How do BMT Users Deal with Rips of TV Shows?

[reggie14]

I started using BMT a while back mainly to try to make it easier to use DVD rips of TV shows in Sage. I was hoping once there was metadata associated with rips of TV shows, I'd be able to see titles and descriptions, order and group episodes by season and episode number, and see fan art.

But, it hasn't been quite as useful as I was hoping, for lots of reasons (issues with BMT and TVDB, lack of certain features in other plugins, and limitations of my setup).

Probably my main complaint with BMT (or TVDB, depending on how you look at it) is that if a series is aired out of order, it can be a really, really painful process to reorder episodes by the "real" episode number, rather than airing date. A while back I went through the fairly tedious process of manually changing the metadata of each episode of Firefly, since Fox did silly things like airing the pilot episode 11th in the airing order. I'm hoping this is the only time I run in to this problem. I'm going to rip my Freaks and Geeks DVDs and my Undeclared DVDs next, both of which also aired episodes out of order, but luckily whoever created the TVDB entries for those shows ignored their rules and ordered them according to the order in which you should watch the episodes.

There's really no simple fix for that. The TVDB guys are usually pretty strict about the primary episode number being determined by airing date. There's also a DVD episode number field, which is usually a bit more reliable, but BMT searches for episodes using the aired episode number.

So, I'm really curious what other people do in this situation. It seems like other people had to run into this problem if for no other reason than I expect there's a lot of Firefly fans among Sage users.

Then, I'm also curious how people are organizing and viewing imported TV shows. If you view imported videos by Title, then there's no folder structure at all- everything is mixed together and sorted by the title of the DVD or episode. So, that obviously wouldn't work very well. If you view by folder then you get the same folder structure as they're organized on your hard drive, but then individual videos show up only based on the filename of the video. It would be far more useful to me if individual episodes appeared in Sage using the title of the episode/video. As far as I know, there aren't any third-party plugins to change that.

I know there's an option in BMT to import episodes as recordings. Is that how everyone else deals with this? In general I'd rather not do that. First, because Sage is going to sort things by the original airing date, not the episode number (and I don't think there's a third-party mod to change that), which will screw up the sorting of shows like Firefly, Undeclared and Freaks and Geeks. And second, because my imported videos are on my unRAID server, which spins down after periods of inactivity. Imported TV shows as recordings would cause my unRAID server to spin up a lot more, and will also cause the Sage interface to get really choppy if the unRAID server spins down the drives. Since I use the recordings menu a lot more than the imported video menu, I'd rather keep them separate.

[Fuzzy]

In my eyes, tvdb does it right. they do provide the Official Season and episode numbers - which is what was decided by the producers - and then also provide the original air date - which is the order they aired. You can easily choose between the two methods of sorting in Sage - made easier if you use the Malore menus, and import your sows in the recordings library. (for your information, sage DOES have the option to choose sorting by Original Air Date, or ShowID - which will numerically be the season-episode if you import them to recordings with BMT)

[stuckless]

I tend to not import tv as recordings, and I just order based on the season/episode # that tvdb provides. I can't say that I've run into this ordering issue myself.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

In my eyes, tvdb does it right. they do provide the Official Season and episode numbers - which is what was decided by the producers - and then also provide the original air date - which is the order they aired.

I don't know what you mean by "official season and episode numbers." I'm not sure those always exist, although you can usually figure it out, particularly once the DVDs come out. TV episodes have production codes, but those don't necessary correspond to the order in which you're suppose to watch episodes.

As it stands, TVDB has three different types of episode numbers. The main one, which BMT uses, is the "aired episode number". According to the TVDB moderators, that is solely based on the order in which episodes aired on TV. That certainly doesn't correspond to the "official" or intended ordering. Sometimes people don't number the "aired episode number" in the order in which episodes aired, but they're supposed to.

There's also "DVD episode number", but that can be a little goofy. The ordering includes special episodes/features, and is numbered like 1.0, 2.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, etc. "x.1" and "x.2" are used when two or more episodes are combined into a single video on the DVD.

The third number is the "absolute number". This is the closest thing to the "official" episode number. The problem is, its numbered sequentially throughout the entire series. So, the first episode of the second season doesn't start at 1, its one more than the last episode of the first season. Actually, it's a bit worse than that, since it might include specials, depending on who did the ordering.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

You can easily choose between the two methods of sorting in Sage - made easier if you use the Malore menus, and import your sows in the recordings library. (for your information, sage DOES have the option to choose sorting by Original Air Date, or ShowID - which will numerically be the season-episode if you import them to recordings with BMT)

Thanks for the tip about ShowID. I've never liked the Malore menus, but it seems to work (at least, with real recordings it works). But, as I said in my original post, I'd still like to avoid imported shows as recordings, since then I'll run into problems with my unRAID server.

Originally Posted by stuckless

I tend to not import tv as recordings, and I just order based on the season/episode # that tvdb provides. I can't say that I've run into this ordering issue myself.

Do you use the folder view in SageTV then? Is there a way to get folder view to show the titles of episodes, rather than the filename of the video?

[stuckless]

reggie, i basically manually edited my stv and raplaced the title with phoenix_media_GetFormattedTitle() that allows me to control the title. I think that the custom video folder plugin uses this api api when showing the files.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by reggie14

But, as I said in my original post, I'd still like to avoid imported shows as recordings, since then I'll run into problems with my unRAID server.

It won't make a difference where the shows are in the database. They are only accessed on media library refreshes, or when played. Simply browsing through the database (recordings, videos, or otherwise) doesn't actually access the files (it doesn't even check that the files exist until you hit Play), and therefore shouldn't cause your drives to spin up. If you feel the need to keep your imported shows separate from your recorded stuff, you can still filter based on the Archived flag (as imports moved to recordings will have the archived bit set).

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

It won't make a difference where the shows are in the database. They are only accessed on media library refreshes, or when played. Simply browsing through the database (recordings, videos, or otherwise) doesn't actually access the files (it doesn't even check that the files exist until you hit Play), and therefore shouldn't cause your drives to spin up.

Is that always true, even when you have metadata and fanart (which I realize is stored in a different location)? After installing BMT I noticed it was really choppy to page through the imported video screen. I thought it was just something that wasn't well optimized in the v7 beta, but then I found a post on the forums where someone described the same problem, and said getting unRAID to spin up all drives fixed it. I set up spin-up groups in unRAID, and sure enough that fixed the choppiness problem.

Was that just a weird coincidence? After doing some testing, it very well might be. I just noticed going to the Video screen doesn't cause my unRAID drives to spin up.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

If you feel the need to keep your imported shows separate from your recorded stuff, you can still filter based on the Archived flag (as imports moved to recordings will have the archived bit set).

That's one thing I'm not a big fan of in the v7 interface. I've already been called into another room by my girlfriend several times when she thought her shows didn't record, when really it was just that the recordings menu switched to archive. I try to avoid ever changing the recordings view, since Sage seems to default to the last view you used when you just select "Recordings" without picking a specific view.

I think there's a big usability problem there. I'm not surprised that a novice user would have a hard time understanding the different views. There's very little that changes on the screen from one view to another, other than the heading in the corner and the actual video items. And there's nothing immediately visible to users that gives them any indication there are other views.

I didn't know about the Custom Video Folder plugin before stuckless mentioned it. That does the main thing I'm looking for. I might switch to importing videos as recordings someday, now that I know that sorting by ShowID works, but probably not until either the default UI's handling of different views changes, or Phoenix has a more intuitive method.

[Dreameriz]

So probably the same issue as special but for some show and i don't know which ones except for one of my favorites
for the show

FireFly

there is the two different orders of how the show goes based
Aired Order
DVD Order

is there a way to tell bmt to which one to select since i like the dvd version an dhow the writer meant it to play out

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Dreameriz

So probably the same issue as special but for some show and i don't know which ones except for one of my favorites
for the show

FireFly

there is the two different orders of how the show goes based
Aired Order
DVD Order

is there a way to tell bmt to which one to select since i like the dvd version an dhow the writer meant it to play out

As noted, BMT simply uses the Season/Episode as provided by TVDB. I don't have any immediate plans to change this. It's not that I don't agree with it, I just don't have the time to add in alternate matching options at this time.