Well, ProfilerQuery has two main strengths, really. First of all, it's easy to combine selection criteria. Secondly it's easy to get an overview of the result. So here are a few examples of things you can do with ProfilerQuery. If you play around with it a bit I'm sure you can find lots of other useful things you can accomplish.
Before DVD Profiler 3.9 the only way to properly profile titles with
multiple films on the same side of the disc was to add manual profiles for
them. Now you can solve the problem by adding variant disc id:s. But if
you have a large collection it may not be all that easy to identify all
box sets where you have added manual profiles as children. But it's easy
with ProfilerQuery:
Now all you have to do is click the parent id in the result, hit Ctrl-C to
copy it, switch to Profiler, use Alt-F10 for "Select by UPC..." paste the
UPC and there you are.
Want to make it even simpler to go from ProfilerQuery to the profile in
DVD Profiler? You can use a macro program. See below.
If you haven't added manual entries for discs with multiple films on one
side, one way to find profiles that may need to have variants added is to
search the disc description for "/", since these profiles often have a
description in the form of "Movie 1 / Movie 2". Thanks to user Wigram
for that tip.
I found, almost by accident, that there were profiles where the
contributor had entered 4:3, resulting in the nonsense "4:3 :1". Now, this
actually causes a problem for ProfilerQuery, because it wants to convert
the aspect into a numeric value so it can be properly sorted in the grid.
So if the field contains "4:3" instead of "1.33" (or "1.37"), this value
will be rejected and replaced with "-1".
But it does point out the erring profile. If you run this with text
output, you'll see the actual value of the field.
Probably not a big problem if you live where NTSC is the standard.
However, if you live in a PAL country and enter your own profiles it's
quite easy to forget to change video standard to PAL.
The one with Sweden as locality is wrong. There are other localities that
use NTSC, and you can add them to the selection criteria if you want, but
just excluding North America will probably narrow things down to where the
mistakes are easy to spot. Also, sorting by locality in the result will
help (click on the Locality header). Australia is a bit of an odd bird,
because they seem to use both standards.
You can find out all sorts of things using ProfilerQuery. For example if
you use no selection (and make sure you've selected "And", not "Or"):
Sort the output on Number of Subtitles to see which of your discs has the
most subtitles. Twentyseven!? Do you have a disc with more? I believe the
maximum possible is 32.
Like I mentioned earlier, you can use a macro program to help connect ProfilerQuery and DVD Profiler. I have used AutoHotKey. I'm an absolute newbie at it, but I wrote the following script:
#NoEnv ; Recommended for
performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
#Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior
speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting
directory.
^j::
clipboard=
Send ^c
clipwait
IfWinExist, Invelos Software DVD Profiler
{
WinActivate ; use the window found
above
Sleep 100
Send {Alt Down}
Sleep 100
Send {F10}
Sleep 100
Send {Alt Up}
Send ^v
Send {Enter}
}
else
msgbox, DVD Profiler not found
Return
It works fine as long as DVD Profiler is not minimized. I had to add the Sleep instructions (100 ms) because the script was too fast. You may have to tweak that. Anyway, I just have to click the ID field in the result and then Ctrl-J to get to the profile I want. This works with any type of ID; disc ID, manual ID as well as UPC/EAN. I'm sure the same thing can be accomplished, possibly even better, with other programs such as AutoIt.