Plex Scanner and BMT Agent for SageTV

[Jason]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I don't know who is really following this thread... could just be me Darci and Brian, but when I am waiting for something I love and appreciate updates and progress with pics....so here ya go if youre like me

if not then don't look

Oh... I'm following your progress...

:-)

-Jason

[mzup]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I don't know who is really following this thread... could just be me Darci and Brian, but when I am waiting for something I love and appreciate updates and progress with pics....so here ya go if youre like me

if not then don't look

I'm following as well. Waiting for a release to test. Plex does show metadata of the TV shows I've pointed it to already.

[zoop]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I don't know who is really following this thread... could just be me Darci and Brian, but when I am waiting for something I love and appreciate updates and progress with pics....so here ya go if youre like me

if not then don't look

i am following, plex has generated some interest for me as it seems to be one of the few apps out there that can deal with very large music collections without barfing all over itself... now to see what else it can do

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by wayner

Is there any reason why Plex won't scan in your Recorded Movies if you move them to a folder in your Video Library but retain the original SageTV name?

I think it doesn't like the way sage names them. AFAIK sage just names them in the format of ToyStory instead of Toy Story. That may have something to do with it.

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I think it doesn't like the way sage names them. AFAIK sage just names them in the format of ToyStory instead of Toy Story. That may have something to do with it.

That's correct. Our scanner and agent will take care of thy for u and pull in data from bmt just like the TVShows :-)

[PiX64]

Glad peeps are interested :-)

so here is the current status

scanner is working quite nicely. We have it doing everything that is is supposed to from a plex perspective. I currently have it NOT adding recorded movies. this is determined by a property retruend from BMT. So that means that no recorded movies will show up in your TV Shows plex import path.

BMTAgent is also working nicely.

The 1 thing that isn't working is reading from the propreties file for sage url and username/pass on MAC only. windows seems to be working fine. Hopefully we can get Darci up and running, code update on google , and a post on a "first release" today.

thats my goal anyways :-)

[crusing]

I am keeping an eye on this as well. Plex is my preferred option when one of my hd300's die.

[PiX64]

Trying to get Darcy up and running before we post anything as th official first release.

[darcilicious]

I'm still poking at it... just now having a chance to try the latest file...

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

I'm still poking at it... just now having a chance to try the latest file...

Darc(i/y) not sure which is right :-D -

I responded to you via email with some things to try.

[vividweb]

I have a few questions. I setup a Plex server this weekend to see how things worked and am impressed.

1. If you have Sage Recorded shows and a separate folder with TV shows can they be shown in a combined group? Or will Sage recordings be under one group and the other shows in their own group?

2. When you have a recorded movie will it be alongside the rips or will it need to go in its own group?

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by vividweb

I have a few questions. I setup a Plex server this weekend to see how things worked and am impressed.

1. If you have Sage Recorded shows and a separate folder with TV shows can they be shown in a combined group? Or will Sage recordings be under one group and the other shows in their own group?

Yes, you can add multiple folders for a specified category (e.g. multiple movies folders together, mutiple tv folders together).

Originally Posted by vividweb

2. When you have a recorded movie will it be alongside the rips or will it need to go in its own group?

No, each "section" in plex can only have one media type (e.g. music or tv or movies, etc)

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

No, each "section" in plex can only have one media type (e.g. music or tv or movies, etc)

Additionally, each section can only use one kind of scanner; since SageTV recordings will require their own custom scanners (one for tv shows, and then another for movies), it won't be possible to to include SageTV Recorded TV Shows with other TV Show files in the same section, for example.

[vividweb]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Additionally, each section can only use one kind of scanner; since SageTV recordings will require their own custom scanners (one for tv shows, and then another for movies), it won't be possible to to include SageTV Recorded TV Shows with other TV Show files in the same section, for example.

That's too bad. Had hoped that it wasn't going to be like that. So now have to determine if a TV show was ripped or recorded in order to find out what folder it sits in. Thought maybe the scanner's could be ranked and if it failed on one it went to the next ranked scanner.

As long as a video was imported into Sage could it be scanned with the new scanner? If so I guess the new scanner could be used on all TV and Movies. How are recorded movies handled then right now?

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by vividweb

That's too bad. Had hoped that it wasn't going to be like that. So now have to determine if a TV show was ripped or recorded in order to find out what folder it sits in. Thought maybe the scanner's could be ranked and if it failed on one it went to the next ranked scanner.

As long as a video was imported into Sage could it be scanned with the new scanner? If so I guess the new scanner could be used on all TV and Movies. How are recorded movies handled then right now?

There is the ability in Plex to have metadata agents which contribute to or get contributed to from other agents. Most agents built for plex that i have seen are actually addon agents for TVDB. What this means is that the TVDB agent will first try and match the file passed from the scanner, if it can't, then it will go down the list of contributing agents to try and find a match from one of them.

This poses other issue because the standard plex scanner cannot read the SageTV files (hence the need for a sagetv scanner). Now if you use the SageTV Scanner to scan al teh tv shows, and use the TVDB agent, with BMT contributing to it, this poses even more problems and use cases to care for. Mainly the SageTV Scanner is far less specific in that it doesn't care about anything but the file name. it takes the file name and looks up all the metadata in BMT. if the other tvshow that you want to add into plex is also known about by SAGE, this will work fine. If the TVshow that you are adding is NOT in BMT, then a few things will happen
1) BMT look up will fail
2) the scanner is responsible for setting up the structural integrity of the media object being placed into plex, so there will be no season episode year, etc info for it to use from bmt
3) This means that we need to enhnace the scanner to handle this case and perform the VERY complex scaning and regexmatching that the Plex Series scanner does out of the box.

So while this is technically feasible its def. not and easy task.

[vividweb]

If the new scanner will scan all shows that are in Sage, Recording or imported, than I have no issues and will be able to just rely on the new scanner and BMT. Anything I want to watch is available in Sage.

[wayner]

I apoligize if this is taking a step backward but what about renaming all TV shows to be Plex compliant - i.e. Showname-S01E04-asfddsflsdflkj.mpg? Can I then have Plex's (and/or your SageTV scanner) scan both my \\servername\TV folders (where my SageTV recordings reside) and my \\servername\videos folders (where my ImportedTV and Imported Movies resides).

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by wayner

I apoligize if this is taking a step backward but what about renaming all TV shows to be Plex compliant - i.e. Showname-S01E04-asfddsflsdflkj.mpg? Can I then have Plex's (and/or your SageTV scanner) scan both my \\servername\TV folders (where my SageTV recordings reside) and my \\servername\videos folders (where my ImportedTV and Imported Movies resides).

Mine already does that, but not for sports or anything that doesn't have a season/episode number.

[SJL]

As my lone HD-100 seems to periodically be at deaths door, then work again for a few months that I forget it's a problem, then starts up again, I really don't have a choice but to move from Sage (other than pay a ridiculous price for an extender on ebay). I needed a front end client and a back end tv server, and figured as we never watch live TV, we had several options. After working with MediaPortal, ForTheRecord, NextPVR and XBMC, I looked at Plex and really like the interface and the simplicity of getting it functioning as well as maintenance. I have been trying to figure out what to use as the back end tv server; MediaPortal's TV server is the only one I had working successfully, but this would be far better! I could stick with Sage on the backend, and load Plex up on the same Virtual Machine... A quick question, how is the status of a show (watched, unwatched) handled between Sage and Plex, as well as deleting recorded shows? Would that be a manual process that I would periodically need to go into Sage and do? (Not a big deal if it is, I'd just like to plan properly).

Thanks for providing this excellent option!

[wayner]

HD-200s have been going for around $200 and, IMHO, are almost as good as an HD-300 as they have some benefits, particularly if you are not using HDMI. Considering the time and effort that it would take to switch to new sotware I think it is worth paying a bit of a premium to stay on Sage.