JackLuminous:

hotshot,

if you have the latest build posted you can hit the skip button. Unfortunately, tehre's a wierd issue where the first time you go into the gallery, you have to press it twice...it's like it doesn't recognize the press the first time in.

Anyways, when viewing a gallery of stuff, hit Skip, and you'll get a popup menu. You can change the image type and sizes from there. It will remember the selection you made.

Wow, that' s awesome. Didn't know about that hidden feature. Anyway you can change it to like the "information" button or something more intuitive then skip?

Also, I was wondering about the format of the title that is displayed when you play an episode and hit "information".

Currently it seems to display "Series Name - Episode Name".

Have you thought about adding Season and Episode number like this:
 "Series Name - SXXEXX -  Episode Name".

I would find this useful since I play a lot of random episodes, and if there's one that I really like it's cool to be able to see what season it was from.

Thanks again!

I am also wondering if there is a way to get Shows which are just specials to pull down metadata correctly. For example: Comedy Central Roast(http://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=season&seriesid=82186&seasonid=32893&lid=7).

I've named the episodes exactly the way they are on TVDB and even tried putting them into a "Specials" subfolder, but with no luck. I also tried to manually change the title in the xml file.

Does anybody know how to do this?

Swears,

Putting them in Season 0 folder should achieve what you're after..

Schlep.

cool beans

schleppel:

Swears,

Putting them in Season 0 folder should achieve what you're after..

Schlep.

Schlep for teh win. behind the scenese, thetvdb.com uses a season of 0 for specials. In the plug in, I display season 0 as "Special" then always sort them at the end of the season folder list. Also, when you go into Watch Series, all the specials SHOULD also show up last in the list.

I just started using your app Jack, and I must say it's impressive. I like the interface a lot, and the automatic metadata downloading works pretty well. I think the app is having some problems with accessing the metadata it downloads reliably though. I get crashes intermittently, but they seem reproducible. Here's a scenario that I setup to test some stuff...

I have a directory with a single series in it. It is a new directory and I have not run Video Library since I added it. When I start up Video Library, I just let it sit at the main screen for a while, and I monitor the directories inside that series directory. I see the ".metadata" directory created, and then inside that I see the "providerdata" directory created. Without navigating through the Video Library interface and just watching the directories, I can see "providerdata" starts to fill up with more and more images, and some .xml files. The ".metadata" directory fills up slowly too, as it seems to filter and choose data from the "providerdata" directory.

Now, if I select that series from Video Library interface, it will load the screen with information. If the series cover art has been loaded, it will display it. If it hasn't, I get the generic blue reel. And more interestingly, it seems that sometimes, if it's in the process of downloading/processing the cover art, it will crash the application.

Going further, if I can get past the series information screen and select "Browse Episodes", the same thing will occur. If the cover art for each episode has already been downloaded, it will display. If it hasn't, it will give the blue reel. If any of the episode coverart is still being downloaded/processed at the time I reach this screen, the application crashes.

Also, whenever the application crashes like this, that series directory will never get further updates to its resources. The current episodes in the directory without cover art won't get any new art, and new episodes added to the directory are the same. The only way to get further updates is to delete the ".metadata" directory and load up Video Library again (and this time let it sit there for like 10 minutes and wait until it loads all the resources).

So it seems like there is an issue with accessing resources that are partially downloaded or being processed and moved from "providerdata" to ".metadata". I'm hoping I'm correct in my assumptions, and this is something you can fix with some synchronization in the code.

Again, good work with this app...very well integrated with the VMC experience and I would like to help as much as I can to improve it.

 

Nice write up. Yes, based on recent posts, there is a synchronization/thread issue w/ downloading the metadata. I am aware of this issue and the annoyances it causes. I will get to it eventually when time permits. I've been thinking up how to handle metadata. I may remove auto-download completely and just do monitoring/crawling..... that work would be more complicated and would involve a service or possibly a background add-in to do monitoring.

Anyhoos, thanks for detailing the scenario involving cover art...when I get a chance to work on this, I'll hone in on the image/thumbnail generating code to confirm your findings.

 

Hi JL,

1. There doesn't appear to be any duplicate files created. The .providercache folder only includes the actors.xml and the seriescache.xml files.  Not sure if it's important, but I always uninstall the previous version before installing the new version of video library. No errors are created in the log file in relation to this problem either.

2. Hmmmm. I don't think that this has worked on any of the versions I have had installed then.  It is possible that it is linked to the problem above though.

Let me know if any more information is required,

Cheers,

Mark

JackLuminous:

@#(*#@)(# TGB forum is pissing me off now...I had a nice long post ready to go and when I try to submit it, i get t_@#_@*#) 404 error for AddPost...

1. I have seen this before but have not yet solved it. Are there any duplicate files?

2. Yes, it should set the covers *at the time that the season metadata is setup*

I installed your plugin earlier today and I have been having similar problems as BrokenRecord a few posts above, I have a large TV collection (3,000 odd episode of 85 shows weighing in at around 1TB) so I left it running in the background for about 6 hours now and so far it's grabbed about 30 shows overall summary and 3 shows cover art and such, but that happened within about 20 mins in and it hasn't done anything since, I tried watching a show with all it's data and it ran fine then tried one with the shows overview and it crashed the program so i restarted it about 2 hours ago and it's made no progress since!

The log file gives this error message:

10/17/2008 12:31:30.847 - Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at VideoLibrary.LibraryApplication.PlayMedia(MediaType mediatype, Object media)
   at VideoLibrary.LibraryApplication.PlayMediaInternal(GalleryVideo video)

I've also tried deleting all the .metadata folders but it did exactly the same, for exactly the same shows (as far as I can tell it's a completely random order it gets the info, not knowing how it works maby you could make it do it one folder at a time in alphabetical order?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated as i would really love to use this plugin to its full potential as from what i've seen it's awesome!

Thinking about it my dir structure isn't standard as it's "/showname/season # (quality)/00. episode name.avi" (quality) being (HTDV), (DVDRip) or (DSR)... can't believe I didn't think of that.

Right, renamed all the dirs without the (quality) bit and now to see if it works...

Edit: Yup that seems to have fixed it!

One problem I have is whenever I browse episodes for a shows season and it accesses the individual episode images it crashes every time until it loops through the whole season sometimes taking 3 or 4 attempts before it's completed, but when it fails on a file it won't retrieve the thumbnail unless you delete the .xml relating to the failed episode.

Also I watch The Daily Show and the releases for that are named like this The.Daily.Show.10.14.2008.DSR.XviD-SYS.avi so it won't match with the episode numbers on thetvdb (http://thetvdb.com/?tab=season&seriesid=71256&seasonid=30126&lid=7) would it be possible to search the file name for a date instead of episode number and match via the air date?

I named my folder 'specials' for BSG (2003) and everything seems to work fine...will naming it 'Season 0' change anything?

deadbunny:

Also I watch The Daily Show and the releases for that are named like this The.Daily.Show.10.14.2008.DSR.XviD-SYS.avi so it won't match with the episode numbers on thetvdb (http://thetvdb.com/?tab=season&seriesid=71256&seasonid=30126&lid=7) would it be possible to search the file name for a date instead of episode number and match via the air date?

Sorry but I am sticking to the season # and episode # designation used by thetvdb.com.

JackLuminous:

deadbunny:

Also I watch The Daily Show and the releases for that are named like this The.Daily.Show.10.14.2008.DSR.XviD-SYS.avi so it won't match with the episode numbers on thetvdb (http://thetvdb.com/?tab=season&seriesid=71256&seasonid=30126&lid=7) would it be possible to search the file name for a date instead of episode number and match via the air date?

Sorry but I am sticking to the season # and episode # designation used by thetvdb.com.

You do realize we added a getByAirDate interface not very long ago? Just hit up http://thetvdb.com/api/GetEpisodeByAirDate.php?apikey=<apikey>&seriesid=71256&airdate=10-14-2008 and it'll give you the correct episode back. The interface was written especially with the Daily Show and others like it in mind.

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No i didn't realize that. There are other issues that are far up the priority list than this one. It was a bear trying to get a grip on all the different naming formats (because very few wanted to rename their torrent formats) that I don't want to open that can of worms right now

ahelseth:

JackLuminous:

deadbunny:

Also I watch The Daily Show and the releases for that are named like this The.Daily.Show.10.14.2008.DSR.XviD-SYS.avi so it won't match with the episode numbers on thetvdb (http://thetvdb.com/?tab=season&seriesid=71256&seasonid=30126&lid=7) would it be possible to search the file name for a date instead of episode number and match via the air date?

Sorry but I am sticking to the season # and episode # designation used by thetvdb.com.

You do realize we added a getByAirDate interface not very long ago? Just hit up http://thetvdb.com/api/GetEpisodeByAirDate.php?apikey=<apikey>&seriesid=71256&airdate=10-14-2008 and it'll give you the correct episode back. The interface was written especially with the Daily Show and others like it in mind.

Hi Jack,

Just a small question:
is it possible to use different regular expressions for different series?

For example:
My Heroes directory is using the SxxExx syntax but my Desperate Housewives is using the Season x Episode y syntax and another one <series>.xx.yy.avi syntax

If I recall correctly the regular expression is system wide, but is there somehow a way to overrule it for a specific directory?

(I'm not to keen on renaming 100 files....)


Thanks!