Someone on the Tellico mailing list recently asked about importing data from GCFilms. I got curious tonight, so I hacked together a combination of GCFilm’s data reader and Heikki Lehväslaiho’s imdbfetch.pl to write a perl script that reads the gcfilms database and outputs a Tellico data file. My perl skills are extremely limited, and it’s a very ugly script, but it seems to work on the small GCFilms file I just made. You can download gcfilms_convert yourself and give it a shot if you’re curious. Make it executable, run it, and redirect the output to a file, then load that file in Tellico.

Also to demonstrate Tellico’s new ability to import results from an external script, you could also download a slightly modified gcfilms_fetch, and then create a new external application data source in Tellico 1.0pre2, using that file as the application, and just putting %1 as the arguments. The collection type would be video.

Then you can actually search your GCFilms database as a data source! One caveat, I just fixed a bug in Tellico 1.0pre2 that prevents the script from running if it’s in your $HOME directory. Dumb, I know, but I just figured that out. So either put it somewhere else, or grab the source from SVN.