Serviio

Would is be possible to remove "UK" and "US" from the show name when checking online, but only if no series is found when leaving it in?

Example:

Sanctuary has two shows: an old UK one and the current US one running on SyFy.

The Show names (from the scene) are currently: Sanctuary.US.S03E0x...

"Sanctuary US" isn't found on thetvdb, however searching for just "Sanctuary" finds the correct show.

If I rename the files to Sanctuary.S03E0x... the metadata search works as expected.

It's just a pain to have to rename files all the time. Maybe make the strings that can be removed from the search user configurable?

J

would it help if you search with a year included? e.g. Sanctuary 2009 (or whatever) ? In that case you could try adding the year on the parent folder, e.g. Sanctuary (2009)/Season 1/Sanctuary UK S01E11....

Searching for "sanctuary 2009" resulted in no results from thetvdb.com.

J

I think this is just a corner case. You'll have to rename the files manually I'm affraid.

Then I've found another "corner"...

Brothers and Sisters (as the scene calls it) is Brothers & Sisters on the tvdb.

"Brothers and Sisters" is also a show on the tvdb - but from 1979!

J

Here's an idea ... how about a list of stop words to be excluded from the tvdb search...

Stop list used below: and,us,uk

To use the two examples quoted above...

Sanctuary (US)...

http://www.thetvdb.com/api/GetSeries.ph ... nctuary+us

returns no results, whereas...

http://www.thetvdb.com/api/GetSeries.ph ... =sanctuary

the first result is correct

On to the second one...

http://www.thetvdb.com/api/GetSeries.ph ... nd+sisters

returns the wrong series, whereas

http://www.thetvdb.com/api/GetSeries.ph ... rs+sisters

returns both, but the first one (closest match??) is correct.

What do you think?

J

and what if someone wants the UK version or the version from 1979?

I know there's no winning here, which is why I was wondering if it could be user configurable.

To be fair, in the case of B&S, the scene is naming the files wrongly - the new series should use the &, the old "and".

Maybe we could think more along the lines of some RegEx metadata search rewrite rules - like mod_rewrite - that would be very powerful.

It's ok when you're getting one or two files a week, but when you download half a season it's a bit of a pain

Anyway, just putting an idea out there.

J

Had another idea that's related...

If we can't do anything to help improve the reliability of matching a file to the online DBs, how about creating a series folder called "no metadata" for anything that can't be found? No "no metadata" folder, no reason to look for files anywhere else.

At least that way every file should appear somewhere and you could treat "Series" as a one-stop-shop rather than hunt through the "folders" structure on the off chance that there's something in there. Ditto the "movie" folder (split based on filename pattern as is done now).

How's that sound?

J

How about this, allowing the user to specify metadata information for a given movie.

For example, let's say we have a movie file called "My Movie 123.avi" then have custom metadata in a file called "My Movie 123.avi.metadata".

The .metadata file could be something like:
<movie>
<title>My Movie 123</title>
<alternative_titles>
<alternative_title>My Movie One Two Three</alternative_title>
</alternative_titles>
<movie_poster>http://server.company.com/mymovie123.jpg</movie_poster>
<genres>
<genre>Action</genre>
<genre>Adventure</genre>
<genre>Science Fiction</genre>
</genres>

...
</movie>

Of course, not having this .metadata file would imply falling back to current mechanism (using online sources).

Thoughts?

In 0.5 you'll be able to choose between online sources and Swisscentre and XBMC .nfo files. So you can completely manage your library in one of the two media centres and Serviio will import their library.

Sounds interesting and powerful.

How do you propose to handle series episodes without the user having to create a metadata file for each episode?

J

These tools usually download the metadata from the net as well, only you have the ability to manually choose alternative name if the search was not precise.

I would really love to be able to provide my own, hand-written metadata in certain cases.

To wit: Inspector Morse has a season called "Specials", and serviio finds this if you name the season "S00" in the video file name.

However, this means serviio presents a season 0, logically listed before season 1.

Unfortunately, all the episodes in "Specials" were aired well after all the other seasons, and also depict events occurring after events in all the other episodes.

I can see several solutions:

1. A metadata entry tool, possibly in the serviio control app
2. Serviio being aware of a season "Specials", presenting "Specials" after all numeric seasons.
3. "Season order" and "Episode order" files, where the user can tell serviio which presentation order to use, overriding defaults and derived data.
3b. Combine this with a "Season titles" file and possibly an "Episode titles" file, and it would be really great

It's listed as it's provided on the metadata website. Can you see any fields in there that would enable certain type of sorting?

Date would do nicely, thank you. But the titles would remain confusing.

But I still think a way of doing one's own favourite sort and present would be very nice, specially for the really old and quaint series.

There will be support for Swisscenter and XBMC metadata in 0.5. So you could manage your entire library in one of these tools. You could then use their metadata instead of the online one. Is that something that could help you?

Not really, given that I run serviio in an OpenSolaris environment, with no linux or windows machine in the network.

Also, looking at xbmc and swisscenter, they seem to pick up their data online, too, so using them would probably not change anything.

Really wonderfull if we can use xbmc nfo to specify metadata...
We have more control, even in massive rename with tools like tvrename than let serviio image what could be the real name.

Any way to test that beta version ?

I now think I may have been mistaken in dismissing the xbmc metadata mgmt: I suppose one could run XBMC in a ubuntu virtualbox on my Opensolaris.

I'm not sure, but it seems the xbmc wiki says you can edit the videodatabase, and then export it to .nfo files.

Can online-data and .nfo files be used at the same time in serviio, with a preference order?