Progress report 6th September 2009

I know it has been almost 2 weeks since the last build, but there has been a reason for that.

I have been working hard to get TV Show handling completed. This is an essential part of the functionality, and it has been missing for far too long.

TV Show browsing is now fully enabled and works great. The shows are added to a treeview hierarchy, this has simplified things for the user and has removed the need for multiple combo/list boxes, all Shows, seasons and episodes can be viewed at the same time.

Episodes and seasons will be added in numerical order only as long as they are not >99. The only way to stop this would be to use 001, 002, etc instead of 01, 02 which I don't want to do, cant be many shows with >99 seasons or >99 episodes in a season.

The browsing speed between shows & episodes is almost instant, although some will still have a delay if they haven't got the actor thumbs stored locally.

The program startup speed is poor, especially if like myself, you have 1000s of tv episodes stored on a slow NAS, I will add a startup cache which will reduce this dramatically.

Here is a preview image


Multi-Part episodes are supported, as is media tagging.

I still need to write the scraper, but this will not take long considering TVDBs excellent API, and obviously I need to write the function that adds new TV Shows.

For this I will likely use a similar method to gen1, for each show added the user can browse the possible matches from TVDB and add the one they choose, along with the preferred language and sortorder. TBH I am by no means happy about this, since it still requires quite a lot of user interaction, especially if they are adding a lot of shows. The other possibility is that MC auto scrapes the TV Show from the first show returned by TVDB, and if it is wrong then give the user a choice to change it. Feedback would be helpful.

As with Movies, illegal xml files will simply not work anymore, this fact will be displayed and the show or episode will need to be fixed or rescraped to use it. Some may find this a pain, but these files would not be compatable with XBMC anyway, so you are better off for fixing them.

All of the additional functionality needs to be added, this includes fanart, posters, editing, playback, filters, etc. While these are important, my immediate concern is to get the scraper and browser working 100%, these functions can be added later.

I have not forgotten the bugs that have been reported for the previous version, some have been fixed, and some are still on my list to look at. I also have added some additional logging.

Anyway, better get back to it,

I've left this thread open for those who want to discuss or suggest anything relating to the TV Show handling, for other things, such as bugs or help please use the relevent forum.

Hi,

My biggest pet peeve about the TV Shows section was when i wanted to add a bunch of new TV Shows to a folder that already
had a bunch of shows there. The problem was that you needed to remember what shows were new, go to one show from the
drop-down and MC would tell you this show has no NFO and then you could scrape it manually.

It would be great if you could just highlight or make bold the name of shows in the treeview that don't have a tvshow.nfo or
an invalid one. It would alleviate so much trouble to going back to the folder list and see which ones were added last, etc...

Quick suggestion about the treeview... could you make it display

1x01 - Pilot

or even

01 - Pilot

instead of

01 Pilot

I think it looks cleaner that way.

Thanks for all your efforts!

Quote :

For this I will likely use a similar method to gen1, for each show added the user can browse the possible matches from TVDB and add the one they choose, along with the preferred language and sort order. TBH I am by no means happy about this, since it still requires quite a lot of user interaction, especially if they are adding a lot of shows. The other possibility is that MC auto scrapes the TV Show from the first show returned by TVDB, and if it is wrong then give the user a choice to change it. Feedback would be helpful.

Could there be a check box in settings so it could be user choice? Personally i would use both if i had the choice.

Suggestion: Perhaps there could be Missing Fanart/Poster/ option? and/or a Recently added option?

Loving the tree view.

Look forward to the release. Any ideas on a date for next release?

Cheers
Paybac

I like being prompted for the right tv show and options.

All sounds good to me.

I don't mind being asked about which show when adding, helps improve accuracy.

Two suggestions.

1) the 100 limit, this can be an issue as I have 88 shows, once you start getting documentary style stuff and old shows you can get over 100 pretty easily.

2) as someone mentioned, can we have an option to show recent additions? Makes it much easier to be able to quickly see what has been added in the last week and ensure they all scraped correctly.

Thanks,
Esra.

EDIT: Any idea on when?? Killing me not having updated TV!!

esra wrote:

1) the 100 limit, this can be an issue as I have 88 shows, once you start getting documentary style stuff and old shows you can get over 100 pretty easily.

He's talking about 100 Episodes per season. Not 100 TV Shows.

I am at 338 TV Shows and 11000+ episodes

Only TV Shows i have that have 100+ episodes per season are Animes and some sketch shows like Kaamelott

-Pr.

Ah ok, all cool then.

Thanks.

billyad2000 wrote:

Episodes and seasons will be added in numerical order only as long as they are not >99. The only way to stop this would be to use 001, 002, etc instead of 01, 02 which I don't want to do, cant be many shows with >99 seasons or >99 episodes in a season.

What about things like the colbert report and the daily show?

>99 episodes in a season will work fine, its just that they wont be sorted properly,

In order to sort the list 01,02,03,04 is used for seasons, then episodes. Season 100 will be listed after season 10. To avoid this I would have to use 3 digits, naming them Season 001, season 002, season 003, then this limit could be increased to 999, but I think 2 digits looks a lot better on the season and episode listings, and as I said, there cant be many shows that have more than 99 episodes in a season, or have run for more than 99 years.

In theory, the amount of TV shows and episodes that can be added is infinite, limited only by memory. gen2 uses a list of TV objects that can be added until your RAM just cant hold them all, and with the amount of RAM modern PCs use, this will not be an issue, believe me.

Looks good Billy, I don't have any immediate suggestions, but would it be possible at some later stage to have the option of either showing the number of missing episodes per season or TV show such as say (12/24) indicating 12 of 24 episodes are present or even better... perhaps listing them in the tree but greyed out?


Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

Looks good Billy, I don't have any immediate suggestions, but would it be possible at some later stage to have the option of either showing the number of missing episodes per season or TV show such as say (12/24) indicating 12 of 24 episodes are present or even better... perhaps listing them in the tree but greyed out?


Cheers

Its something I considered but I am not sure how I would achieve it.

I could certainly add missing episodes for seasons that people have, for example, you are missing episode 5 of season 3, of a show, this would be fairly obvious, the problem is how to know how many seasons and episodes a particular show has, or how many episodes in that given season, this gets more tricky if you consider that many shows are ongoing. It would mean searching TVDB for the season and episode count of every show, I'm not sure TVDB even has that information, so I would have to literally count up through each season and episode, checking if they exist or not.

Just read your post re sorting & I'm not sure if it is possible but....

Is it possible to have a hidden column to sort by?

So column 1, the hidden one, would be the raw episode/series number e.g. 7,17,88,109

Column 2 would be the formated text version e.g. 07,17,88,109 (showing usually 2 digits unless over 99 perhaps) + our series or episode title

We sort by column 1, but display only the contents of column 2

Possible?


RE the missing episodes, if TVDB don't provide the information easily it would be slow to test for additional episodes on each TV Show update, but perhaps if you could choose manually to "investigate for more episodes", MC could look for the next episode in each series it has already & also for a next series - perhaps maybe 10 tests if the series is already populated, but I guess maybe 250 plus if a series is virtually empty.

Pity TVDB doesn't supply a whole series info xml - that would be too easy I guess!


Cheers

StormyKnight wrote:

RE the missing episodes, if TVDB don't provide the information easily it would be slow to test for additional episodes on each TV Show update, but perhaps if you could choose manually to "investigate for more episodes", MC could look for the next episode in each series it has already & also for a next series - perhaps maybe 10 tests if the series is already populated, but I guess maybe 250 plus if a series is virtually empty.

I'd be happy if it at least looked for "holes", that is look at the highest numbered episode and look for missing ones up to that, no web traffic required for that.

Thanks,
Dennis

billyad2000 wrote:

StormyKnight wrote:

Looks good Billy, I don't have any immediate suggestions, but would it be possible at some later stage to have the option of either showing the number of missing episodes per season or TV show such as say (12/24) indicating 12 of 24 episodes are present or even better... perhaps listing them in the tree but greyed out?


Cheers

Its something I considered but I am not sure how I would achieve it.

I could certainly add missing episodes for seasons that people have, for example, you are missing episode 5 of season 3, of a show, this would be fairly obvious, the problem is how to know how many seasons and episodes a particular show has, or how many episodes in that given season, this gets more tricky if you consider that many shows are ongoing. It would mean searching TVDB for the season and episode count of every show, I'm not sure TVDB even has that information, so I would have to literally count up through each season and episode, checking if they exist or not.

I don't know if you saw my message before but TVRename has this functionality. I know it uses TheTVDB but it may also get other
information from elsewhere. It even know what shows are upcoming.

You can get it at http://www.tvrename.com

Pr.Sinister wrote:

Hi,

My biggest pet peeve about the TV Shows section was when i wanted to add a bunch of new TV Shows to a folder that already
had a bunch of shows there. The problem was that you needed to remember what shows were new, go to one show from the
drop-down and MC would tell you this show has no NFO and then you could scrape it manually.

It would be great if you could just highlight or make bold the name of shows in the treeview that don't have a tvshow.nfo or
an invalid one. It would alleviate so much trouble to going back to the folder list and see which ones were added last, etc...

Quick suggestion about the treeview... could you make it display

1x01 - Pilot

or even

01 - Pilot

instead of

01 Pilot

I think it looks cleaner that way.

Thanks for all your efforts!

Thanks for your suggestions,

episodes are now listed as
01 - Pilot

TV shows without an nfo file will be highlighted with a Bold Red font in the treeview, episodes without an nfo file will not be listed since as long as a valid tvshow.nfo file exists, it will be possible to automatically add missing episode nfos with the scraper.

nfo files with an xml error will be added, but will be highlighted with a Bold Red font.

In addition to this I have added several options to a context menu on the treeview,
Open File - opens nfo file in notepad for direct editing, this can be used to fix xml errors.
Expand All - expands all shows and episodes
Collapse All - collapses everything back to the TV Show
Expand selected show -
Collapse selected show - these expand the currently selected show even if you are viewing an episode
Reload Item - This can be used to reload the nfo file.

If you have repaired a faulty xml file then the nfo can be reloaded by either selecting another item and then the faulty one again, or you can use the context menu. If a faulty file has been fixed then the nfo will be loaded, and the font changed back to normal for the item.

God I hope this comes out quick.

Killing me having to use boring old list view for TV shows on XBMC!

I have still been using old 2.92 for TV's only... (but still want the new toys)

i can't wait for this either.

Yeah i was going to do that for TV, but nothing below 3.094 has worked on my server.

2.35 works fine but can't scrape and everything until 3.094 crashes on startup.

Anyway hopefully this will be out soon and I can get to work on fixing up my TV section. I have a few series that are out of whack.

esra wrote:

Yeah i was going to do that for TV, but nothing below 3.094 has worked on my server.

2.35 works fine but can't scrape and everything until 3.094 crashes on startup.

Anyway hopefully this will be out soon and I can get to work on fixing up my TV section. I have a few series that are out of whack.

2.92 works well for me. I use it as a stand alone with the Setting folder inside to root. Has a few glitches but 99% of my scrapes still work.

Wizerd wrote:

esra wrote:

Yeah i was going to do that for TV, but nothing below 3.094 has worked on my server.

2.35 works fine but can't scrape and everything until 3.094 crashes on startup.

Anyway hopefully this will be out soon and I can get to work on fixing up my TV section. I have a few series that are out of whack.

2.92 works well for me. I use it as a stand alone with the Setting folder inside to root. Has a few glitches but 99% of my scrapes still work.

Have you tried setting up a 2nd copy of MC (and tv/movie folder) just for scrapping? Less things (no existing tv/movies) to cause a failure.

Bye,
Dennis

StormyKnight wrote:

Looks good Billy, I don't have any immediate suggestions, but would it be possible at some later stage to have the option of either showing the number of missing episodes per season or TV show such as say (12/24) indicating 12 of 24 episodes are present or even better... perhaps listing them in the tree but greyed out?


Cheers

Figured out how this could be done, the xml nfo for a tv show can be downloaded completely in a zip file, this could be used to check for missing episodes, although I would have to start including an command line unzip utility with MC, not that that is a problem.

Thats something for the future anyway, bit busy with other things at the moment.