TV file tagging

[tolkeinknoxy]

For TV episode information could it be possible to use www.thetvdb.com? It's very good at providing shows, episode information and images from shows in a structured way.

It should be easily possible to create a script much like the Amazon Script in combination with something like the Media Files Sync Script. When manually launched it analys videos under the folder by their path structures and then, if determined to be a TV Episode, go online and retrieve information about them. By manually being launched it will only start its navigation from the current level in the file tree. Like in my case /home/public/data/videos/raid/TV/ That way the script should not get confused and start trying to match up Films etc. In many cases i guess most people store their TV shows in a different directory to their Films for their own personal organisation.
A plugin for another piece of software (opensource but for windows) which does this is here:
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/files/Download/Plugins/VideoorMovies/MP-TVSeriesplugin/

In theory such a plugin will drastically reduce the time it takes to tag shows information and everyone who uses the tool would then have a more standerdised tagging structure for Tv. For shows that the computer has multiple options for, it can present them to the user much like the coverart tool.

Does anyone think this might be possible/a good idea?

[tschak909]

a very good idea.. definitely something to look into.. we'll need to implement it as a media identifier, and tie it in with the sync show to pluto database.

hopefully with sufficient changes to the media identifiers, the need for viewing by hierarchy will disappear.

-Thom

[colinjones]

Looks really cool! Would love to see a good parsing algorithm on the file name, especially for bit torrents. Hopefully better than the Amazon one, as most of the time you have to correct that before searching or it doesn't parse anything out at all!

Thom - by eliminating heirarchy, you mean filename sort heirarchy don't you? To be replaced by a heirarchy based on the attributes, yes?

[tschak909]

correct. nobody ever notices that the attributes shown when a detail view is visible are in fact clickable, to alter filter parameters. This needs to be more visible.

-Thom

[colinjones]

Thom - lost now! Sorry, can you explain in more detail? Which attributes are clickable? Do you mean the menus to the right of the sort menu, so you can filter as well as just sort? Or is there something I have never noticed before?

BTW - slightly different topic, do you also feel that the "Sort" menu is misnamed? I think it is really an "Arrange By" menu...given the Filename option. A sort function could be a useful additional option (and of course, it would default to sorting by the same field as it is arranged by, just like now)

[tschak909]

click on a file, to see the details.... notice the black boxes to the right which show the attributes? ... guess what? THOSE ARE CLICKABLE.

-Thom

[colinjones]

are they?!!!! What do they do? I know, I know, I'll check when I get home .... but just wondering.... exciting new options for me to screw with

[jondecker76]

I'm at work right now, but just though of a "work around" idea.. (though I can't test it until I get home)

Try assigning an album attribute to your tv shows. The orbiter file list can already filter by album in the music page, so why wouldn't it work in the Video page?  (unless this is hard-coded in media_plugin)

[tschak909]

This is hard-coded via OrbiterGen actually.

-Thom

[colinjones]

Hmm... interesting, I choose a movie that has an attribute of comedy, then click on that attribute and it filters for those movies that have the same attribute. So far, as expected.

But this seems to be one of those occasional situations where the UI creates that little "<-Back" button that isn't usually there, even though sometimes that spot on the screen still responds as if it was, in addition to the normal big "back" button as a tile in the media grid. If I click the <-Back button it does seem to go back. But if I click the normal one, it changes screen to include all media with that comedy attribute, not just the ones in the movies folder.

Yes Thom, I am sorted by Filename (please don't tell me off!) It doesn't seem intuitive, is this a bug or am I just misunderstanding what it is doing. Having 2 back buttons that do different things seems confusing...

[tschak909]

this is a bug that you seem to be experiencing, I can not reproduce it.

-Thom

[norjms]

I would like to see this impletmented...since the code is opensource and thetvdb.com has an access api, I would think this would be much simpler to program than starting with nothing. I started a help wanted for this a few days ago, as I would pay someone to rewrite this plugin as a mythtv / Linuxmce addition.