New arbitrary metadata discussion

[aflat]

Originally Posted by stanger89

It's kind of a shame (since it so close to what Sage already has) but I'd really like to see a Actor/Role saved. Maybe an array each of actors, and the role they play, eg:

Actors = [ "Shatner, William", "Nemoy, Leonard"...]
Roles = [ "Captain James Kirk", "Spock"...]

I've always found Sage's current "PeopleList"s rather limiting in their usefullness. One feature I always wanted to see was a way to lookup other movies an actor was in.

It might be better to have 1 line

Actors = ["Shatner, William":"Captain James Kirk";"Captain James Kirk's brother", "Nemoy, Leonard":"Spock";"Evil Spock"...]

That way you don't have to maintain 2 1:1 arrays.

[stuckless]

How about this....
We reuse the existing Sage property Actors, but we Store the values as

Actors=William Shatner -- Captain James Kirk;Leonard Nemoy -- Spock

basically the -- acts as a role separtor, if it exists. This isn't 100% perfect but it has the side effect of being usable by the default stv as well.

I don't know if storing the actor and role in sage's single field will also allow you to use the people searching for roles as well. ie, if you search for "kirk", will it find "William Shatner -- Captain James Kirk", or does the search have to be an exact match?

[stanger89]

Doesn't that make it hard(er) for an STV to search for the same actor in other mediafiles? Your second point is what I'm thinking. At the very least the STV (or something) would have to parse out the actor's name and search just on that. Where as if the name and role are stored separately the STV can just search on the name.

Of course all that said, you do bring up a good point, we really don't need two new properties, just one for the role, so you'd have:
PeopleList - Stock property containing actor names
RolesForPeopleList - Stock property containing the type of role (never understood this).
CharactersForPeopleList - Custom property containing the character the actor played

And no the custom property wouldn't be displayed in the stock STV, but it's not now, and isn't of great utility in that STV anyway.

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by stuckless

How about this for a compromise... since I really don't want to make "key" names used as display labels.

Currently, I'm storing a list of Sage Properties and Extended Properties, so I can easily add some additional fanart/metadata apis that will return the array of extra metadata fields, and allow you to call GetMetadataLabel(key) and GetMetadataDescription(key) for each key. For now, the labels and descriptions are not localized, but that is certainly something that we can add later, and it will be transparent to the stv, since it will get encapsulated within the GetMetadataLabel(key) api call.

Ok, but a couple of questions.
How does the list of labels get updated for a new key?
What does GetMetadataDescription(key) return?
Will your list of Sage Properties and Extended Properties get updated if I and an Extended Properties key via an STV?

I support stanger89's CharactersForPeopleList suggestion.

On a more generic level, I must say, I'm going crazy switching between this thread and the FanArt thread as there's quite a bit of overlap. And I still don't understand why they're in the SageMC forum (I only stumbled across them on a slow day), so just another gentle reminder that SageMC does not have exclusive use of metadata or FanArt.

John

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Of course all that said, you do bring up a good point, we really don't need two new properties, just one for the role, so you'd have:
PeopleList - Stock property containing actor names
RolesForPeopleList - Stock property containing the type of role (never understood this).
CharactersForPeopleList - Custom property containing the character the actor played

And no the custom property wouldn't be displayed in the stock STV, but it's not now, and isn't of great utility in that STV anyway.

I'm fine with just having the STV's assume a 1:1 mapping between the the existing Actor= and a new custom property ActorRoles=. It'll work 95% of the time and its one less complication for STV devs to worry about.

Actor[0] -> ActorRoles[0]

I'll go ahead and add it to the list and my scraper.

[evilpenguin]

Does Sage use Rated= for its parental controls? If so we probably shouldn't change it to ContentRating= even though I think its a better name.

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Does Sage use Rated= for its parental controls? If so we probably shouldn't change it to ContentRating= even though I think its a better name.

Yes, it uses both Rated and ExpandedRatings for Parental Controls.

John

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I'm fine with just having the STV's assume a 1:1 mapping between the the existing Actor= and a new custom property ActorRoles=. It'll work 95% of the time and its one less complication for STV devs to worry about.

We're kind of stuck there anyway with PeopleList and RolesForPeopleList today anyway. you could always do creative things like add the actor twice if they're in two roles, or put the two characters in one slot eg "Bob and Jim".

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

Yes, it uses both Rated and ExpandedRatings for Parental Controls.

John

OK, then lets leave that alone.

[evilpenguin]

FYI, I updated the 2nd post with example property files.

[stanger89]

It occured to me last night that an "IsTrailer" flag might be handy, not sure how we'd set it though.

[Ikarius]

So, having the "Episode Title" field, what should we store in the basic Sage Title field? The show title + the episode title? If it actually makes sense to put the full episode title in the basic title, I'm not sure if we ought to bother with having a separate epsisode title....

[stanger89]

Sage already has an Episode field in the database by default, that's where it stores the episode title.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Sage already has an Episode field in the database by default, that's where it stores the episode title.

yeah, but I think it's impossible to change it from outside of the api.

[JREkiwi]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Sage already has an Episode field in the database by default, that's where it stores the episode title.

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

yeah, but I think it's impossible to change it from outside of the api.

If you are wanting to maintain a consitantly available metadata irrespective of whether you are dealing with recording or an imported video, then you need separate MediaTitle and EpisodeTitle.

The database Title and Episode fields have different contents depending on whether it relates to a recording or a video.

John

[stuckless]

Some problems with our metadata approach...

1. Sage is only setting the new metadata fields when a new media file is imported/re-imported. Once the file has been imported, we can change it, but sage won't pick up the new values, at least not right away. (you may be able to touch the media file and then tell sage to rescan, but he effect won't be immediate)

2. Mike provided me a problem that he's having with multi-set dvds. It makes me think that we'll need a DiscNumber metadata field as well. For example if you have the "Planet Earth" series on dvd, then you'll have multiple disc, but you may not have fanart for the complete set. So, much like i've done with the Seasons, we probably need to do with Discs as well... ie, first look in
Planet Earth/Disc1/Backgrounds
and then
Planet Earth/Backgrounds/

The biggiest problem so far that I see with the fanart stuff, is that it relies on the movie title, which can't really be changed once the movie is imported. Which means that until everyone re-imports thier tv shows to populate the new MediaTitle and SeasonNumber fields, then season specific fanart will be broken.

We really need a way to be able to update the metadata elements AFTER a media item has been imported.

[evilpenguin]

Sage is still working on this

SetMediaFileMetadata(MediaFile mf, String name, String value)

Once they have it working we should be able to set these values though the API rather than .properties files.

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by stuckless

1. Sage is only setting the new metadata fields when a new media file is imported/re-imported.

Thought I'd add my 10 pence worth and say that it only works once, and thats when it gets imported. If you try and re-import it with updated metadata it doesn't get used unless you restart the whole service/system.

[stuckless]

If sage provides the new SetMediaFileMetadata() api call, then it should fix up all these little issues... but until that happens, i think that we should either work around it... or not release until the sage api call exists.

[jaminben]

It could also just be me not doing something right and it does acutally work ok. It maybe a good idea if someone else could verify that it doesn't update correctly on a re-import.