value if your screen is wider.

Next instalment will deal with extras, a new features introduced with version 4.2.0.

Ey@el

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