UPC and field changes

[dr4c4n]

Has any of this been followed up on? There is an XML RPC to www.upcdatabase.com
and it lists examples of all of the programming languages to access the information. I was wondering if there's been a plugin written for this at all. If not I'm attempting to write the python to just gather the title / any information from the description, and hopefully try to figure out how to automatically get that data into gcstar to perform a search..

Any help would be appreciated.

there is also a python extension to imdb which contains many upc codes for dvd movies.. I am really interested in persuing this endeavour... let me know how to help / who I should contact.

I love the gcstar application's layout and included templates. However I cannot use the barcode scanner with this application due to the fact that it cannot look up data based on the UPC codes. This will help with importing movies, books, magazines, software (from boxes both video game / operating system / applications) Books are not that bad since the upc is generally the same value as the ISBN.

Two websites I think should be written plugins for at least to grab the name of the product (and then do a search on imdb / other websites to gather the rest of the data.

The first is the internet upc database : http://www.upcdatabase.com/

other upc resources:
http://upcdata.info/
http://www.upcmachine.com/

or even using the google plugin to search for products by their upc number..

and another resource I've found (although it hasn't been updated since 2008) included upc's in an html, comma separated value and excell formatted database.

I would like to contribute, and learn the code to get this information from those sites. Thanks.

I have written a couple of scripts already which helped me out a bit, I'm willing to share and to learn something new by contributing what I have to gcstar.

Other things I've noticed: not being able to sort the entries by the "id" (not to be confused with identifier) specifically in the movie collection which you can access on another panel, but cannot "group by" which I would like...

also to be able to import the names and the upc numbers directly somehow (I think you can through csv, but I need to know how to add that extra field / change the fields).

let me know where to post my code for others..

by the way my results just from upcdatabase.com were:

out of 232 upc codes of different dvd movies, upcdatabase.com had 172 product descriptions (which I got automatically)

might also be nice to integrate so we can update their database when we put in a new upc number that the database doesn't have so others can have / use the info...

(there should be an open repo / database for ALL types of upc codes..) it would make things so much easier.. :) go foss projects!!!

[dr4c4n (dr4c4n)]

here's one of my scripts ...

[dr4c4n (dr4c4n)]

forgot to mention that all that my little script did was from a list of upc codes (scanned in using my barcode scanner)

looks up the product description and creates 3 files
one that lists the missing upc codes (ones not found in the db)
one that lists just the description (so just the names)
and another that puts the name beside the upc code.

[dr4c4n (dr4c4n)]

Some Additional UPC resources I've looked up, links to other projects / some interesting ideas for applications...

[zombiepig (nyall-zombiepigs)]

First step we need to do here is add a UPC field to the relevant collections:
- board games
- books
- comics
- films
- games
- music
- periodicals (currently no web plugins for this collection, but it's worth planning ahead)

Next step is to add searching by upc to website plugins which can handle this information. Eg, musicbrainz can search by barcode directly:
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release/?type=xml&query=barcode:5016025611720
For websites which can search by barcode it's an easy addition to let gcstar make use of this.

Final step would be for sites which don't support barcode search. In this case we could use http://www.upcdatabase.com/xmlrpc.asp to return a product name for a given barcode. A few ways this could be shown in the gcstar ui:
- add a button next to the UPC field, 'lookup'. This would grab the product name and insert it into the relevant title field. This could also search on this product name using the selected default website plugin.
- a menu command for 'add items by barcode'. This could bring up a dialog, allowing user to enter multiple barcodes. A button for 'add to collection' would then go and translate the codes to product names and search with the current plugin.