Adding videos to your database

There are multiple ways to add videos to your database -- you can do so individually; by mass importing video data by editor YouTube channel URL, AnimeMusicVideos.org editor profile, or by public YouTube playlist; or, if you have used a previous version of AMV Tracker, you can import your database from that version to be compatible with version 2 and above. Each of these methods is described in detail below.

Single video entry

To add a single new video entry to your database, click the button on the upper-left of the main window. You will be shown a new window with four tabs, each of which includes different types of data you can add to your video.

Sources and URLs

This tab allows you to identify where this video and editor can be found on the internet, as well as where the video file might be found on your local computer (if it exists there). It is also where you locate/generate/download thumbnail images for your video entries.

1. Video sources

   • Video URL text boxes: These four boxes are for you to put URLs to where the video lives on specific websites -- YouTube, AnimeMusicVideos.org, AMVNews, and/or any other website where the video might be found. There are additional functions which are activated when certain criteria are met:

     • - URL must be entered. Click to open the corresponding URL in your browser. (If you put a URL in and this button does not activate, please ensure that the URL you are entering is correct -- i.e. you are entering a YouTube URL in the the YouTube text box, an AMV.org video URL in the AMV.org text box, etc.)

     • - URL must be entered. Click to auto-populate video and editor information with data scraped from the corresponding URL.

     • - URL must be entered. Click to download video.

       • For YouTube URL, there are several things that must be set up before this function becomes available in AMV Tracker. I have created a separate section that walks through the steps to get this working, as well as the actual process of downloading videos. Please see here for more information.

       • For AMV.org URL, be taken to the video's download page (NOTE: you must be logged in to your .org account and have fewer than 10 outstanding star ratings, which can be cleared on the Member's Main Page).

       • For AMVNews URL, be taken to the video's download page.

     • - Video title and editor name must be entered on "Video information" tab (for AMVNews, only video title is required). This will execute a search on the corresponding website to try and find the video.

     • - AMV.org only. Video title and editor name must be entered on "Video information" tab. AMV Tracker will execute a search for the video on AnimeMusicVideos.org based on the entered editor name and video title, and will scrape the video/editor information from the first search result that occurs.

   • Local file: If you have the video file saved locally on your computer, you can locate it here by clicking the "Local file" button.

     • - Clear the file path from the "Local file" text box.

     • - Play video file. If the file has been renamed, moved, or deleted since the local file path was specified, an error message will alert you to this fact.

   • Thumbnail: Thumbnails are used to display an image for each video entry while in Detail View. You can either manually select an image file on your computer by clicking the "Thumbnail" button here, or you can generate/download one if certain conditions are met (see below). The image below this row shows the selected thumbnail. NOTE: All generated or downloaded thumbnails are automatically put into the AMV_Tracker/thumbnails/[db_name] directory. They are named based on the unique video ID that is generated when you enter the video into your database.

     • - Clear the file path from the "Thumbnails" text box.

     • - Download the YouTube thumbnail for this video. YouTube URL must be entered in the "Video YouTube URL" text box.

     • - Generate a thumbnail from the local video file specified in the "Local file" text box. NOTE: You must have ffmpeg downloaded or installed on your computer for this to work. Please see here or here for further information.

2. Editor channels/profiles

   • Fetch URLs from existing entries: If you have entered the editor's name on the "Video information" tab and this editor has at least one video entry already in your database, you can click this button to auto-populate the below four text boxes with any URLs already entered into AMV Tracker for this editor.

   • URL text boxes: Here you can specify links to where to find this editor on YouTube, AMV.org, AMVNews, or any other locations. Clicking the corresponding button will take you to the provided URL in your browser.

Video information

This tab is where you will enter all of the publicly available information about this video, such as video footage used, song artist/title, video duration, contests entered, the editor's own words about the video, among other things. Most of these things should be pretty self-explanatory, but here are some details to know about some of the fields on this tab. PLEASE NOTE: By default, all fields in the video entry window are OPTIONAL, with the exception of "Primary editor username" and "Video title". These two fields are always required for a video to be entered into your database.

• Primary editor other username(s): Used to denote any other usernames this editor currently goes by, or has gone by in the past. If you need to enter multiple names here, separate them with a semicolon + space ("; ")

• Addl. editor(s): Used to list out other editors involved in the creation of the video. Activates once the "Primary editor username" field is filled in. Click the "2+ editors" button that appears to enter the names of multiple editors, each on their own line, if needed.

• Release date: Please note that all three dropdown boxes must be filled in for the release date to be entered, otherwise it will just go into your database as blank. If the release date is not known, check the "Date unknown" checkbox.

• Star rating: Used to record any publicly available star ratings (for example, on the .org you can see this per video if you are/were a Donator, and there is a star rating available for every video on AMVNews). Needs to be a number between 0 - 5.

• Video footage used: As you enter more and more videos into AMV Tracker, you will be able to select already-entered footage by either double-clicking the text box or starting to type the footage name and selecting it from the popup. If the footage is not already represented in the database, type it out and then click the "+" button to add it.

• Song genre: If you are unsure what genre a song is, enter the artist name and click the "[?]" link next to the "Song genre" text box to look the artist up on RateYourMusic, which should provide good suggestions.

My rating/tags/comments

This tab is to input your own personal feedback on the video, including a rating you can assign (out of 10), marking the video as notable or as a favorite, adding tags, and writing your own notes on the video.

• My rating: This is a rating you can assign to the video to denote how much you like it. Ratings are at intervals of 0.5 on a scale of 0 - 10.

• Notable/Favorite: These are checkboxes you can use to identify videos of note (whatever that means to you), or to easily mark your "favorite" videos. Both of these can be used to easily find such videos via filtering later.

• Apply custom logic: Custom tag logic can be set in the Video entry section of AMV Tracker's Settings. This function allows you to auto-tag videos based on other fields within AMV Tracker being filled out in certain ways, in order to make tagging videos easier. Clicking this button will run through any active filter logic and apply tags as instructed. PLEASE NOTE: clicking this button will erase any existing tags and overwrite them based on your defined logic -- thus it's best to click this button BEFORE any other tags have been applied.

• Tags: Here you can select any tags you feel apply to the video you are entering. Tags and tag groups can be created and defined in the Tag management section of AMV Tracker's Settings. Clicking the corresponding button will clear all tags from that row. Clicking the corresponding button will allow you to add a new tag to that tag group.

• Personal comments/notes: This is a free text entry field where you can make any notes or comments you want on the video being entered.

Submission rules

This tab is used to both check data before it is submitted to the database, as well as to tell AMV Tracker where to put the video within your database.

• Checks enabled: Check this box if you want to ensure that the fields defined under the "Data checking" section of the Video entry tab in AMV Tracker's Settings are populated before the video can be entered into your database. Uncheck this box to disable this check -- in this case, only the Primary Editor Username and Video Title fields need to be populated. NOTE: The default state of this checkbox can be defined in Settings.

• Video source: This field can be used to track either the method by which a video enters your database (e.g. manual entry, mass import, etc.), the place you found the video (e.g. YouTube, amv.org, shared on Discord, etc.), or some combination of both. The default value for this field can be defined in Settings.

• Add to following sub-DBs: If you are making use of sub-databases other than "Main database", and you want this video to go into one or more of them, choose the specific sub-DBs you want this video to be entered into here. PLEASE NOTE: At least one sub-DB must be selected in order for the video to be entered into your database.

• Add to following Custom Lists: If you have one or more Custom Lists and you'd like to put the video into them, select which Custom Lists you'd like to add the video to here.

Downloading videos from YouTube

AMV Tracker has built-in functionality which allows you to download YouTube videos directly from the Sources and URLs tab in the video entry screen. Because of the extra work required by the user to enable this function, I have moved this topic to its own section. Before you are able to use this function, you must ensure the following:

• You have downloaded yt-dlp.exe. There are two methods for doing this:
  1. The preferred method is to enter PowerShell (right-click on the Start Menu icon > Windows PowerShell) and type winget install yt-dlp. That's it, nothing more needs to be done.
  2. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, you can download yt-dlp.exe from here, under the "Assets" header (you only need the .exe file, you can ignore all the other files listed there).
• You have downloaded ffmpeg. There are two methods for doing this:
  1. The preferred method is to enter PowerShell (right-click on the Start Menu icon > Windows PowerShell) and type winget install Gyan.FFmpeg. That's it, nothing more needs to be done.
  2. If you don't feel comfortable doing this, you can download the "Essentials" build from the site linked above, and extract the three .exe files found in the /bin directory to the same directory as yt-dlp.exe.

Once both yt-dlp and ffmpeg have been downloaded and/or installed, go to AMV Tracker's Settings and, on the "Data import" tab, locate yt-dlp.exe, ffmpeg.exe, and ffprobe.exe using the respective buttons. (Depending on your methods for obtaining these programs, the text boxes here may already be populated, in which case you do not need to manually locate those particular .exe files.)

When all this has been completed, you can start downloading videos from YouTube from within AMV Tracker. On the video entry screen, once you populate the "Video YouTube URL" box with the URL to a YouTube video, the button will activate. Clicking it will bring up this screen:

• You must click the "Save video to..." button to locate the directory and specify the filename for the video to be downloaded before AMV Tracker will allow you to download it
• In general, the "Download 720p" or "Download 1080p" buttons should suffice for most people. These will automatically find the best video/audio combo at the respective resolution, or if that resolution is not available, the next-highest one that is.
• If, however, you want more control over the specific video & audio streams to download and mux, you may select both and then click the "Download selected" button. AMV Tracker will download both streams separately and then combine them, and save the video file where you specified.

Mass import video data

AMV Tracker has two options for mass importing data -- by editor channel/.org profile, or from YouTube playlists. Each of these options are explored below.

By YouTube channel or AMV.org editor profile

You can paste either the editor's YouTube channel URL or their AnimeMusicVideos.org profile URL into the text box, and when you click "Download data", AMV Tracker will fetch the video information for all videos on their channel/.org profile and import them into the database you have specified. The "Video source" text box at the bottom of the window will populate with whatever value you have defined in AMV Tracker's Settings, and will be based on the type of URL you paste.

NOTE: AMV Tracker cannot differentiate between AMV and non-AMV entries on an editor's YouTube channel, so it will import ALL videos from that channel.

By YouTube playlist

You can paste the URL to any public YouTube playlist and AMV Tracker will fetch all the videos on that playlist and import them into your database. If you have one or more Custom Lists already created before using this function, you will also be given the option to put all these videos into one of them. The "Video source" text box at the bottom of the window will populate with whatever value you have defined in AMV Tracker's Settings once you enter the URL.

NOTE: For both of the above options, if you check the "Overwrite existing entries" checkbox, and AMV Tracker detects that a video it is attempting to import is already in your database, it will overwrite any conflicting fields with the information it finds during its fetch. If "Overwrite existing entries" is left unchecked, any duplicate entries it detects will simply be ignored and whatever you already have in your database will remain untouched.

Also, checking the "Download thumbnails" checkbox will download any YouTube thumbnails from a YT channel/playlist. If the "Overwrite existing entries" checkbox is checked and AMV Tracker finds a duplicate, it will overwrite the existing thumbnail with the one it finds on YouTube.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Depending on the size of the channel/playlist you are importing data from, YouTube may rate-limit you when you use this function, meaning that all video entries will not be imported. In this case, AMV Tracker will import the data that it gets before this rate-limit occurs, and once complete you will be shown a dialog that lists out all the videos (along with their corresponding YouTube URLs) that were not able to be imported. You will be presented with the option to retry (picking up where you left off), or you can manually add the missing videos one by one and use the function to auto-populate the video entry with the data that would have been included in the mass import, had it succeeded. (If doing the latter, it is recommended that you copy and paste all the failed imports into e.g. a text editor so that you can access the failed URLs when you decide to manually add them later.)

Import from previous version of AMV Tracker

If you have never opened AMV Tracker 2 before, upon first launching it you will be prompted to select your working database, and you can choose to import from an old version of AMV Tracker here. Click that option and follow the prompts in that case.

Otherwise, if you missed this when you first launched AMV Tracker, this option can be found in [Settings > Data management]. Make sure the dropdown on the right says "Previous AMV Tracker version" and click the "Import data from -->" button. Follow the prompts and AMV Tracker will import everything and make it compatible with v2. If you created any Custom Lists in v1 of AMV Tracker, those can also be imported by clicking the "Import Custom Lists" button under the "Custom List operations" section in the same Settings tab, and following those prompts as well.

NOTE: IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED THAT IF YOU WANT TO IMPORT DATA FROM AN OLD VERSION OF AMV TRACKER, YOU DO THIS BEFORE ADDING ANY VIDEOS TO A NEW DATABASE, AS YOU CANNOT IMPORT A DATABASE FROM AN OLD VERSION OF AMV TRACKER INTO AN ALREADY-EXISTING DATABASE -- THESE VIDEOS MUST GO INTO A BRAND NEW DB.