pyTivo Discussion Forum

choekstr · Joined: 06 Dec 2008 Posts: 152

oh yeah! This is the true value in it. A lot of the efforts TheAmigo has done in coding is to streamline and help it work better in cron. For instance, my cron entry used to be:

TheAmigo · Joined: 14 Apr 2009 Posts: 33

choekstr · Joined: 06 Dec 2008 Posts: 152

The code I added back in .20b was designed to strip out any CD1/2 regardless of where it occurs in the filename so the string that got sent to IMDB was Empire Of The Sun (1987). It would capture that and add it back in later for appropriate identification in the NPL. In testing with the -d (debug) it looks like it no longer behaves this way with all the recent changes and rewrite.

I think we should add this back in as it give much more flexibility in naming. BTW, I name my files almost exactly like this but without the '-' :
Empire Of The Sun - CD1 (1987).avi

TheAmigo · Joined: 14 Apr 2009 Posts: 33

The reason I did it that way was to avoid matching tags if they appeared in the title of the movie. I don't have a large collection to test against, so I don't know if there's much risk of false positives. If you want to try it, just make this change:

TheAmigo · Joined: 14 Apr 2009 Posts: 33

Here's another update that adds a new feature: categorize by genre. To use it add the option: -g GenreDir

What it does: For all the movies it indexes, it will create a directory under GenreDir/ for all the genres it finds. Within each directory, it will create symlinks to all the movies in that genre. Then you can share the genre dir with pyTivo and browse your movies by genre.

There are a few caveats:
- It's unix only (should work on Mac OS X, but I don't have that for testing)
- It doesn't read existing metadata files to learn genres. So to index all your movies, you'll have to either run with -f (forces a metadata update) or delete the metadata files that you want updated.
- If you run with -g to create genre links and later delete (or move or rename) some movies, it won't know and the old (broken) links will still be there. Deleting the genredir automatically is too dangerous, so you'll have to do that by hand if you want to update all the links.
- When possible the symlinks are relative so if you move a common parent of your movies and genredir, they'll still work. This requires python 2.6+. Older versions of python will link to absolute paths and be more likely to break.
- So far, it only applies to movies, not TV shows. I archive many entire seasons, and I don't want individual links to every episode of ST: TNG in my Sci-Fi directory. I organize my shows by directory, so I'd like to have it just put a single link to the entire series in each applicable genre dir, but it's not easy to detect when TV shows are sorted into dirs by series.

My initial thought was to have subdirs so you could click though into multiple genres and you'd see only the movies that match all those genres. However, this could quickly get out of hand... if a movie had 10 genres listed, that'd be over 3 million directories, with a symlink to the movie in each one. Thus for now, it only creates one level of directories. Going a 2nd level deep wouldn't be too bad, but I have to wonder how much need there is to search for movies based on two genres... feedback welcome.

Someday, this may become moot if someone were to add the same functionality to pyTivo itself... but I'm not holding my breath.

Other changes in this version are minor:

lrhorer · Joined: 04 Mar 2008 Posts: 153

choekstr · Joined: 06 Dec 2008 Posts: 152

There is nothing else needed for running pytivometathis in order to generate metadata files for your movies and TV Shows. What other files do you think are necessary and what are you trying to accomplish?

The commandline options are just a -h away:

lrhorer · Joined: 04 Mar 2008 Posts: 153

rdian06 · Joined: 12 Apr 2008 Posts: 1420

lrhorer · Joined: 04 Mar 2008 Posts: 153

Thanks!. I installed the .deb package for IMDbPY from the official Debian "Lenny" distro, and the program no longer nags. I may have to investigate the XML parse if I have problems. I'm going to download the latest version of the script right now.

Oh, and I think I rest my case concerning the need for a little documentation.

lrhorer · Joined: 04 Mar 2008 Posts: 153

Alright, well, at this moment there is only one program on the server without a metafile, so I ran:

choekstr · Joined: 06 Dec 2008 Posts: 152

If the filename doesn't have the commonly found SNNENN (ie S01E21) naming convention then it can't determine it is a TV show so it treats it as a movie.

This is a case where the script can only do so much and you have to meet it halfway. Name you files accordingly, with some conventions that work well for automation and you should have no problem. In general as long as you have the SNNENN convention somewhere in the filename it works great.

It is the movies that are tougher to find perfectly at IMDB. IMDB is a finicky beast and if you don't match the voodoo naming properly you won't get IMDB to find it first try. Don't be afraid to open up the script and make some changes to match your movie naming convention and help it match better.

lrhorer · Joined: 04 Mar 2008 Posts: 153

Oh, geez, that's totally backwards. If I have to look up the season and episode number manually using something like MasterCephus' metagenerator, then the script is pretty much superfluous. I can just use the manual lookup to create the metafile in the first place. Indeed, the most tedious and time consuming part of the entire manual process is trying to find the season and episode number. The rest is trivial and takes an almost insignificant amount of time and effort.

Also, what about TV shows that aren't series? Specials, documentaries, etc?

rdian06 · Joined: 12 Apr 2008 Posts: 1420

choekstr · Joined: 06 Dec 2008 Posts: 152

Yeah, the whole resonating tone of this thread is that this tool doesn't do what you want: "be magical and just work" and there is a lot of animosity and disdain over a tool that a few of us have graciously helped develop for your and others' potential use.
If you don't like it, don't use it. It is that simple.
If you think it is backwards, change it. You have the source code!
If you think it needs documentation (it hasn't been needed so far as others have figured it out on what is given so far) then please create some and give back.

The whole point is that this is free, open source and you aren't paying for anything so you have no rights to complain. You only have rights to change it for your liking like the rest of us have.

And you might want to look into using the season and episode naming since a good portion of the industry/scene uses this as a convention and many tools use this. Any metadata tool has to have "something" to lookup to identify the file and download the metadata. That is either going to be season and episode numbers, or episode title. We all agree the season and episode numbers are the way to go as it is succinct, absolute and way less prone to interpretation error. Automation is all about removing any chance of error.

And just to be perfectly clear, this script is NOT to identify your files for you. This script assumes your files is already identified and downloads metadata for your identified file. It populates things like episode title, directors, actors, ratings, etc into a metadata file based on criteria it knows about the file derived from the filename.