Confused about Creating MetaData and Importing TV Recordings

[Diego Garcia]

I would like to import some TV shows that I've recorded outside of SageTV into the Sage database. In other words, I'd like them to show up in the Sage Recordings menu structure. That presumably means I need to (a) get or create metadata for the recordings and (b) import the recordings into sage.

I'm finding that surprisingly confusing. I've read up on BMT and mediascraper, for example, but I'm not clear if BMT will generate the metadata, and when I ran Beta13 of mediascraper it didn't create any property file associated with the test recording I fed it.

Actually, that's not quite true: the first time I ran it against the recording it did >>something<< but I have no idea where it stashed the file it created, if, in fact, it created one. The second time I ran it against the same file it apparently recognized that it had already created a file, and didn't create a new one. Now if only I could get it to tell me where it put the file...

But, even if I get that first step working, I'm not clear what I do next. Both BMT and mediascraper have provisions for directly modifying the sage database...and both carry warnings to use that at one's own risk (no one seems to have reported serious problems, though). On the other hand, there's a thread that Opus wrote which talks about sage automatically reading an associated property file when it imports a video, but I'm unclear as to how to make sage import a file. I couldn't find a sage menu command that did that.

Maybe importing is associated with the directories sage periodically asks me if it should scan when it starts up. But I haven't been able to find where those directories are configured in the menu tree (which might be where the import command is).

Which is why a how to would be nice. BTW, if that only exists in pieces I'd be happy to write one by pulling things together.

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by Diego Garcia

I would like to import some TV shows that I've recorded outside of SageTV into the Sage database. In other words, I'd like them to show up in the Sage Recordings menu structure. That presumably means I need to (a) get or create metadata for the recordings and (b) import the recordings into sage.

I'm finding that surprisingly confusing. I've read up on BMT and mediascraper, for example, but I'm not clear if BMT will generate the metadata, and when I ran Beta13 of mediascraper it didn't create any property file associated with the test recording I fed it.

Actually, that's not quite true: the first time I ran it against the recording it did >>something<< but I have no idea where it stashed the file it created, if, in fact, it created one. The second time I ran it against the same file it apparently recognized that it had already created a file, and didn't create a new one. Now if only I could get it to tell me where it put the file...

But, even if I get that first step working, I'm not clear what I do next. Both BMT and mediascraper have provisions for directly modifying the sage database...and both carry warnings to use that at one's own risk (no one seems to have reported serious problems, though). On the other hand, there's a thread that Opus wrote which talks about sage automatically reading an associated property file when it imports a video, but I'm unclear as to how to make sage import a file. I couldn't find a sage menu command that did that.

Maybe importing is associated with the directories sage periodically asks me if it should scan when it starts up. But I haven't been able to find where those directories are configured in the menu tree (which might be where the import command is).

Which is why a how to would be nice. BTW, if that only exists in pieces I'd be happy to write one by pulling things together.

Do you have the Web interface installed? That's the easiest way to do it.

Mediascraper relies on the Web interface to import shows into the sage database.

I'm not quite sure how BMT does it.