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
