Good day, english Sirs,

of all your seven "Die Hard 4.0" - profiles only the Blu-ray (#5039036036283) has an additional Original Title (Live Free or Die Hard).

Does this Original Title come from the credits? (in the german Blu-ray release it's Die Hard 4.0 in the opening credits)

Love, bbbbb

Quoting hal9g:

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Another example of a change in the Rules having the effect of directing us to put the "wrong" information into a field.

The "Original Title" should be the title of the movie when in was originally released in its CoO.

Taking it from the opening credits is just plain stupid!

bbbbb wrote from the UK profiles and it's an US movie, so this part of the rules would be correct:

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Foreign Films: The Original Title field will contain the original title for the main feature in the country of origin.  i.e. A German DVD release for a film originally produced in the United States would have the German title in the Title field and the English title in the Original Title Field.

This matches to your second sentence.

Quoting VirusPil:

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Quoting hal9g:

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Another example of a change in the Rules having the effect of directing us to put the "wrong" information into a field.

The "Original Title" should be the title of the movie when in was originally released in its CoO.

Taking it from the opening credits is just plain stupid!

bbbbb wrote from the UK profiles and it's an US movie, so this part of the rules would be correct:

Quote:
Foreign Films: The Original Title field will contain the original title for the main feature in the country of origin.  i.e. A German DVD release for a film originally produced in the United States would have the German title in the Title field and the English title in the Original Title Field.

This matches to your second sentence.

Yes, that's a good point.  However, there are other instances where the "Original Title" does not match the opening credits, and the film cannot be considered a "foreign film".

The Rule needs to be changed.

Quoting hal9g:

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The Rule needs to be changed.

No it doesn't. If it would be changed, we'd see an ENDLESS stream of debates on what a film's "original title" is, since we wouldn't have a consistent, readily-available-for-everyone, "set in stone" place to take it from anymore. Essentially it would turn the field into a free-for-all, resulting in even more useless CLT results (due to the same films being counted multiple times). Sure, there are a few unfortunate cases now, too, but not nearly as much as a rule change would cause. This is a simple, clear-cut rule that 's easily understood, and works accross the board. I really don't see an alternative that gives us the same level of clarity. You also need to realize that EVERY approach results in some users being unhappy: every time a film has more than two different titles, we're always going to lose (at least) one of them. Rather than arguing over whether we enter title variant #2 or #3, and different users deciding differently on that, I very much prefer the current consistent rule.

Let us, once again, look at the alternatives.

Quoting the Contribution Rules:

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Use the title from the film's credits.

Quoting hal9g:

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I think the Original Title field should contain "The Original Title" of the film, wherever you need to go to find it.

Obviously, I'd rather stick with the rule as it is now. Again, this gives us a consistent, crystal-clear and "set in stone" source to take the original title from. No room for different interpretation, no endless debates, no bickering, no ping-ponging - if only the entire set of contribution rules were as clear as this one! Instead, you suggest to muddy the waters with: take it from "wherever you need to go to find it." I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of non-rule that has driven us to hundreds of pages of bickering and inconsistent data - it essentially boils down to "do whatever you want". No, the simple and consistent "title from the film's credits" rule is there for a very good reason.

Again: there will always be a few oddball cases where you'd like to track a different title variant than the one you see in the credits. Not to worry: please go ahead! Just keep the title fields for those few oddball cases local. That's what I do, and trust me: that really is a far better solution than turning the field into some free-for-all...

Personally, I'd rather the data be useful than straightforward. We don't have a single, definitive source for SRP, either, and we still include it.

Quoting Ace_of_Sevens:

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Personally, I'd rather the data be useful than straightforward.

But it is useful. The field tells me what the title in the credits is - that's very useful to me (allow me to point out that I can't see this on the cover - if we didn't track it in the "original title" field I'd have to pull the disc out to find it). The database can never be all things to all people, but as illustrated time and time again, the simple "use the title from the film's credits" gives the highest percentage of accurate results. There will always be a few oddball cases where one might decide to track a different title variant locally, but for the online database, this really is the best approach. We take the "title" from the cover, and the "original title" from the credits - again, I wish all rules were as simple as that one. I don't see why we'd want an inconsistent, multi-interpretable bit of vagueness instead of the absolutely foolproof rule we've got.

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We don't have a single, definitive source for SRP, either, and we still include it.

And, as a result of that, it's about the messiest, most inconsistent field we have. I've largely given up on dealing with it - I have a pretty good set of sources I use to research (original!) SRP's, and when I've done that, I lock it down and never look at it again. But in the online database it truly is a mess. Not exactly the route I'd like to go down for original titles - especially because the original title is so important with regards to the CLT. Compared with that, nothing depends on the SRP. But consistency is extremely important for the "original title" field. Exactly because of the importance of consistency in this area, we desperately need the simple, foolproof, straightforward approach that we've got right now.

The movie - O Brother, Where Art Thou? from 2000, in the opening on screen credits the title as  O Brother, yet the art and credit block shows the tile as O Brother, Where Art Thou? ...

Quoting Ace_of_Sevens:

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Quoting cvermeylen:

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I must say I agree with T!M and Pete on this one. If we stop taking the original title from the credits, you can be sure most people will get it from IMDB.

There's no single source for CoO, either. Besides, assuming you know the CoO, there are plenty of ways to look up what the title was there besides IMDB. For instance, you can mostly look this up in DVD profiler by just checking whatever the region in question is.

I wouldn't compare the original title to CoO. CoO is flawed anyway since we can't track multi-country co-productions. It has always been the case to take as much as possible the info from the DVD itself.
I can only speak for myself, but I like the Original Title rule just the way it is.