I was not sure where to post this and I thought this would the the right place. My apologies if it isn't and please tell me where it ought to be.

Does anyone know of a tool where one can browse dvr-ms metadata for multiple files in some reasonably intuitive easy to read manner?  And maybe even print it?  In a nutshell I am looking for a way to compare metadata field by field between multiple dvr-ms files and visually analyze it.

The obvious question is why would I want to do something this bizzare - and that takes a long answer. I am currently engaged in the eternal quest to organize my files so that all episodes are linked.  So that when I sort by title, all episodes under a particular title fold into one single category.

After doing some due research I used EditDVR-MS to edit the files so that all of their WM/WMRVRequestID.  If you browse around the forums you will see that particular piece of advice.  But this only partially works.  Some of the episodes do get correctly linked and some do not. This seems to imply that it is a combination of fields working together that classifies the files.

I tried googling to see if I could get a description of every field in dvr-ms metadata so I could do a better job.  But I am unable to find any.  My next best choice is to compare field by field and see what is common between the episodes that to get categorized together and what is different between those that do not.

To achieve this I was hoping there was a tool out there that would allow me to browse all the metadata fields in some reasonably intuitive format and allow me do deduce relationships. Something along the lines of a Windows Explorer interface, but visually allowing me to display all dvr-ms metadata fields as properties and sort and/or filter on any one.   And maybe print out too if doing it on screen is too hard.  Even better would be to allow me to choose which fields to browse since one can fairly confidently eliminate many of the fields from consideration.

Any suggestions?

 

Well, it depends a little on which fields you want to see. The more common fields like Program Title, Episode Name, Duration etc are available through Windows Explorer by just selecting the appropriate fields from the View/Choose Details menu.

If you want more in depth coverage then I'm not aware of anything that does exactly what you're after. I wrote a tool that will extract the metadata from one or more DVR-MS files, but it exports the data in an XML file. You'd probably want a CSV or similar so you could then import the data into Excel.

However, as I provided the code, it'd not be difficult to strip out the XML formatting code, and replace it with a simpler CSV output.

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/post/266829.aspx

 

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Recorded TV Manager

Recorded TV manager will deal with series and episode titles, and sort them in a 2-foot interface.  I haven't seen anything that involves working with the metadata directly. or better yet allows you to batch edit the meta data so that it sorts properly in the MCE interface.  It will keep all of the episodes in one place on the server and present them one at a time in order as they are watched, but that isn't quite the same as having them all grouped together properly in MCE.

I would love a utility that will let me select multiple recordings and change the requestID of all of them at once so that they all group properly.  Did they fix this problem in Vista?  Do episodes recorded from the same series on the same channel at the same time still end up getting listed separately?


Ian

Yes Ian, in part I am looking for a tool like what you are describing - a utility tool.  But for now what I am really looking for is a research tool.  Even if I had a tool to change a particular attribute of a selected set of files as a batch it still would not help me - because I don't know which attributes need to be changed.  And from scouring around on thegreenbutton it does not appear that anyone else does either.  There is a thread talking about changing WMRVRequestID to link files together.  But from my experience it only partially works.  If a set of files have the same value for WMRVRequestID some sort as a group and some do not. This suggests that there are more attributes that contribute to the grouping. Since it is too painful to try to eyeball all of the attibutes individually in EditDVRMSMetadata I was hoping to get a tool where I could view all values of a set of selected files at one time.  So maybe I pick 10 interesting target metadata fields.  Then I look at a group of files that sort together and see which fields match and which do not.  Next I look at a group of episodes that do not group together and see which sort together and which do not.  Eventually I could probably guess which attributes are key.

Only after I do that can I do what you suggested earlier, namely changing a set of attributes as a group.

I will try and use the info that other people have suggested to further my quest. In the meantime if anyone has any suggestions or can point out any obvious bits of information I have missed let me know.