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[ozziaj]

Could someone please confirm or explain why MC24 can no longer gather movie info from Wikipedia and Rottentomatoes, but only from IMDB?

Used to work perfectly with Wikipedai, but sadly no more.

Anyone care to comment?

Thanks and cheers to ya all 

[Matt]

For Wiki, make sure you're using the latest build.  It wasn't working for a while, but has since been fixed.

For Rotten Tomatoes, they have turned us off.  I'm inquiring about getting started again.

[ozziaj]

For Wiki, make sure you're using the latest build.  It wasn't working for a while, but has since been fixed.

Thanks Matt. Though I am using latest build as far as I know: 24.0.60 - can you confirm, please?

BTW, looking back at my imports, this hasn't worked for me for well over a month now. I only really noticed it lately as I was trying to update a few older imports ....

Really hope this can be fixed soon.

[amandalishus]

Fwiw, Wikipedia import is working fine for me in v24.0.60, and it definitely wasn't a few builds back; I just noticed it was working again when I checked after reading this.

If RottenTomatoes has ever been an option for me, I hadn't noticed it; however, I know for a fact that IMDB has not. As far as I was aware, TMDB and Wikipedia were the only options for movie data. Of course, TMDB returns the IMDB ID, although bizarrely not the TMDB ID (that would be a nice addition btw).

Is there some way to get imported data from IMDB of which I am not aware? That would make me truly happy, but I thought there was some issue with licensing data from IMDB for such purposes. I've actually kinda played around with their API, thinking I might create my own auto-import for their data using a personal developer key, but I haven't gotten very far owing to a surfeit of laziness.

[ozziaj]

@amandalishus Thanks for the headsup. IMDB = My Bad    Of course I was taking about TMDB. Never had IMDB, always just TMDB. Rottentomatoes used to work on and off, though it was rarely of any use to me. Primarily I used to source from Wikipedia.

Well, it's still not working at my end. I'm wondering if uninstalling MC and reinstalling might fix the issue. Though the fact that this happens on both systems, one being a brand new install, makes me think reinstalling ain't of much use.

Living in China, I thought that perhaps the Great Chinese Firewall had something to do with it. But the problem stubbornly stayed even when using my VPN and going through a US based server.

Funny thing though, everything worked fine until I upgraded to this latest build ... Should I bother going back to one of the previous builds??

So, basically I've pretty much run out of ideas here ... ?

[RoderickGI]

I'm wondering if uninstalling MC and reinstalling might fix the issue.

No, reinstalling isn't going to help.

The Wikipedia lookup was fixed back in 24.0.56, and some work has been done on other sites since then. Take a look at the Release Notes: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Release_Notes_MC24

I suspect you are correct that Wikipedia is being blocked from China. That wouldn't surprise me. Test if you can get to the Wikipedia site and the specific movie pages directly using a browser. Maybe the Great Chinese Firewall is blocking the VPN site as well? More likely your local firewall is the issue. Or there just isn't any information on Wikipedia about the movies you are looking up.

[ozziaj]

I suspect you are correct that Wikipedia is being blocked from China.

No, Wikipedia, surprisingly, isn't blocked in China. Never has been for the 10 years I've been here. I just tried it with the VPN in case connection through the local server is too slow when trying to access Wikipedia info via MC - this can happen on odd occasions, and then going through the VPN helps.

Though I'll check your suggestion re firewall (I'm using Comodo on WIn 10 64bit on top of Win 10's security). But doubt that this will help as I haven't changed any firewall settings for zonks ... Still, I'll play this a bit later and will get back.

BTW: where can I download latest version 24.0.63, please?? Can't find the relevant link .... ?

Cheers to ya all for your kind comments and suggestions 

[JimH]

63 isn't out yet.

[ozziaj]

63 isn't out yet.

Thanks, but take a look at this link, please:

Code: [Select]

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Release_Notes_MC24Says 63 is there, dated Nov 15, 2018 ....

[Awesome Donkey]

24.0.63 hasn't been released to the public yet as it's in private beta testing. 24.0.63 may or may not be released to the public, it depends how well the beta testing goes. And it might be a build with a higher number than .63 released to the public too, again, it all depends how well testing goes for each build.

Nonetheless, the release notes wiki article covers the changelogs of all builds, including the beta builds that haven't been released to the public.

You'll always find the latest public build that's released at the top of this forum section in a release post.

[ozziaj]

@Awesome Donkey Thanks, got it.


But let's get back to the topic of my support request, namely that the Get Movie function doesn't work for me under Windows 10 Ent (1809, 17763.134) with MC 24.0.60.

To exclude any firewall related issues, I've made an image copy of drive C, then uninstalled Comodo Firewall and completely disabled Windows 10 firewall and defender.

And still MS can only access movie info's from TMDB; none show from Wikipedia or Rottentomatoes.

As I can readily access Wikipedia here in China without a VPN, I think I can safely exclude any blocking issues from that Great Chinese Firewall?

In any case, using my very reliable VPN and going through a US-based server, MC still doesn't load movie info's from Wikipedia.

As luck would have it, tonight I'm off on a two day business trip to Tokya, Japan. Now, as there are no government blocking issues in Japan, and presuming my problem is somehow linked to some odd blocking issue, my MC install should have no problem accessing Wikipedia's movie info's, right?  ?

Well, we'll see and I shall report. Though my guess is that I'll encounter the same problem in Japan as I don't think it's a blocking issue.


Could someone here please let me know if there are any known WIndows 10 issues that may perhaps be related to the problem I'm having?

Thanks and cheers for all help and advice 

[ozziaj]

Just to update: As I had expected, I encountered the same problem in Japan.

My MC v24.0.60 cannot access movie info from Wikipedia or others, only from TMDB. This has been the case for me in Japan, as well as in China.

I'm pretty confident in saying that this issue is not due to any blocking, either through firewall settings or indeed that great Chinese Firewall ...

So, for me at this stage, I can only think of some issue between this version of MC and Windows 10.

Could someone here please help me to find a solution?? 

[RoderickGI]

I don't have any other ideas, but just checking; you are trying to do the lookup one movie at a time I assume, and you do scroll all the way down the list of results to find the Wikipedia entries? TMDB will just about always be the default site selected when multiple movies are looked up, or when the lookup is done during Auto Import. But a manual lookup allows you to select Wikipedia.

I just did a lookup on "Pearl Harbor (2001)", which MC gave many results for from TMDB, but down the bottom of the list were a whole bunch of results for Wikipedia as well.

[swiv3d]

I agree with RoderickGI, I looked up 50 first dates and got a whole slew of results from all of the listed sites including wikipedia. I guess we need some chinese or japanese users to try it out! If you select a movie file and click on Tools>Links you do see all of the links such as TMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Wiki listed?

[ozziaj]

I agree with RoderickGI, I looked up 50 first dates and got a whole slew of results from all of the listed sites including wikipedia. I guess we need some chinese or japanese users to try it out! If you select a movie file and click on Tools>Links you do see all of the links such as TMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Wiki listed?

Thanks swiv3d

Well, that's getting me a tiny step further! Yes, under Tools | Links I see all the links. If I click on Wiki after selecting a movie file, I get:

There was a problem loading the webpage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=2%20Guns&fulltext=Search&limit=20&offset=0

Please double check your connection and the webpage you are trying to load.

Error code - 101

Guess that indicates a possible network issue?

Question is where? 'Cause if I copy that URL from the error message, and try to open it in a browser window, I have no problem at all opening it (Wikipedia shows me its Search results page for the movie title, in this case 2 Guns) .... ?

Neither Windows Firewall nor Comodo report anything unusual or blocked. I even did as advised in the "Taming Windows Defender on Windows 10" thread:

Code: [Select]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,114101.0.html
As this same thing happens on my 2nd 'puter, running the same version of Windows and MC but not Comodo (just Win Defender), I tend to exclude a firewall problem...

I'm wondering: which part of MC initiates the wiki search? Could something be wrong with that part?

Still, even that doesn't make sense to me. I uninstalled MC completely on my 2nd 'puter and reinstalled MC 24.0.60 from scratch, but it made no difference.

I'm thinking of creating another testbed 'puter and install Windows 10 from scratch plus only MC 24.0.60 to see if there is some Windows conflict. Do you think that would be worth a try? Or just wasting time & effort?

Perhaps I should point out, that initially on both of my current installs, MC24 was installed as an update to previous versions. Perhaps that created some sort of conflict?

Though on my 2nd 'puter I tried to make sure that after uninstalling MC24 and before reinstalling it again, I cleaned all leftovers from previous versions, including in the registry. Naturally I can't be sure if I got 'em all, nor indeed if I tackled any possible Windows 10 corruption issues ...

So, where should I go from here, please?

[RoderickGI]

Try changing the MC web engine. The options are Chromium and Explorer. Swap whatever you have. If it then works, try swapping it back and try again.

I don't think that the "Get Movie & TV Info" functionality is dependent on the Tools > Links functionality, but if that isn't working, there is something seriously wrong with your installation. Sometimes just switching Web Engine to the other one and back again is enough to fix things. But then, "Get Movie & TV Info" works for TMDB, so something very strange is going on. As it fails on multiple PCs, it would indicate a settings issue, if not an underlying Windows issue, particularly if you are restoring the library to the other PCs.

BTW both TheTVDB and TMDB MC lookups use APIs provided by those pages. I'm not sure Wikipedia lookups use the Java API, but I would assume it does. So there is some coding involved, as well as browser functions and Java version. You do have Java on these PCs, right? Have you updated Java to the latest?

[Hendrik]

The Web Engine does not influence metadata lookup, nor is Java required.
But if MC cannot open the wikipedia URL in a web view, then its likely also not going to work for lookup.

Does the URL in the quote above work in an external browser for you?

[ozziaj]

I think I finally found a solution to my problem.

Seems it has to do primarily with my Comodo firewall. On a hunch, I completely uninstalled Comodo on both of my systems, this time using an old uninstalling/cleaning application one could get from Comodo, instead of just using the normal Windows uninstaller. This seems to remove more leftover settings the normal uninstaller is missing - possibly in particular firewall related application settings.

On my 2nd system I had removed Comodo some time ago early this year, but just using the normal Windows uninstaller. So I also applied Comodo’s utility there.

I then reinstalled Comodo on my primary system only, making sure all flagged components from MC are treated as fully allowed applications. Now MC can access Wikipedia’s movie information once again on both systems.

Funny thing, though.

I had to update about 30 movies. Some movies MC could access info from TMDB and Wikipedia, and on some (mainly newer) movies, it only got TMDB infos. But, low and behold, going through my VPN, MC could access movie infos from TMDB and Wikipedia for all movies. So, it seems that that sneaky bastard of the Great Chinese firewall is starting to block some parts of Wikipedia, either randomly or going by some weird algorithm. It’s a funny world, living in dragonland. 

Thanks to all here who helped; your input was much appreictaed. Cheers and peace be with ya’.

@Administrators: This topic can be deemed closed as far as I’m concerned. Cheers

[RoderickGI]

Well, it is good that you fixed it. 

But sometimes on this forum I feel like just saying; "It's your firewall. It's your firewall. It's your firewall." 

I'm going to start sounding like Jim: Firewall, Antivirus, or Security software. 

The Web Engine does not influence metadata lookup, nor is Java required.

Thanks for the clarification Hendrik. I'll try to remember that for the future.

[JimH]

Well, it is good that you fixed it. 

But sometimes on this forum I feel like just saying; "It's your firewall. It's your firewall. It's your firewall." 

I'm going to start sounding like Jim: Firewall, Antivirus, or Security software. 

Don't forget video drivers.  And lately, it's the OS!

[~OHM~]

Well, it is good that you fixed it. 

But sometimes on this forum I feel like just saying; "It's your firewall. It's your firewall. It's your firewall." 

I'm going to start sounding like Jim: Firewall, Antivirus, or Security software. 

What's a Firewall?