Here I will keep a running list of any known issues/bugs that you may encounter while using AMV Tracker. Please check here before posting anywhere else if you are experiencing unusual behavior with the program.

(1) If you happen to have the working spreadsheet open in Excel or some other program while you are using the data entry tool, and you click “Submit”, nothing will happen. The program cannot write data to the spreadsheet while it is open, so please make sure you close the spreadsheet BEFORE using this program.

(2) For this reason and others, it is strongly, STRONGLY recommended that you DO NOT touch the databases in Excel, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc. Although any AMV Tracker database can be opened, viewed, and edited in Excel, doing so may very well break its functionality with AMV Tracker. Because of certain limitations I had at the time I started writing this program, I ended up using a specific Python library that makes use of older versions of Excel documents. You may end up unknowingly converting a database to an incompatible filetype (i.e. *.xlsx), or if you edit any of the information directly in Excel, you could very easily screw up the way AMV Tracker displays video information on searches. This program was designed specifically so that you don’t ever have to interact with the spreadsheet directly, so you should never need to, however if you find yourself in a position where you want to for whatever reason, please manually make a backup and move it to a different directory before using AMV Tracker to interact with it, just to be safe.

(3) There is currently no ability to search with Unicode/non-ASCII characters. This is not planned to be fixed for future releases. This is because of the way Unicode works and the fact that it would be a major pain to implement, much more trouble than it’s worth. If you find that a video title or some other piece of information is all Unicode/non-ASCII/non-English characters, it’s recommended that you transliterate it on data entry if you want to make it searchable.

Just to be clear, Unicode/non-ASCII characters can be input on data entry, and will be displayed when the video is searched for, but the search function will not recognize any Unicode characters put into a search field (and in fact the program won’t do anything if you try to search using Unicode characters).

(4) If you delete one or more videos from the database from the video edit window, weird things can happen if you try to search again right away, or try to click on things in the search results window. Simply go back to the home window and search again (or simply click the blue “Refresh” text at the top of the search options window) if you find that the program isn’t responding when it should be in these cases.

(5) Program will occasionally close without warning, typically when editing/deleting existing entries, but sometimes at other random times as well. This is annoying but does not result in data loss; changes are always saved to the database before the program closes. I’m looking for reasons this bug exists but have had trouble consistently replicating the conditions under which it occurs, so I’m not sure when/if this will be fixed.