Automated Updater

Heya,
After seeing how good the latest incarnation of MediaCompanion is, just thought i'd make the suggestion (not sure if its been suggested before).

I love media companion, its fantastic, however what i hate doing is going to it to scan for new tv shows. Would it be possible to add a feature that simply scans the tv show directories for new tv shows periodically? That way you could leave it running in the background and new shows would automatically get scraped. You potentially could also do this for renaming (I noticed that you have a renaming format that appears in properties - this will be great once its up and running ).

What i'm looking for, is as close to a fully automated system as possible running XBMC in the foreground, without the need to go back to the library program (yes i'm aware that XBMC will autoscrap new episodes that don't have a .nfo, but i'd rather media companion rename the file and scrap the info.)

Take Care,
Haydon

I often think of doing something like this (even manually with a macro) but then i worry that it won't be how i want it.

I like to scan once a day, review what's been added and then start up XBMC and it auto updates the library.

Means what gets added has been 'vetted' by me first.

I agree though this would be useful in the TV section as there is not a lot of changes being done there normally. Mainly Movies where you might like to review.

esra wrote:

I often think of doing something like this (even manually with a macro) but then i worry that it won't be how i want it.

I like to scan once a day, review what's been added and then start up XBMC and it auto updates the library.

Means what gets added has been 'vetted' by me first.

I agree though this would be useful in the TV section as there is not a lot of changes being done there normally. Mainly Movies where you might like to review.

I take your points but I do update tv shows regularly. I wrote a java program that moves files from my "drop box" / downloads directory to the correct tv show directory (including which season it is) for the shows I watch, and that works fine - sometimes there is a bit of updating that is required on the patterns to determine which tv show it is, but never on the season / episode number. it works by using two XML files - one that contains the settings (including the base path that stores my tv shows), and one to work out what file is what show and what directory name is what show. If people are interested in this i'll clean up my code and post it.


There isn't much to go wrong, as its not really a full scan, more a topup scan. You would already have the theTVDB show ID in the nfo file of the tv show, the show in the correct season folder, so that could also be used, as long as the regular expression to extract the episode number worked (and maybe a bit of logic to double check the filename is for that show), there really shouldn't be much to worry about. Obviously it would skip anything that it couldn't 100% work out (ie there is no tv show .nfo and or the filename is confusing then it could leave that episode alone.)

You can get MC to automatically scan for movies using the following commandline...

Quote billyad2000 from https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/feature-requests-f4/command-line-options-t106.htm?highlight=command wrote:

Basic command line option "sq" has been added to version 3.031 - see announcements.

"\media companion.exe sq"

will start media companion minimized, scan for new movies, then exit.

However to my knowledge, TV shows are not supported yet. I'm not sure why current TV shows can't be automatically checked for new episodes, it would be the same as hitting the "Search For New Episode" button. Obviously, completely new shows cannot be added in this way which I think would be fine for most people...


bigh,

Odd that you mention your application, when today I had one of my fellow workers say this is exactly his current problem.

He uses RSS to automatically download his content, but has to manually file it in the correct folder. His other issue is some content comes as compressed files so they would have to be uncompressed before filing.

Can you create a new post in the general discussion section with a relavent title some information & scripts etc?

Cheers

Ok made a new thread - and popped it up on my host

Please contribute and comment -

Linkies

NB I give no warranties that this will work for anyone!