Naming/Directory format for organizing movies?

[evilpenguin]

I'm adding support for movies (imdb, theMovieDB) to my mediaScraper tool and I need to know what naming/directory format people use to organize their movies. The uglier the better

[Skirge01]

DVDs\[Title]\[Movie File(s)]

I've only just begun ripping my DVDs, so this may change. My music is organized by genre, so I may go that route with movies, as well, simply because this root folder could get very long over time:

DVDs\Action\[Title]\[Movie File(s)]

That's probably as complex as I'd get. I'll leave the majority of the filtering/sorting to SageTV.

[stanger89]

Yeah it's basically one of these:

<folders>\[Title]\<contents> // Where contents includes VIDEO_TS or BDMV, etc for a DVD or BD
<folders>\Title.<extension> // Where extension is valid video file extensions

[Brent]

For ripped DVDs:
Media\Movies\DVDTitleName\vobs etc

For video files (avi's, divx, mpg etc):
Media\Movies\MovieTitleName.mpg etc

[evilpenguin]

Is putting the year the movie was released in the file name pretty common? I know I've seen that kind of stuff online.

ex: "..\300 (2006).avi"

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Is putting the year the movie was released in the file name pretty common? I know I've seen that kind of stuff online.

ex: "..\300 (2006).avi"

That's the file name format I use for SD. When I get my bluray player I'll add the resolution too. ie: Contact (1997) 1080p.mkv

[evilpenguin]

That's the kind of ugly I'm looking for

Both those things should be fairly easy to handle.

[QueOnda]

What about for mutidisk dvds or movies?

I do it different ways but mainly I have

Movie name folder/ disc1folder/ movie content
Movie name folder/ disc2 folder/ movie content

or

Movie name folder/ Part 1 folder/ movie content
Movie name folder/ Part 2 folder/ movie content

Part1 and part 2 is like Death wish and Death wish 2

or

Movie name folder/ movie content (in movie content I would have Death wish 1, Death wish 2 and Death wish 3

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by QueOnda

What about for mutidisk dvds or movies?

I do it different ways but mainly I have

Movie name folder/ disc1folder/ movie content
Movie name folder/ disc2 folder/ movie content

or

Movie name folder/ Part 1 folder/ movie content
Movie name folder/ Part 2 folder/ movie content

Part1 and part 2 is like Death wish and Death wish 2

or

Movie name folder/ movie content (in movie content I would have Death wish 1, Death wish 2 and Death wish 3

Hmm, the 1st and 3rd should be doable, but I don't think I can handle the 2nd one.

[QueOnda]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Hmm, the 1st and 3rd should be doable, but I don't think I can handle the 2nd one.

That's cool. I can change things on my side, It's time consuming but I need to do it anyway.

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I need to know what naming/directory format people use to organize their movies. The uglier the better

My post is maybe way over the top and really ugly. But I'm curious how people are handling and managing HiDef movies and didn't want to start a new thread. Apologies to EP and others in advance.

Setting up HiDef movie servers are a labor of love with a lot of labor.

My HiDef movies server has four 1TB hard drives. I've opted to go with mt2s muxing for now. I figure that when Sage does begin to support Blu-ray playback (it's the future) m2ts is a given. The HiDef discs I've seen/processed so far use m2ts containers for mpeg2, mpeg4 (H264) and VC1 content. m2ts support with support for audio formats included on HiDef discs is a must.

Four TB of storage may seem like a lot, but it isn't. My experience is that muxing only the movie with one preferred audio track works out to an average to 20GB per movie. That yields about 50 movies per TB of storage space.

With my DVD's I always had folders for genres. My favorite "Action" and "SciFi" movies genres are each too large to fit on a single 1TB drive. So I have deviated from genres for my HiDef movies and have opted to store them alphabetically for now ignoring "A" and "The" when it's the first word. My drives/folders are named "HD Movies A-De", "HD Movies Df-Ki" etc. I based my names on my top 150 favorites with margin for error and room for new movies that meet my personal standards. (ie Some movies like "Enemy of the State" and "The Fifth Element" I am happy to watch multiple times whereas "Get Smart" was a watch once-er.)

On my SageTV server, I also have four 1TB drives. Three of them I use with SageTV and the fourth is named "Now Playing". New HiDef disc releases go to the "Now Playing" drive until they are watched by the family, then they are either deleated (the disc goes back in the box and to my local pawn shop to be sold), or (if it's a keeper) moved to my movies server (the disc goes into a cd sleve and gets stored with my other keeper discs in case I ever need to backup the disc again (sorry purists, I don't keep the BD Cases)).

My backups are named in the following manner: Movie Name-Year-Genre-Codec-Audio Type.m2ts. So Mr. Woodcock might look like this on hard drive: Mr. Woodcock - 2007 - Comedy - VC1 - DTS6CH.m2ts. I am putting the codec and audio type in the name for now as a "just in case" solution. I am still in the experimental stages with SageTV Client and the HD-200 and that gives me an easy way to correlate playback problems to codecs. Of course, when Sage gives us full support for all of the HiDef audio formats in all Sage products I'll have some renaming to do. Or maybe I'll just leave them the way they are.

Alternative suggestions or comments appreciated.

[stanger89]

I see what you're doing and I really like that functionality, but it seems like a awful lot of work. I really want to see that sort of functionality (namely the new additions listed separately) handled by Sage.

The "one drive isn't big enough" is one reason my solution includes a couple arrays. I've got my original 8x250GB RAID-5 array in my server (1.75TB), and I've recently upgraded my ReadyNAS from 4x500 (1.5TB) to 4x1.5 (4.5TB). Now Sage makes it so using numerous drives isn't an issue for navigation, but this does make organization much easier.

The issue I'm just beginning to wrestle with is how to get my "movies" to be differentiated from "videos" in Sage. Previously, all my movies were DVD rips so I used Sage's DVD detection (ie the DVD view) to keep movies listed separately from my misc videos (trailers, misc clips I've collected, etc).

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by stanger89

The "one drive isn't big enough" is one reason my solution includes a couple arrays. I've got my original 8x250GB RAID-5 array in my server (1.75TB), and I've recently upgraded my ReadyNAS from 4x500 (1.5TB) to 4x1.5 (4.5TB). Now Sage makes it so using numerous drives isn't an issue for navigation, but this does make organization much easier).

I will have to become reaquainted with RAID arrays to be sure. I had a bad experience (years ago) that just turned me off to RAID. I'm sure RAID is eons ahead of where it was back then.

The issue I'm just beginning to wrestle with is how to get my "movies" to be differentiated from "videos" in Sage. Previously, all my movies were DVD rips so I used Sage's DVD detection (ie the DVD view) to keep movies listed separately from my misc videos (trailers, misc clips I've collected, etc).

It would be nice to see some "nonbinding" statements from Sage re things they are thinking about to handle some of these challenges. Are they leaning to m2ts, mkv etc? Where are they trying to get with audio rendering? What kind of directory structure are they thinking of supporting for HiDef content?

Until then, I just keep plodding along.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

It would be nice to see some "nonbinding" statements from Sage re things they are thinking about to handle some of these challenges. Are they leaning to m2ts, mkv etc? Where are they trying to get with audio rendering? What kind of directory structure are they thinking of supporting for HiDef content?

Jeff said they're working on Blu-ray ISO/folder support for the extenders, and looking at TrueHD/DTS-HD decoding as well.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I will have to become reaquainted with RAID arrays to be sure. I had a bad experience (years ago) that just turned me off to RAID. I'm sure RAID is eons ahead of where it was back then.

I don't want this to sidetrack the whole discussion, but this was the reason I went with WHS. The drive extender technology is a perfect match for something like Sage. No RAID to mess with, but you don't need to worry about drive letters, either. Admittedly, I'm using FlexRAID for some data protection, but it's not a necessity. I use WHS' duplication feature for important data.

Now back to our regularly scheduled thread...

[tmiranda]

I use:

//SHARE/MOVIES/genre/Title/VIDEO_TS

I have 4 different share names...

[evilpenguin]

Something that's just killing me with movies...

Juno 2007.avi

So this is obviously the movie Juno, but when I run it through my program I can't tell the difference between

Juno (2007) - Movie
Juno S20E07 - TV show

There's some pretty complicated stuff I can do to compensate, but I'd much rather just say that if you have the year in you're file name then it should be in parenthesis ex: (2007).

Is that a big issue for anyone?

[Skirge01]

EP: Having done quite a bit of programming in VBA for Excel-based applications, I understand your frustration. Don't take my upcoming comments as a dig against your scraper, since I appreciate what you're doing, fully intend to use it, and I know I couldn't write it myself. I'm looking to gain some understanding and maybe do some brainstorming here.

I'm a bit confused as to how you're parsing the info from the filenames. It would seem to me that the parsing should be intelligent enough to know that S20E07 contains season and episode numbers, rather than a year. It's entirely possible that someone's poorly named file might have junk numbers that don't pertain to either the year or the season/episode info, which I believe would cause problems for your scraper. For example, what if someone put a date as part of the filename? Perhaps the original airing date or something?

Because of issues like that, I think that the scraper needs to have some sort of intelligence built in, so that it can determine what data it's finding. It sounds like you're ripping out all numbers, no matter where they lie and turning that into some piece of data, such as the year in this instance, hoping that a sequence of 4 numbers will equate to a valid year and that a sequence of 3 or 4 numbers may also give you the season/episode info.

Getting back to your original request, you were asking for "ugly" conventions and it seems that you definitely got some. The trick now is to figure out how best to handle some of these situations. We can't expect you to handle all possibilities, but a little intelligence in the parsing will probably go a long way.

My thought is that whatever code you're using to pull out the numbers, should be looking for a sequence of 4 numbers, rather than just any and all numbers. If your code doesn't return 4 numbers, each in sequential positions, it can't possibly be a year, so the next logical possibility would be the season/episode info.

I feel like I'm starting to ramble, so I think I'll stop here. If you didn't find this post to be productive, sorry for wasting your time.

[wayner]

It would be nice if you could strip the SageTV show ID from the title if it was still there.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I feel like I'm starting to ramble, so I think I'll stop here. If you didn't find this post to be productive, sorry for wasting your time.

No worries, I appreciate the comments, but rest assured I'm being much smarter than you're giving me credit for .

I actually use about 12 different RegEx's to check for the various different types of TV show naming formats that I know/allow. And one of those formats, my least favorite, has files named like this...

The Simpsons 722.avi = The Simpson's S7E22

But if you extrapolate that naming convention into Season 20 (which the Simpsons just hit last year) you run into the real problem...

The Simpsons 2008.avi = The Simpson's S20E08

And if i'm going to allow TV shows to be named in that format how can I tell the difference between the above and this...

The Simpsons 2008.avi = The Simpson's Movie (2008)