Viewing imported videos in the SageTV Recordings area

[galeo]

I lost my wiz.bin which was two years old recently. I have hundreds of
videos that are now "orphans" and can be viewed only via the imported videos menu - which cannot be described as an optimal solution.

All I want to do is to somehow bring them back as SageTV recordings.


I have SageTV version 6.2
I have installed version 2.1.9 of the Read and Write metadata files STVi.

I am not sure if I understand whether it is supposed to be able to bring (or
display) the files from the "imported videos" folder in the SageTV
Recordings menu. I am hoping that it does - in addition to all the other
cool features.


Here's what I am doing with the metadata STVi

1. Installed both the IMdb search and the metadata STVi's 2. I configured
the metadata options (kept the configurations at default) 3. I now see a
whole bunch of .my and .properties files in my folder 4. These files don't
have anything meaningful inside them - just the name of the file as the
title. For example the file name that was created when an episode of Columbo
was recorded was called: Columbo-ACaseofImmunity-3481436-0.mpg.
5. When I change the metadata title from Columbo-ACaseofImmunity-3481436-0
to A Case of Immunity - I am able to manually select an entry.
6. However none of this actually gets this file as a SageTV recording.

Please Help!!!

Thanks very much

[GKusnick]

I don't use that STVI so I don't have any advice on that.

However your best bet is to restore a backup copy of your wiz.bin. If you're not in the habit of making regular backups, look in your SageTV install folder for filenames of the form wiz.bin.SageTV VX.Y.Z. The 6.2 installer should have made one last time you upgraded.

Not to lecture, but two years without backups is just asking for trouble.

[galeo]

Learnt the hard way :-(

However the wiz.bin or wiz.bak is no longer an option. It was my C: drive that had crashed and I had to reinstall the OS and Sage etc. Luckily all the videos were stored on other drives.

Based on what I read - the Read and Write metadata STVi seems like what I need - just not sure if I am using it right or now.

Would love to hear from someone who has used it to restore orphan videos back into the SageTV recording area.

Now I have a daily backup of my wiz.bin - stored for 8 days!

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by galeo

Based on what I read - the Read and Write metadata STVi seems like what I need - just not sure if I am using it right or now.

Would love to hear from someone who has used it to restore orphan videos back into the SageTV recording area.

The Read and Write metadata STVi is more for adding metadata to imported videos.

The Web User Interface is what you need to use to get them back into the SageTV recordings area.

John

[galeo]

I looked at the Web User Interface - and I didn't see anything that looked like something I want.

The feature list didn't include anything to import videos or anything similar.

Am I missing something obvious?

All I want to do is to get a previously recorded mpg file - which is no longer in the wiz.bin - to be added to the wiz.bin - so that the recording shows up in the SageTV Recordings area of the interface.

[JREkiwi]

In the Web interface you can either use Edit Show Info or if you have xml files for the shows you can import the xml files and they will end up in the SageTV Recordings.

Edit Show Info is sort of hidden at the bottom of the detail information for a selected video.

John

[galeo]

Cool - this looks promising!

Will let you know how it goes.

Thanks a ton, John.

[galeo]

THe "Web User Interface" plug-in worked great for importing one of my orphan videos into the wiz.bin file.

Now I need to figure it out how to achieve this for the hundred+ orphan videos I have.

I think I can automate the creation of the xml file for each show based on the name of the mpg file...

Is there a way to automate importing these xml files?

Thanks again.

BTW - the web user interface seems like a great tool in general.

[nielm]

To import them all, instead of creating one xml file per show, create a single XML file for all the shows with multiple <show> elements in the <showlist>, then import that.

I admit that I do need to make this type of import easier/better: I imagine that it is a real pain to figure out the show/airing/mediafile required items: duration and startime, whereas they could be inferred from the file size and timestamp... It is just something I have not had time to do yet...

(click on the XML button of the Sage Recordings view for an example of the format you will need)

(thanks )

[galeo]

That's good to know that I can create one big xml file - that makes the automation a lot easier.

I have to accept the fact that I have lost most of the information about all the orphaned recordings - so the only thing I can automate is the title of the show from the name of the mpg file - which will go into the <title> and the filepath variable in the <segment> tags respectively. (I will have to parse the filename and insert spaces before the capitalized letters to generate the title)

For now - I will force the show duration to be something large (I noticed that Sage shows the portion beyond what was recorded in red - since it assumes that the show was not completely recorded) Again, this is something I can live with - but it would be nice to have - since that information is already embedded in the file.

Thanks for your help!

--


On a related subject - I am looking forward to vlc being ported to the iPhone one of these days. I can already view the webInterface on my iPhone - but it would be awesome when I can actually watch the shows using Sage webInterface. When that happens - it would be nice if you could make slight modifications to the sage web interface so that it is easier to read and touch on the iPhone's small screen!

[ke6guj]

nielm, I'm using your xml generator to create xml files for all my recordings. If I ever lost my wiz.bin (I keep 10 daily backups, so it would take a catastrophe), I should be able to use the xml files to add the shows back into a new wiz.bin (with the webserver?) so they don't end up as orphans, right?

[nielm]

jack: yes

galeo: if you estimate the bitrate, you can estimate the duration from the file size. Once imported 'Edit Show Info' can be used to fix the file start time/duration <-> Airing mismatch.

EDIT: this is no longer necessary in webserver 2.22 -- it can work out the start time/duration of the Airing from the file being imported.

[galeo]

Excellent idea on using the file size to estimate the duration. I think most of my shows were recorded with the "Good Quality" setting with using approximately 2GB/hour disk space.

I can also get the show start time from the dos command dir /tc

I intend to create a table in excel that will have these columns... then I can create a category/subcategory column and manually enter those based on the title... I think this should work out OK.

I also installed the xml generator - which is working out great!

Thanks

[richardhood36]

Whoa. You guys are talking about conversions and all that stuff.

Let's get back to the problem. I have never "lost" my recordings directory when I have updated and I have been here since 5.?. I always backup before updating.

When I updated to 6.2, I noticed there were no recordings in the recordings "library". I then restored my 6.1 version of wiz.bin to the sagetv\sagetv directory. When I restarted sage, the recordings still were not there. I looked in the sagetv\sagetv directory and I had a new file wiz.bin.SageTV V6.1.9.146. The old file was not accepted. Are the old and new files different formats???

Why didn't sage accept the old file?

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by richardhood36

Whoa. You guys are talking about conversions and all that stuff.

Let's get back to the problem. I have never "lost" my recordings directory when I have updated and I have been here since 5.?. I always backup before updating.

When I updated to 6.2, I noticed there were no recordings in the recordings "library". I then restored my 6.1 version of wiz.bin to the sagetv\sagetv directory. When I restarted sage, the recordings still were not there. I looked in the sagetv\sagetv directory and I had a new file wiz.bin.SageTV V6.1.9.146. The old file was not accepted. Are the old and new files different formats???

Why didn't sage accept the old file?

When you install a new version of Sage, you should just install over the old version. Sage will automatically create a backup copy of your Wiz.BIN and name it with the old version number in the file name, then it will upgrade the bin file to the new format if anything has changed from the old version. Personally, I make a backup copy of the whole Sage folder before installing an upgrade, but have never had a problem.

In theory you should be able to just shut down Sage (and stop the service if you have it running in service mode) and drop an old version of Wiz.Bin in the Sage directory, then re-start and Sage should be able to use it or convert it if needed. But, I have seen others post about problems with this - especially if the Wiz.Bin was created with a much older version of Sage.

[galeo]

richardhood36 - I hope you are able to get the recordings back into your sage 6.2

If for some reason you are not able to - stay tuned and I will let you know how my "import" works out

[richardhood36]

I installed over the old version and expected Sage 6.2 to pick up the old sage recordings. Go figure....

[galeo]

the web user interface worked great. I was able to import all my orphaned recordings back.

In a few cases - I forgot to include the <category> tag

is it possible to change the category of multiple recordings en-masse that are already in the db?

Thanks

[nielm]

you should be able to just re-import, with some data that contains categories...

[galeo]

Thanks Nielm.

After importing I have converted many of them to save space and deleted the original recordings. They are all in the db, but the xml file I had created is no longer current. I could - change the name of the file from my xml and try to reimport - if that makes sense.

Is there a way, I can select multiple recordings, and change their category (or other attributes) en masse? Like I can delete, unarchive multiple?

BTW - I love your web interface.