Metadata on my TV

If you're like me, you have a whole load of movies in your library that you just never got round to viewing. Its always the more recent movies that are top of mind and are most likely to be selected for viewing so ... more and more of your older movies gather cobwebs and may, perhaps, never get seen.

The genre, plot, key actors, audience rating and even recording quality are often all pertinent to the decision on what to watch. Which means cranking up my favorite 3rd. party media manager on my laptop and scanning through for something that caught my fancy to watch.

Wouldn't it be nice if Serviio could provide this metadata direct to your TV. I understand work is being done to improve Serviio's support for metadata but I got bored waiting.

I cobbled together some code to take the exported data from my media manager and data from MKVmerge to build a short (25 second) movie for each movie in my library and placed them alongside the original movie (same folder) for Serviio to pick up. Now Each of my movies is accompanied by a metadata movie. See example below.

  Code:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r4vh5vn4n9plnjv/Information.mkv

[gmann001]

That is slick... can your app do "bulk" or is it one at a time?

Hi gmann001,

I think "app" is giving my code a little more gravitas than it deserves! "script" would be more accurate - its written in a script language called Open Object REXX http://www.oorexx.org/

Yes it does bulk / batch ...
I export the metadata from my "Movie Collector" db once a week and run my code against all my movie folders.
As Serviio supports artwork and NFO files (XML format) - my code generates them by default and also generates the MKVinfo files.
It only recreates the movie stub if something significant has changed (takes about 12 seconds per movie stub on my i5 quad @ 1920x1080x25seconds).
So 1st. time through it can take quite a while @ 5 movies per minute - best done overnight. But subsequent runs are much quicker as I'm only processing changes and additions.

There's a sort of model interface where I can use simple statements to pull together and position different artwork & text.

  Code:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nhk5vb7j6s0w53n/WMwQhxaV4h

[gmann001]

thanks, I'll have to take a look at that. I've been looking for a solution since none of my devices support/display the description that Serviio gives them. This may be the solution

This is very cool!

Could you please post MediaInfoCreate.rex and other needed files?

Which media manager are you using?

Hi POS,

MediaInfoCreate.rex does a lot of additional stuff for me - including renaming media files and moving folders around. I'd rather not let any code out into the wild that might inadvertently "change" a user's movie files. So ... give me a couple of days and I'll remove any code that updates media, and then I'll post a copy on my DropBox. (This version will just create the metadata files - in the right place).

You'll need need to install some pre-reqs (no costs involved!) ...
>MEdiaInfo http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo used to extract technical data about the movie.
>ooRexx http://www.oorexx.org/ - interprets and executes the script code (MediaInfoCreate.rex).
>If you are not running Serviio then check that you have a copy of ffmpeg http://www.ffmpeg.org/ - used to build the movie metadata stubs.

I'm using Movie Collector Pro http://www.collectorz.com/movie/ as my media manager. It requires a license - but I've used it for some time and so am loath to change it!

If you can't or won't use Movie Collector - then as long as you can somehow export your metadata in some easily readable format (flat file, comma delimited, XML type) then Its fairly easy for me to write a plug-in for your metadata format rather than Movie Collector's - just let me know what you need and post a data example.

Regards.

Hi Nicksky

Great!

I will just start out using your configuration and try that media manager. I was just looking for a way to display metadata on my TV, mainly rating, cast, genre, plot summary and poster image.

BTW: What would it take to make the Info button on a Samsung TV show a short text below or instead of the current information about run length and file size? I would like to amend the screen, which pops up when pressing the Info button.

I look forward to trying your script.

Hi POS,
All code is loaded (now called MediaInfo.rex). Look in the ReadMe folder for instructions - good luck.

Serviio and similar software are utilising a protocol called DLNA to talk to your TV. Its a very limited standard and sadly
what the info button does on your TV (or any TV in fact) is not usually available to any server/streamer utilizing DLNA.

Hi Nicksky

Thanks a lot, will try it out.

Serviio provides metadata like description, rating, genre and poster image, but the Samsung TV is not displaying it. It seems to be an issue with the TV.