What's next

Hi everyone, hope you all had a nice christmas, and new year, only 350 days to go until the next one

My wife surpassed herself this year, santa has brought me a shiny new Asrock Ion 330, although I suspect Mrs Santa was also getting tired of the limitations of the XBox.

Setting this up led me to a numer of conclusions,

1. Linux sux. Maybe windows has made me lazy, but for some reason linux seemed to have more in common with Windows 95 than than Windows 7. I am still using it for XBMC, but only for the reduced boot time. In addition to this, linux is incapable of playing Blu-Ray disks, I know that this is the not the fault of Linux, but it may ultimately force me back to Windows. Even though I can rip my blu-ray disks there are still occasions, such as when I borrow or rent a disk when I want to watch it without that need.
   
2. I finally got round to setting up my tv shows on XBMC and tbh Media Companion is seriously lacking here, I have not really used the XBMC library for TV Shows before and I found the whole process to be a pain.
   
3. The Asrock ION rox, it took some time to get everything working, mostly due to problems relating to linux drivers, but this device is awsome, It handles HD playback perfectly, and using the transparency skin the library looks fantastic.
   

The result of this is that I have decided to prioritise the TV Show handling of MC, over the next month or so adding the following features.

• A thread that will attempt to auto scrape tv shows, in the past I have not added this due to the high risk of error, and the potential downloading of 100s of incorrect episodes. To avoid this I will add an unconfirmed option to the locked option. It can be easily switched from this to unlocked. Perhaps a dialogue asking for confirmation before scraping episodes.
  
• The ability to download missing posters and screenshots, I found this to be the biggest pain. In addition I think adding a dialogue to the screenshot would be helpful, eg Rescrape screenshot etc.
  
• A filter function similar to movies that allows people to list episodes with missing art etc.
  

In addition to this I will be working on the following, most likely in this order:

• I will be finally reworking the preferences, i'm not looking forward to this, but I need to bite the bullet, you may find that in coming builds the preferences may be a little inconsistent as I gradually move appropriate settings into their new homes. The idea is that none of the new preferences will need a new window, but will be listed inside the tab. The current tab will be the main program preferences. The TV Show and Movie inner tab controls will each have their own preferences tab, relating to section it is located within. This may take a bit of time to get right, so please be patient.
  
• I want to create a basic startup wizard, that will assist new users in setting the correct preferences.
  
• An internal help system needs to be created, perhaps using F1 or similar, especially with regard to the preferences which can be extremely confusing.
  

Over the next few days, I will also be working through the bug reports added over the last couple of weeks, many of which I will be addressing as a priority.

Billy

Personally I think you're being too hard on yourself. I find MC to still be the best TV show scraper out there and I seldom have any problems. Having said that (Curb anyone?), I would love to see all of the proposed additions that you just mentioned. Congrats on the new HD/XBMC setup. Sounds like the ideal setup I read about so much on the XBMC forums. I hope you have a nice remote to control your newfound glory with

Don't get me wrong, as a TV scraper, MC works ok, but after I had scraped the nfo's into XBMC, I realised that a lot of stuff was missing such as screenshots, series posters and in particular the season-all posters, which I had not needed with PM3. These had to be downloaded one by one, switching back and forward between tabs, looking for episodes that were missing screenshots etc. Was most certainly a pain. I suppose that in the longrun, most of my shows are complete, and now that I am happy with them, I will not need to touch them again, but the process of getting their could have been a lot smoother.

I have an old harmony 688 I bought on ebay for over a year now, it works great, although setting up the built in Asrock IR receiver for linux was a bit of a pain. It's something I would like to replace with one of the newer models, mine is that used that the ink on the keys is rubbing off .

I have to agree that I also find

Quote :

Media Companion to still be the best TV show scraper out there and I seldom have any problems

My self personally I would still like to see auto rename on search for new episodes option

tmp wrote:

I have to agree that I also find

Quote :

Media Companion to still be the best TV show scraper out there and I seldom have any problems

My self personally I would still like to see auto rename on seach for new episodes option

I can add that, I just worry a little about folks who have not used correct naming conventions suddenly having entire shows renamed incorrectly. In addition to this the sortorder can confuse things further.

billyad2000 wrote:

tmp wrote:

I have to agree that I also find

Quote :

Media Companion to still be the best TV show scraper out there and I seldom have any problems

My self personally I would still like to see auto rename on seach for new episodes option

I can add that, I just worry a little about folks who have not used correct naming conventions suddenly having entire shows renamed incorrectly. In addition to this the sortorder can confuse things further.

I fit in that category / kept shows names that was ok by XBMC standard names and changed the shows that does not.

But you could add it like an option and if like me was about to reinstall XBMC i could fix the shows before adding them to the XBMC library again.

billyad2000 wrote:

tmp wrote:

I have to agree that I also find

Quote :

Media Companion to still be the best TV show scraper out there and I seldom have any problems

My self personally I would still like to see auto rename on search for new episodes option

I can add that, I just worry a little about folks who have not used correct naming conventions suddenly having entire shows renamed incorrectly. In addition to this the sortorder can confuse things further.

Thats true ....


I changed my naming convention when I switched from the XBOX to Linux

billyad2000 wrote:

Don't get me wrong, as a TV scraper, MC works ok, but after I had scraped the nfo's into XBMC, I realised that a lot of stuff was missing such as screenshots, series posters and in particular the season-all posters, which I had not needed with PM3. These had to be downloaded one by one, switching back and forward between tabs, looking for episodes that were missing screenshots etc. Was most certainly a pain. I suppose that in the longrun, most of my shows are complete, and now that I am happy with them, I will not need to touch them again, but the process of getting their could have been a lot smoother.
[...]

I have no idea what you are talking about!
Seriously, all of those thing are downloaded automatically for me! Except maybe the season-all, I'm not sure about that one...
What I do miss in Gen2, and was available in Gen1, is an option to scan for missing thumbs. Would be great to have that again

billyad2000 wrote:

I can add that, I just worry a little about folks who have not used correct naming conventions suddenly having entire shows renamed incorrectly. In addition to this the sortorder can confuse things further.

Yes Billy I can see that as a problem...

I see two ways of implementing this......

1. An advanced setting in the preferences with the associated warning messages...

OR

2. Some sort of preview of what is going to be done so people can make an informed choice before hitting "go!".

Cheers

i couldn't be happier than i am now i remember struggling back 4 or 5 years ago. this is great

Music would be great
my music is a mess. if organize is going to part of this have option to leave original format in tact and create new

some features maybe not so mainstream:
1 a client version to allow other computers to use database over network with limited abilites (readonly)
or portable version to go on thumb drive for ofline veiwing.

2 basic file handling from filters ie filter horror and select move/copy/del to x directory. (move movie/avi/nfo)

3 Google image scrapper. not so much for movies but misc videos and home videos.

4 Print a catalogue ie basic version is print wall on page. better version 2 or 4 videos per pg w discription.

keep up the great work
hanson

hanson wrote:

4 Print a catalogue ie basic version is print wall on page. better version 2 or 4 videos per pg w discription.

You can do something like this at the moment using the HTML output......

Have a look a this post.....

https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/html-templates-f9/movie-card-easy-print-v11-t848.htm

Cheers

I thought I'd let you know about some features I have been looking for in one or more apps over the last few years:

1. Monitor a directory for new downloads
2. Then rename and move TV shows to their proper directories
3. Scape shows for their nfo, artwork, tbn
4. All done in the background through command line and services

This has been an imposable thing to find. I use tvrename for most of my TV show stuff and media companion for my movies as well as getting the folder art for my tv shows. For a short period of time I had this working using utorrent rss feeds, watchdirectory to monitor folders and it would run tvrename by command line and then autoit scripts for media companion. Now tvrename has no command line function and my trial of watchdirectory expired. Watchdirectory is way to expensive and robust for what I need but it worked great. For me the final goal is to get this process fully automated. Mistakes in the scraping here and there are fine with me and I can edit them if I feel the need but managing large amounts of library data for movies and especially TV shows can take too much time.

HTPC Specs:
AMD Phenom 8750 Toliman 2.4GHz 3 core 95w
GeminII 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler
Onboard ATI Radeon HD3200
MSI Media Live Diva 5.1 plus the preamp soundcard MS-7411 Motherboard
4 x 1 terabyte sata segate 7200.12 hard drives
Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS
SILVERSTONE Media Center / HTPC Case
1080p 42" Dynex LCD
5.1 Polk Audio Surround Sound

billyad2000 wrote:

Don't get me wrong, as a TV scraper, MC works ok, but after I had scraped the nfo's into XBMC, I realised that a lot of stuff was missing such as screenshots, series posters and in particular the season-all posters, which I had not needed with PM3. These had to be downloaded one by one, switching back and forward between tabs, looking for episodes that were missing screenshots etc. Was most certainly a pain. I suppose that in the longrun, most of my shows are complete, and now that I am happy with them, I will not need to touch them again, but the process of getting their could have been a lot smoother.

Hehehe... I don't want to be an ass here but when i mentioned this in the features request, you dismissed it and told me to do what
you just did.... . And btw you will need to touch them again once a new season starts for any TV show (at least with the way MC
is right now)

Before you start implementing anything, may i suggest you take a look at TV Rename (http://www.tvrename.com)

It has a lot of the features people are requesting but unfortunately the latest alpha version is buggy and hasn't been updated in ages.

If you download the latest non-alpha version and try it, i am sure you will get inspiration on how to incorporate some of the features
in MC and even find better ways of doing what the program does.

IMHO, I think MC is pretty much perfect in the Movies department so i am extremely ecstatic you have decided to improve the TV side.

Keep up the great work!

Flook wrote:

I thought I'd let you know about some features I have been looking for in one or more apps over the last few years:

1. Monitor a directory for new downloads
2. Then rename and move TV shows to their proper directories
3. Scape shows for their nfo, artwork, tbn
4. All done in the background through command line and services

This has been an imposable thing to find. I use tvrename for most of my TV show stuff and media companion for my movies as well as getting the folder art for my tv shows. For a short period of time I had this working using utorrent rss feeds, watchdirectory to monitor folders and it would run tvrename by command line and then autoit scripts for media companion. Now tvrename has no command line function and my trial of watchdirectory expired. Watchdirectory is way to expensive and robust for what I need but it worked great. For me the final goal is to get this process fully automated. Mistakes in the scraping here and there are fine with me and I can edit them if I feel the need but managing large amounts of library data for movies and especially TV shows can take too much time.

Don't use the latest version of TVRename and you will get the command-line options back.

Also, DirMon is free and does what Watchdirectory does IIRC.

-Pr.

Quote :

Don't use the latest version of TVRename and you will get the command-line options back.

Also, DirMon is free and does what Watchdirectory does IIRC.

-Pr.

Hey thanks Pr but I've tried Dirmon a few times over the years and have never had it working right for my needs. I can't use the command line abilities of dirmon with tvrename. Dirmon command line seems to only be for ShowAnalyzer because it inserts files names and directories into the command line on its own based on knowing ShowAnalyzer will use it. I might just not know how to use it but there is no real documentation for it that helps at all. There is one super old thread on the forum that tells a little bit but it's pretty bad. Watchdirectory command lines worked perfect. I'll have to look at going back to an old tvrename but I didn't think they would function properly due to changes in tvdb or something like that.