Episode Information exported into Video Library

[roxy99]

I love the feedback! Keep it coming. Let me tackle each issue one at a time.

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I have them in a folder with the Series name and then each season in the series. EX:
T:\TV\Action\24\1\1X01 1200AM100AM.mp4

Okay then. I'll include an ini file which the user can customize according to the naming convention they use. The utility will look at the user's naming pattern convention to coduct its search.

The reason I selected the default naming convention I used is that I want that when Sage records something, the names sage provides will work as is. Sage seems to use the convention <showtitle>-<episodename> so I stuck with that. But I can see I'll need to provide customization for season based naming.

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

By the way, does this only work for avi files?

No it does any extension you choose. I discussed avi for illustration purposes only.

Originally Posted by Armondole

I suppose this is point I was tryring to make. You're right, there are too many types, so I was suggesting to have a method in your application that would allow the user to change what filenames/formats the program would look for... instead of forcing the user to rename possibly hundreds of files with another tool

DVD Maniac,

In your example T:\TV\Action\24\1\1X01 1200AM100AM.mp4, the show title doesn't appear in the base name (*.mp4). If the show is seperated from its folder, can lose track of it. For instance, I have a CSI episode with the episode name 'Blood Line' and an ER episode with the same episode name. I would suggest that the show tilte still appear in the filename. I can write a utility for that for you.

In general though I would'nt want to force any naming convention on anyone. I think I'll include a naming pattern initialization string that the user customizes. There are basically 2 broad categories of search patterns:
1) Season/episode# based: eg S01E09, 1X5, etc
2) Title/episode name based: the way the utulity works now.

[dvd_maniac]

I keep the series name out of the filename because some shows like say: Everybody Hates Chris, or others with a long name cause the episode to not fully show in Sage...

I can only see something that does it by series or seasons to work for me and others that have massive imported videos.
Unless I rename all videos in a folder to include the series name, use your tool then rename them back.

But this definitely shows promise.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I keep the series name out of the filename because some shows like say: Everybody Hates Chris, or others with a long name cause the episode to not fully show in Sage...

I can only see something that does it by series or seasons to work for me and others that have massive imported videos.
Unless I rename all videos in a folder to include the series name, use your tool then rename them back.

But this definitely shows promise.

Its something I can work around. The tool can see if a tilte name is present in the filename, if not, then read the directory name of the folder and use that as a title basis.

I can set the tool to extract an entire series and then intelligently rename the .my files to be consistent with the naming convention used in the folder. No ini pattern will be needed since the utility will figure it out.

[dvd_maniac]

That's almost perfect but will that work in my case since the videos are actually in folders named for the season?
Like 24\1 or 24\2

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

That's almost perfect but will that work in my case since the videos are actually in folders named for the season?
Like 24\1 or 24\2

Anything is possible as long as I know about what's needed. The Python programming language is very powerful and easy to do that sort of thing.

BTW, my plate is pretty full now so I'll put the .properties aspect on the back burner for now and perfect the .my method. I will get to the .properties eventually but its a bit of a nebulous area for me since I'm using Sage 5 there's no way for me to test the .properties files. You can help me by sending me a model of a working .poperties file.

[Armondole]

Originally Posted by roxy99

Anything is possible as long as I know about what's needed. The Python programming language is very powerful and easy to do that sort of thing.

Are you using regular expressions in your python script to determine episode naming?

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by Armondole

Are you using regular expressions in your python script to determine episode naming?

Yes

[Armondole]

Originally Posted by roxy99

Yes

If you haven't already, you could have a look at the XBMC methods for regex filename recognition examples. They cover quite a bit of the naming conventions.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by Armondole

If you haven't already, you could have a look at the XBMC methods for regex filename recognition examples. They cover quite a bit of the naming conventions.

Very good to know indeed! Thks for the linkl

[Opus4]

I ran into something last night from a sample properties file I was given a while back, so I would like to post a reminder that for lists of names, use a semicolon or forward slash to separate all the names. If you use a comma, like in the sample I have, the whole name list for a role will be seen as a single name because names can have commas.

- Andy

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I ran into something last night from a sample properties file I was given a while back, so I would like to post a reminder that for lists of names, use a semicolon or forward slash to separate all the names. If you use a comma, like in the sample I have, the whole name list for a role will be seen as a single name because names can have commas.

- Andy

As a follow up question to that issue, what happens if suppose in 24 I have in the Actor heading:

Actor : Keifer Sutherland (Jack Bauer) ; actor2 (role2) ; etc

Thats the way TVcom lists actor(role) pairs under cast. What's the best way to represent that information in the .properties file? We need the .properties file to be indexable by actor and I wonder if the (role) section will be problematic.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by roxy99

As a follow up question to that issue, what happens if suppose in 24 I have in the Actor heading:

Actor : Keifer Sutherland (Jack Bauer) ; actor2 (role2) ; etc

Thats the way TVcom lists actor(role) pairs under cast. What's the best way to represent that information in the .properties file? We need the .properties file to be indexable by actor and I wonder if the (role) section will be problematic.

I'm guessing that "Keifer Sutherland (Jack Bauer)" would be considered to be a full name. When searching videos by name, you would get more than one "Keifer Sutherland" entry if there were lots of shows credited this way... on the other hand, you would find results where that actor plays only that part.

- Andy

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I ran into something last night from a sample properties file I was given a while back, so I would like to post a reminder that for lists of names, use a semicolon or forward slash to separate all the names. If you use a comma, like in the sample I have, the whole name list for a role will be seen as a single name because names can have commas.

How did I miss that I'm sure that little piece of information wasn't in the first couple of incarnations of this post, although it obviously is now. Now, how do I determine which of the commas in the comma separated list output of GetPeopleInShowInRole is a delimiter and which ones are not?

John

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

How did I miss that I'm sure that little piece of information wasn't in the first couple of incarnations of this post, although it obviously is now.

I added that note at around the same time I posted the reminder above, so you didn't miss it before.

Now, how do I determine which of the commas in the comma separated list output of GetPeopleInShowInRole is a delimiter and which ones are not?

Try using GetPeopleListInShowInRole() instead. That should provide you with an array instead of a comma separated list.

However, I think I got that sample properties file from you, so you may notice that there are multiple names in a single array element... this is because of using the commas as the separator in the properties file... as I discovered very recently when I was trying to get a list of people.

- Andy

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by Opus4

However, I think I got that sample properties file from you, so you may notice that there are multiple names in a single array element... this is because of using the commas as the separator in the properties file... as I discovered very recently when I was trying to get a list of people.

I'd not noticed the multiple names as the search works either way.
Back to the coding grindstone

John

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

I'd not noticed the multiple names as the search works either way.

Not the way I'm doing it.

- Andy

[Armondole]

Originally Posted by roxy99

Very good to know indeed! Thks for the linkl

Is there a way for your script to look up the Episode NAME instead of episode number from TV.com?

I am wondering because SageTV likes to save it's shows with the format "ShowName-EpisodeName-EpisodeID#" and I was trying to incorporate some regex recognition into the XBMC scraper (so i could see my Sage recordings properly), but realized it only cares about episode #'s and not the name... if you have a method for this, please let me know! THanks

[Armondole]

The administrator/owner of the "thetvdb.com" has offered up some information for SageTV and/or any other program to interface with his database. This could be very helpful to anyone who is creating a scraping tool or plugin for SageTV.

Read the following for more information: http://thetvdb.com/?tab=xml

There are 2 requirements that he asks of anyone who uses his databse:

"First, you MUST inform your users about this site and ask them to contribute.

Second, once you publicly release your program, plugin, or script, you MUST inform us about it. This way we can link back to you and keep tabs on everyone accessing the interfaces. "

[roxy99]

The only thing is how up to date is the tvdb.com database? Does it get its data only from users who upload or is it always in synch with TV.com?

From what I've gathered TVDB.com provides an xml database to facilitate plugins on HTPC system to grab data and is in itself a screen scraper from TV.com. Please correct me if I am wrong.

In that sense if I piggy back my scrapper off of tvdb's, then my utility is dependent on that sites reliability. So on top of my utilities reliability the user needs to be concerned about tvdb's reliability.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by Armondole

Is there a way for your script to look up the Episode NAME instead of episode number from TV.com?

I am wondering because SageTV likes to save it's shows with the format "ShowName-EpisodeName-EpisodeID#" and I was trying to incorporate some regex recognition into the XBMC scraper (so i could see my Sage recordings properly), but realized it only cares about episode #'s and not the name... if you have a method for this, please let me know! THanks

That's actually how I designed it: ShowName-EpisodeName for that very reason.

Presently that's how it works for me but as others have mentioned a season/episode# approach may be more relevant for larger collections and video download-aholics.