How do you feel about

[golgoj4]

Changing the names of your files?

As i get a little better with c++, and a little more understanding of updateMedia, im considering extending updateMedia to work with theTVDB.com and imdb.com. The main issue i see however, is filenames. There would be a general format like for tv something along the lines of Show.season.episode.extension (ex SGU.S01.E19.avi) and movies like name.year.extenson (ex Top.Gun.1986.avi). I dont really know how people have their collections organized, how big the collections are on average or really anything else about people's libraries so please provide some feedback. Im more than likely going to try my damnedest to integrate this into updateMedia somehow, and i'd like to get an idea of how people store and categorize their libraries outside of the way i normally do it. For me, this would require a lot of file re-naming, but im up to it for metadata that will be automatically grabbed instead of needing to do it from the webadmin (although its a lot simpler now to do so).

thanks in advance
golgoj4.

[tschak909]

I have thought about this one a lot...

The issue is that nobody quite organizes files quite the same way, and coming up with ways to automatically sort the files will undoubtedly create huge piles of heuristics that may or may not work in most people's use cases,

To delve a little deeper:

Do we:

* Take folder names into account? If files are named similarly within a folder, are they indeed grouped together?,
* is it reliable to create a parser which breaks apart file names, and assigns weighted probabilities to them? (This is an episode #, this is a season #, this is the name of the episode, this is the movie?)
* What if some of these are missing?
* What if the different properties are named and numbered differently?

Every solution i've seen for this, has been some hacker's solution JUST FOR THEM and it doesn't work for other people.

so we have to sit back and seriously think of what the overall objective is:

TO ORGANIZE THESE PILES OF MEDIA FILES INTO MORE MEANINGFUL STACKS OF MEDIA.

I've come to my own conclusion that the way to solve this is to provide a better UI for naming and grouping things,

Perhaps start with a pile of unorganized stuff, and lasso and drag them together into groups, and the ability to create bins for TV shows, and Movies.. In the TV Show bin, provide ways of grouping them via direct manipulation into their respective seasons etc.

Keeping in mind as well, that each attribute has a place for its own picture. We can leverage this, to quickly assign pictures, etc.. to TV show art, then once the improved orbiter file view has been written, we can take advantage of it.

-Thom

[valent]

XBMC team has solved this issue, and when you use their naming convention and XBMC as media center player everything "JustWorks"(tm)
All shows automatically appear in correct categories and also by season, all info from internet is available.

Check it out, maybe it helps: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=TV_Shows#TV_Show_files_naming_conventions

[pw44]

I did organize that way:

-- USA Series
        |
        ------> House MD
                        |
                        --------> Season 1
                                           |
                                           ---------- episode files for season 1
                        |
                        --------> Season 2
                                           |
                                           ----------- episode files for season 2
 
and so on...  It makes (at least for me) the browsing and search much easier....

[tschak909]

Are you guys just not listening to me at all?

We eschew hierarchy. We will continue to do so.

We can suggest groupings based on how they are stored, but we can not expect everyone to store things this way!

-Thom

[pw44]

Hi Thom,
I was talking about the physical directory structure.
But all are tagged as TV Shows (SD, HD), Movies (SD, HD), Music Videos, and so on, with the filenames normalized (Season # Episode # and  episode title).
Which kind of physical structure are you suggesting?

[tschak909]

You didn't read my suggestion at all.

I am saying the entire UI needs to change, to allow things to be grouped by the user much easier. I will not repeat what i've already said.

-Thom

[pw44]

Ok, the UI needs to change to make it easier, but does it have to do with the way the files are stored?

[tschak909]

No, and that is exactly my point. File storage and their presentation SHOULD NEVER BE COUPLED.

-Thom

[pw44]

Ok, no problem. I got it...

[skeptic]

It might be worth while to check out jamu (Just Another Metadata Utility) as well.  The method of plugging data into the lmce would need to change, but the code for collection of that data may be useful.  It's written in python if that makes a difference.

[tschak909]

Has anyone investigated it?

-Thom

[golgoj4]

XBMC team has solved this issue, and when you use their naming convention and XBMC as media center player everything "JustWorks"(tm)
All shows automatically appear in correct categories and also by season, all info from internet is available.

Check it out, maybe it helps: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=TV_Shows#TV_Show_files_naming_conventions

dude...thats the point of the discussion. to go this route or come up with something more advanced if possible...if you mention xbmc one more time...

[golgoj4]

quickly looking over jamu...it looks promising but I would need to investigate how updateMedia deals with changing names of files and whatnot. do we want to rename people's files?

[apagg]

do we want to rename people's files?

I would say no, atleast not whitout user confirmation. People may have many reasons for nameing files the way hey do.

I peronaly like the way MediaMonkey can tag files from filename.