jagowar:

i dont know exactly how the mytv program does it but it works really really well for finding new series and getting metadata for them.  i know it has a worker process/service that does the scanning and downloading of metadata but beyond that i have no idea how it works.

im just not a huge fan of the mytv interface (and the fact that it requires a sql server).... i dont believe the sql server is required for the series lookup.  i am also trying to organize everything under one roof and out of all the interfaces ive used i like yours the best.

i know this might be difficult to do as well but it would be far simpler if you could just force it to use metadata easily like you can for movies... make it so you have one series xml file where you can tell it what series it is and have the program do the rest.  i know it still gets into the regex issues but at that point i dont think people would have too many differences where you couldnt manually do something.

or another thought is to have some sort of regex generator.... do this through the ui where you select the folder you want to use in video library and can graphically set the regex....  tell the browse path somehow where the episode/series #, etc all are.  that way it would have everything it needs to make the regex for you.

to me the real problem the regex is even an issue is with tv series there are just too many sections that manually have to be configured if you go the manual route (the series,season,episode levels all add up after a few series).  if there was some way to tell the program what series it was and have it do the rest that would be an excellent way to have it work.

It's a secret

No, seriously it uses a hardcoded RegEx which I spent countless hours on 'perfecting' to recognize the most common naming schemes. It still fails now and again, but I would say it works to 99.9% - at least in my case, the number of episodes it has not been able to pick up correctly can be counted on a a couple hands and feet, and this is out of several thousand episodes in total.

This was a conscious decision on my part as I felt user-provided RegEx's would just confuse the normal user - as JL says, by their very nature they [RegEx's] are not userfriendly. At all. I had a few requests early on to provide user-entered RegExes as a 'hidden' option, but once I tweaked my RegEx a little more it seems everyone is happy as can be.

Basically though, myTV will take the filename and break it down using well known 'separators' such as x, SE, and so on. Also, in later builds (still in beta) it will always add the episode and if it's uncertain about whether it got it right or not it'll let the user decide (when loading the collection) by displaying the actual filename and the automatically parsed information - if it's wrong you simply enter the correct season/episode [or TVDBID] and it'll refresh from TheTVDB straight away. If it's correct, no action is needed apart from pressing OK.

Of course, part of the reason it works as well as it does is due to the backend SQL Server you are so against - having instant access to every single piece of metadata all the time means I don't have to care about many of the issues xml-implementions are facing. There are workarounds for it all, but I would be interested in knowing how well [ie. speedwise] xml-implementations handle filtering shows/seasons/episodes by watched status etc - as that was one of my main reason for choosing a DB backend.

Oh, and please let me know what you dislike about the myTV interface - always open for suggestions on how to improve it (of course I am biased, but I think it beats all other similar application hands down in terms of displaying data to the end-user - especially in the latest [non-public] betas)

This would be a non issue if we archived our stuff using either of a few naming formats. In my perfect plug-in developer world, all our archived tv shows would be \Series\Season\Series Name-SxxExx-EpisodeTitle.[extension]. Likewise, all movies would be MovieName or MovieName-releaseyear.[extension]. For stuff like "is it HDTV" this info would be stored as a property inside the metadata.

Since that isn't going to happen, I'm going to have to cut this off somewhere. On my end, I need to provide a usable 'pick one' UI and figure out for which situations I can make a safe assumption on what the correct movie should be. On one hand, I could just do what I am doing now where, if I can't find an exact match, the user has to resolve (with UI in place). This will get tedious quickly if your collections are very large and several items can't be identified....

...At this point, I am pretty much gonna concede the richer feature set  (more config options, db backedn, mounting/ISO-support, transcode360 support, possibly pivoting, etc.) to OML, video browser, and myTV :-) .

On my radar:

• Find UI
• Jump-In-List
• Be able to switch between 2-row (small) and 1 row (large) views similar  to DVD library.
• Be able to set views on a folder-by-folder basis
• About page with version number
• Settings page to configure some things. (maybe not regex)
• Settings page for each folder that essentially displays the folder.xml or *.series.xml or *.season.xml information.

Ogre:

Oooh, yeah, we could prolly come up with a regex that uses "or" to work with a bunch of different filename formats!

Option 1. Have an tv expression configuration file that contains regular expressions, each on a separate line.If this file exists then the app will check the file against EACH ONE of them to determine if the file is an archived tv....potentially expensive if you alot of files. If the file doesn't exist then the app will use the default expression. The app has to be useful out of the box without any config files already created.

Option 2. Agree upon a limited set of individual expressions that will be hardcoded into the app.

Option 3. If there are a limited set of regex ( less than 5) and provide an "edit info" option for un-identified movies or tv shows where you can enter the key information:

Movie/Series Name, SeasonNumber, Episode Number.

JackLuminous:

Ogre:

Oooh, yeah, we could prolly come up with a regex that uses "or" to work with a bunch of different filename formats!

Option 1. Have an tv expression configuration file that contains regular expressions, each on a separate line.If this file exists then the app will check the file against EACH ONE of them to determine if the file is an archived tv....potentially expensive if you alot of files. If the file doesn't exist then the app will use the default expression. The app has to be useful out of the box without any config files already created.

Option 2. Agree upon a limited set of individual expressions that will be hardcoded into the app.

Option 3. If there are a limited set of regex ( less than 5) and provide an "edit info" option for un-identified movies or tv shows where you can enter the key information:

Movie/Series Name, SeasonNumber, Episode Number.

ahelseth:

Oh, and please let me know what you dislike about the myTV interface - always open for suggestions on how to improve it (of course I am biased, but I think it beats all other similar application hands down in terms of displaying data to the end-user - especially in the latest [non-public] betas)

jagowar,

For the edit info, I'm thinking it would really serve for you to put in the key information necessary to download metadata...not necessarily a "overwrite all metadat using this page" type thing. Apologies if I didn't say that right. Alternatively...now that this idea is percolating and getting all fizzy in my head...is, since we are talking about finding metadata easily, it could be combined into the Find Movie or Find Series UI. There could be an optional button on that UI where you can update the series or video xml metadata before you even start searching. At minimum, only the key information would be available for edit: series name, year, episode number, season number. I mean, really, you only need to edit the metadata so that you can get a more accurate result, right? So outside of this find UI, you really don't need to edit this info. An exception to this would be typos and funky encoding characters which are present on the provider site....

jagowar,

2. If we are talking about just having that metadata so we can display it on the UI in some nice way then I can accomodate that now. For starters, I can add the metadata properties to the object model and xml file to track this 'video HD/resolution type' (what's a more intuitive/correct name for this property?) and audio type? Later we can look at where/how to display this on the details UI.

jagowar:

option 1 would only have to be done the first time though right?  if the metadata files are there already then it would skip it right?  if so i would do a combination of step 1 and 3.  where you have regular expressions it tests against and then for those episodes it does not find have some sort of a "edit info" page.

as for ui elements....  i saw you list and would like to see 2 more added personally. 
1. bring the page up/dn buttons to the addon.  really makes it difficult to browse through 80 movies only having left and right.
2. (and this one could be later down the road).... but have some sort of way where we could tag video and audio properties about the episode/movie and have media center like "HD" tags in the info but do it with 480p,720p,1080i/p,2.0,5.1 on the audio side.

JackLuminous:

jagowar,

2. If we are talking about just having that metadata so we can display it on the UI in some nice way then I can accomodate that now. For starters, I can add the metadata properties to the object model and xml file to track this 'video HD/resolution type' (what's a more intuitive/correct name for this property?) and audio type? Later we can look at where/how to display this on the details UI.

jagowar:

option 1 would only have to be done the first time though right?  if the metadata files are there already then it would skip it right?  if so i would do a combination of step 1 and 3.  where you have regular expressions it tests against and then for those episodes it does not find have some sort of a "edit info" page.

as for ui elements....  i saw you list and would like to see 2 more added personally. 
1. bring the page up/dn buttons to the addon.  really makes it difficult to browse through 80 movies only having left and right.
2. (and this one could be later down the road).... but have some sort of way where we could tag video and audio properties about the episode/movie and have media center like "HD" tags in the info but do it with 480p,720p,1080i/p,2.0,5.1 on the audio side.

JackLuminous:

jagowar,

For the edit info, I'm thinking it would really serve for you to put in the key information necessary to download metadata...not necessarily a "overwrite all metadat using this page" type thing. Apologies if I didn't say that right. Alternatively...now that this idea is percolating and getting all fizzy in my head...is, since we are talking about finding metadata easily, it could be combined into the Find Movie or Find Series UI. There could be an optional button on that UI where you can update the series or video xml metadata before you even start searching. At minimum, only the key information would be available for edit: series name, year, episode number, season number. I mean, really, you only need to edit the metadata so that you can get a more accurate result, right? So outside of this find UI, you really don't need to edit this info. An exception to this would be typos and funky encoding characters which are present on the provider site....

Gremlin:

Regarding the season naming regexpr etc, why not simply let the user define the format in the config file using a pseudo language and the program then converts that internally to a regex

e.g in your config you would specify

<FileFormat>S[seasonNumber]E[episodeNumber] - [episodeName]<fileFormat/>

Internally the software converts that (I've simplified the expression greatly and left off extension checking but you get the drift

REGEXP =[\\/]S([0-9]+)E([0-9]+)

In my experience this doesn't work for anyone but those anal enough (no offence to anyone, I used to do this myself before starting my application) to rename all their files to a specific format.

People want ease of use, and in most cases that means they don't record the episodes themselves they download it from some torrent site - and in doing so they will come across episodes named in a variety of ways.

IMO - the way forward for you guys would be to come up with a master RegEx which will recognize the most common naming schemes (such as SxxExx, XxXX, XXX, X.XX and month-day-year) and if that still doesn't fit everyones needs - allow for a separate RegEx.xml where advanced users could come up with their own which would be processed in addition to or instead of the 'master'. You could even try to parse out extra information using this, such as Videoformat, Filetype, Episode title etc.

jagowar: Fair enough - and yeah, I think I remember seing that post now you mention it :)

What you have to remember though is that not everyone knows what a RegEx is. Heck, half the people who know what it is doesn't know how to write one. Which is why I recommended what I did - it will allow everyone to get up and running in minutes whilst still providing that extra edge for power-users.

In terms of performance, there's not much to be had or lost either way (although, in my initial tests it was [very slightly] faster having a single RegEx than several different ones and checking the file against each one until it found a match) as you'll only iterate through your collection during the initial setup/startup - once it's done it only has to check new files, which even for a serious 'collector' would be a maximum of ~40 a week.

I have a good few TBs (more than I like to admit TBH - Chenbro RM41416b case anyone) of television shows archived myself, and as I said, in the past I duly renamed the files to my preferred format of Showname SxxExx - EpisodeTitle.ext, however after starting my project I just don't bother anymore - I never go looking for something to watch by digging through the filesystem, so spending time organizing it just seems like a waste of time. My experience is that most people fall into this category and the only reason they bother renaming files at the moment is because they have to - which IMHO should not be the case when using a media manager such as this one.

ahelseth:

What you have to remember though is that not everyone knows what a RegEx is. Heck, half the people who know what it is doesn't know how to write one.