Struggles with getting things from the Web in NVivo 9

Alright NVivo 10 is out and it has web integration, but I have not tried it out except very peripherally. What I do have is a project I am collaborating with that is using the web.This is largely about static web pages and it should be fairly easy to do that right? Well my experience is wrong.

I started off on the preliminaries for this using fileshot pro, you'd think it was ideal, all sorts of extra facilities from your normal pdf printer specially designed for websites. You'd think it. However when we came to using it on commercial websites which listed products we had searched for we got completely black pdfs. Needless to say I have not shelled out for a copy when the trial period expired and when I remember I will be uninstalling from my browser.

So I went to Bullzip pdf printer and this works fine or at least it does on my machine, it produces pages made up of text and pictures which are simple enough to import successfully into NVivo and I can use in vivo coding facilities from NVivo. When the student who is actually doing the hands on stuff comes to use it, it produces pure pictures. Why? I do not know. I have not found any settings that I can change which will allow her to produce pdfs like I do on my machine. Cutepdf does exactly the same trick. This means I have to download all the webpages.

Then we come to problem number two, on the twenty or so pages we are actually looking there are three which have a video on. Having those videos would be nice. What is more it is fairly simple to download the videos as mp4 format, and officially NVivo reads mp4. Should be straight forward then to include.Only when we try we get the message that NVivo does not recognise the format.  Oh dear now we have to deal with that. So we looked for a converter that would work. The first didn't and we promptly uninstalled it, but FormatFactory  does and will convert these files to avi format which NVivo 9 will read.

Of course this is all technical stuff, it won't get mentioned in any paper or thesis we write, it will not appear at all in the how to books, but it has taken about three hours of work for two of us to get that far and many wasted hours because the software was not working together by the student. Maybe next week we will be making progress on the actual analysis.