jagowar:

this is what the log spits out....  it is still giving me errors.

08/05/2008 23:08:11.791 - Could not find a part of the path '\\htpc\MCE_MOVIE_500\TV Test\metadata\folder.xml'.
 

Sorry, I skipped over this last night (for me, the posting was about 1:30am).  I had exactly the same problem, and got around it by creating the metadata folder and the folder.xml files for the Recorded TV folder, and the Movies Folder.

I confirmed permissions on the folder were set to Everyone, Full Controll, and this didn't fix it.  I guess it is an issues with them not being created.

So yeah, I can confirm this is the case, and manual creation is the fix.

Schlep :D

EDIT: In testing the TV series regular expressions, I discovered I had to create a metadata folder for each and every folder before it would stop generating errors.  One thing to note.  UAC is turned ON on this PC.  I will try it with it turned off (altho, I'd rather keep it on, people who should be able to break things do use this PC (my testing PC))

See last post on Page 3 :-). A possible fix posted a few mins ago.

The fix works fine.  (altho I did turn off UAC between my post, and the post of the fix).  I deleted all metadata folders in the TV Test Folder and they were all created fine.

The < and > appears to have fixed the regular expression customisation also.

I changed my episode structure in the testing folder to similar to yours (not exactly the same, as I wanted to test custom strings) and it kinda works now, but not entirely.  I can go into the library, select entourage, select season one, and all the episodes show up in the folder.

The metadata for each episode looks similar to this:

 

<Metadata>
  <NeedsMetadata>false</NeedsMetadata>
  <Status>Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: SearchPath</Status>
  <OriginalBroadcastDateTime>0001-01-01T00:00:00</OriginalBroadcastDateTime>
  <OriginalRunTime>0</OriginalRunTime>
  <Duration>17480000000</Duration>
  <EncodeTime>0</EncodeTime>
  <EndTime>0</EndTime>
  <Watched>false</Watched>
  <Position>0</Position>
  <Title>\\Stuart\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage</Title>
  <SubTitle> Pilot</SubTitle>
  <IsDelay>false</IsDelay>
  <IsLive>false</IsLive>
  <IsMovie>false</IsMovie>
  <IsPremiere>false</IsPremiere>
  <IsRepeat>false</IsRepeat>
  <IsFinale>false</IsFinale>
  <IsSAP>false</IsSAP>
  <IsStereo>false</IsStereo>
  <IsSubtitled>false</IsSubtitled>
  <ClosedCaptioning>false</ClosedCaptioning>
  <ContentProtected>false</ContentProtected>
  <DTVContent>false</DTVContent>
  <ATSCContent>false</ATSCContent>
  <HDContent>false</HDContent>
  <SeasonNumber>1</SeasonNumber>
  <EpisodeNumber>1</EpisodeNumber>
  <BroadcastFirstAired>0001-01-01T00:00:00</BroadcastFirstAired>
</Metadata>

And the Metadata for the Entourage Fodler looks like this:

<Metadata>
  <NeedsMetadata>false</NeedsMetadata>
  <Title>Entourage</Title>
  <ImageType>NotSpecified</ImageType>
  <SortOrder>Title</SortOrder>
  <SpannedFolders />
  <GetMostRecentVideo>false</GetMostRecentVideo>
  <CleanUp>false</CleanUp>
</Metadata>

I am about to take all episodes out of "Season" folders and simply place in one folder and see if that makes a difference..

Schlep :D

that got me working on the test tv show i had... time to move on to my real directory and see how it does.

edit:  it does a decent job getting covers/movie art and data for movie but for some reason it will not let me move (left/right) once it loads.  it crashes and returns me to the previous screen.  also the logging is gone so i cant see if i can find out why its not working.

as for tv shows.... its acting very weird.  it does download metadata for the tv shows and images but only 1 or 2 episodes will show in each season.

i do want to say the look of this application is top notch....  its really one of the best "looking" applications out there (on the extender).  i know this might be a bit beyond this but any chance you might consider separating the tv and movie applications and having each one stand on its own?  just seems it would make more sense to have my movies and tv shows separate.

jagowar:

as for tv shows.... its acting very weird.  it does download metadata for the tv shows and images but only 1 or 2 episodes will show in each season.

Hopefully we can help each other out here, as the Movies side of things works faultlessly for me at the moment, just going through selecting the right moviematches.

How do you have your TV shows filed, and which regular expression are you using.  I can't seem to get anywhere with TV series, I think I am missing something major, but not sure what.  Did you have to do anything specific to be recognised a a TV series...

Oh, wait... You're using dvr-ms files aren't you...  Mine are .avi, .mpg and .rmvb.  That's why mine's been harder...

schlep The autodownload stuff won't work with your setup, unfortunately. This is due to whole design of this beast.

Exhibit A: " <Title>\\Stuart\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage</Title>".

If the end filename were "entourage.s01e02.episodename" or something like that then a custom regex would work for ya. 

However, another program could create the proper xml then you wouldn't have to do anything manually. If that were to go down, I'd probably add a config flag "DownloadTVMetadata" and set it to false. That way it won't waste time trying to see if your file is an archived tv file or not....

jagowar:

that got me working on the test tv show i had... time to move on to my real directory and see how it does.

edit:  it does a decent job getting covers/movie art and data for movie but for some reason it will not let me move (left/right) once it loads.  it crashes and returns me to the previous screen.  also the logging is gone so i cant see if i can find out why its not working.

as for tv shows.... its acting very weird.  it does download metadata for the tv shows and images but only 1 or 2 episodes will show in each season.

i do want to say the look of this application is top notch....  its really one of the best "looking" applications out there (on the extender).  i know this might be a bit beyond this but any chance you might consider separating the tv and movie applications and having each one stand on its own?  just seems it would make more sense to have my movies and tv shows separate.

Thanks for the good feedback, jagowar. I pretty much dig the Internet TV look so I mimicked that :-P.

1. As for the crashing when moving left or right, I think there might be a problem in the MCML not properly handling the case of one of the metadata properties being null. I saw a case of this while working on the watchedfolders bug.  Also, I've seen some cases of MCML exceptions not making it back to the app so that I can trap and log it...

2. For the shows that aren't showing, check the \metadata folder for one of the videos that don't show up. If there were problems with pulling the metadata, an error will be written in the <Status/> tag.

If you don't mind the hassle, Jagowar, can you zip up your movie xml files and PM me? I suspect something in the metadata is causing it to barf up a lung. Although this is real pain in the *@#)(*# for you guys, it's actually very helpful in shaking out alot of assumptions and -cough- sloppiness on my part :-D.

3. With regards to separating, I guess I never considered that because, for me, the value proposition was one place for all my videos --and more useful than Microsoft's lackluster effort. Also, the 'movie library' area is getting pretty crowded and the work those folks are doing would blow this out of the water :-).  

Minor notes: when you pause the video, the position is saved back to metadata so you can pick up where you left off on another media center, another extender, the next day, next year, or whatever. This doesn't work well with dvr-ms (since they have this ability anyways) so I was in the midst of disabling that feature for RecordedTV files.

 

sent you a pm... oh and something else that i would like to see added.  mainly for the movie section is to allow more than one row for the movies.  would be nice to have an option to allow for 2 or 3 rows on each page.  but its more important to get the base working perfectly.

Okay,

Movies, working like a dream for me.  I have 350+ movies, and I'm so far up to "B" in choosing the best match (not one has been an exact match, but I'm guessing that has to do with the [YEAR] I tack onto the end of the file).

TV Series, still struggling majorly.

I have now completely renamed all the test data to be \\SERVER\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage-S01301-Pilot.avi (have also tried it without the "Season 1" section), and it's not working right.

Should I not have Series folders, should every single TV show be in the one folder.  I'm just not sure of what layout you are actually expecting this to be in.  If I can work out what it's meant to be, I can at least decide what to do from there.  I don't get .series files created, and the XML files are still returning the same error I listed a couple of posts up (<Status>Value cannot be null. Parameter name: SearchPath</Status>).  So I appear to have hit a wall on the TV series front.

I don't mind changing my file/folder structure, I just need to know to exactly what (and will need to finally rebuild my MCE 05 one, I have 2 VMC and one MCE05, so the file structure has still been important, plus, I really prefer to have everything in organised folders to make them easier to find :)).

Any advice you have would be great :)

Schlep :D

EDIT: Just put all videos in the root folder, still getting the same issues, just less folders in the Title...

schleppel:

jagowar:

as for tv shows.... its acting very weird.  it does download metadata for the tv shows and images but only 1 or 2 episodes will show in each season.

Hopefully we can help each other out here, as the Movies side of things works faultlessly for me at the moment, just going through selecting the right moviematches.

How do you have your TV shows filed, and which regular expression are you using.  I can't seem to get anywhere with TV series, I think I am missing something major, but not sure what.  Did you have to do anything specific to be recognised a a TV series...

Oh, wait... You're using dvr-ms files aren't you...  Mine are .avi, .mpg and .rmvb.  That's why mine's been harder...

my tv shows have been giving me problems as well....  and i have a mix.  mostly avi.

Just an update on the movie filenames.  I grabbed a random selection from my main Movies folder and copied them to a test folder and took the [YEAR] off the end of the filename.  8 out of 10 found the exact movie match and worked perfectly. (the ones that didn't were one of the Batman films, and one of the Alien vs Predator films, which are both completely understandable).

If you've come up with any way to specify how much of the movie filename to use to search (ie, using a regular expression) I would be in heaven.

I too love this application.  As far as looks are concerned, you're leaps and bounds ahead of the others.  It's EXACTLY what I'm after (at least, I think it is on the video front, haven't seen it in action on my PC yet ;)) and everything is awesome.  I actually like just the one line of movies, as it renders a little faster than 2 lines, and the covers are nice and large.  Altho with 350+ movies in the database, it can take a while to scroll through them.  A fix for this might be a nice option to add to the wishlist.  Title hopping by text input (ie.  You hit the 9 button on the remote and a little "w" pops up and screen and you get taken to the "w" movie entries.

If sending you some files of the results I'm getting in my TV Series endeavour makes understanding what I'm trying to say, let me know, and I'll send them through.

Schlep :D

schleppel:

TV Series, still struggling majorly.

I have now completely renamed all the test data to be \\SERVER\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage-S01301-Pilot.avi (have also tried it without the "Season 1" section), and it's not working right.

Should I not have Series folders, should every single TV show be in the one folder.  I'm just not sure of what layout you are actually expecting this to be in.  If I can work out what it's meant to be, I can at least decide what to do from there.  I don't get .series files created, and the XML files are still returning the same error I listed a couple of posts up (<Status>Value cannot be null. Parameter name: SearchPath</Status>).  So I appear to have hit a wall on the TV series front.

I don't mind changing my file/folder structure, I just need to know to exactly what (and will need to finally rebuild my MCE 05 one, I have 2 VMC and one MCE05, so the file structure has still been important, plus, I really prefer to have everything in organised folders to make them easier to find :)).

Any advice you have would be great :)

Schlep :D

EDIT: Just put all videos in the root folder, still getting the same issues, just less folders in the Title...

Schlep, you don't need to put all videos in a single folder at all. I designed it around the notion of a series folder and a bunch of sub folders. I totally agree with you on organizing your shiznat; all of my tv shows are organized as SeriesName\Season folder\SeriesName-SnnEnn-EpisodeName.avi.

If in your test case, you are using the same structure then it's just that something is causing it to fail. Together we just have to identify the scenario that's causing it so I can reproduce it and fix it. No worries. That being said, that error message is one of mine so I know at least where to look. Just gotta figure out the circumstances...

"\\SERVER\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage-S01301-Pilot.avi" is totally legit --of course, I am assuming you really meant "...S01E01..". . So we expect to see

• \Entourage\metadata\Entourage.series.xml and such
• \Entourage\Season 1\metadata\Entourage-S01E01-Pilot.video.xml

Since we might have another case of "first-time running it blues", I am going to blow away my Dexter metadata and then browse to it in the app. My watched folder is \\myserver\videos\tv shows so the expected 'root' for Dexter is \\myserver\videos\tv shows\Dexter. I am going to see how it behaves then post back.

 

i do only want to see it as an option but i would like to have some sort of way to add 2 or 3 lines of movies....  so we can make it look like the video wall if we want.

another little thing is id like to see the album art size increased a bit on one row.... there is quite a bit of wasted space thats not needed in the one row.

Dang, by the time I finish responding to one message there're two more..slow down, people! Just kiddin' :-). Definitely send me some samples from your \TV Test\Entourage\* set up.

schleppel:

Just an update on the movie filenames.  I grabbed a random selection from my main Movies folder and copied them to a test folder and took the [YEAR] off the end of the filename.  8 out of 10 found the exact movie match and worked perfectly. (the ones that didn't were one of the Batman films, and one of the Alien vs Predator films, which are both completely understandable).

If you've come up with any way to specify how much of the movie filename to use to search (ie, using a regular expression) I would be in heaven.

I too love this application.  As far as looks are concerned, you're leaps and bounds ahead of the others.  It's EXACTLY what I'm after (at least, I think it is on the video front, haven't seen it in action on my PC yet ;)) and everything is awesome.  I actually like just the one line of movies, as it renders a little faster than 2 lines, and the covers are nice and large.  Altho with 350+ movies in the database, it can take a while to scroll through them.  A fix for this might be a nice option to add to the wishlist.  Title hopping by text input (ie.  You hit the 9 button on the remote and a little "w" pops up and screen and you get taken to the "w" movie entries.

If sending you some files of the results I'm getting in my TV Series endeavour makes understanding what I'm trying to say, let me know, and I'll send them through.

Schlep :D

SONUVA[long stream of expletives]!!!

Problem reproduced and confirmed. It generates the .video.xml but never writes the series stuff. And as you said there is an error in the Status. Dangit. This actually has worked for the last 3+ months. Another fine case of "this code is ugly, i need to refactor it to make it cooler..." :-/

Working on fix now.

Update:  I saw it in Schelp's .xml file but I didn't clue into it until just now

• "...<Title>\\Stuart\TV Test\Entourage\Season 1\Entourage</Title>..."- Screwed Up
• "..<SubTitle> Pilot</SubTitle>.." - Absolutely fine
•  ".. <SeasonNumber>1</SeasonNumber> .."- Absolutely fine
   ".. <EpisodeNumber>1</EpisodeNumber> .." - Absolutely fine

I debugged into the code and some extra error-checking code I added was broken. It hadn't tripped me up before because I haven't added any new tv series in awhile...(Mental note: use NUnit framework for next coding project...).

Update: running through testing right now. So far so good. Oh one more thing: it downloads all available images (except fan art and 'text' images) to \metadata\Images. I did this so that the user can pick banners and covers from the available images.