Best Practices for Sage Video Library?

[reggie14]

So, my Sage box has always been a constant work-in-progress. But, now that I have a system with plenty of hard drive space, QAM and firewire recording working, and extenders for playback devices I'm looking for more stuff to do.

My imported video library has gotten pretty big, and I've never really put any effort into organizing it. I have lots of ripped DVDs, and TV shows. I'm keeping the movies in their native folder structure, but I'm encoding TV episodes in Handbrake. So, I have lots of files and I've decided organizing them is going to be my next project. A while back Brent put together a how-to guide on setting up the video library, but a lot has changed since then. evilpenguin came out with his mediaScraper tool, and SageMC now supports fanart. There doesn't seem to be a good, comprehensive source of information on how one would organize and tag his video library in a way that lets the SageMC and the stock UI access the metadata as well as letting SageMC fanart work.

I know I would really appreciate it if someone could come up with another how-to guide similar to what Brent did a while back. And I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one that would make use of it.

[PLUCKYHD]

read the bmi thread for how best to do it and still get metadata and fanart support

Also try my movie wall

[reggie14]

Are you talking about the Batch Metadata Importer thread? So, what's the difference between the BMT and evilpenguin's scraper? Is one better for some circumstances than others? Do they play together nicely, or do you basically have to choose one? The BMT apparently can get data from DVD Profiler. I don't have that now, but I'm willing to get it. Would that simplify my life versus just using imdb, tvdb, etc.?

Also, I see there's a massive fanart pack available for download. Is there some advantage to using that, or is that kind of pointless if you use BMT or evilpenguin's scraper?

I have to admit, I'm a little overwhelmed by this. There's lots of different customizations, some that seem to overlap, and most of threads with several pages of posts. I managed to get firewire recording working, arguably one of the most complicated enhancements, but there was a nice, step-by-step guide for how to do that. It doesn't seem like there's one here, but maybe that's just because it's not as complicated as it seems like it is. Is there anything I need to know before I jump in to this (short of reading 42 pages of posts in the BMI thread)?

[stuckless]

Reggie, maybe I can help shed some light on things....

Fanart Pack....
This is simply fanart for for approx 1200 movies/tv. No metadata (ie descriptions, actors, etc), just images. This is great if you already have a metadata provider and all you need are images. The downside, is that you'll be getting some images for movies/shows that you don't have... or you won't be getting some images for movies/shows that you do have...... but the upside, is that the author has hand picked some very good hi-res artwork.

MediaScraper (EP)
MediaScraper is a command line tool that will fetch metadata and fanart from tvdb, imdb, and themoviedb.org. The emphasis was originally on TV, but it does do movies as well. MediaScraper will also import non sage tv recordings into the sage tv recordings area.

Batch Metadata Tools (bmt)
Since I wrote this, I know alot about it. It will get metadata/fanart fanart from tvdb, imdb, themoviedb, dvdprofiler and mymovies. Using dvdprofiler and mymovies requires some configuration. It runs as a command line tool, and as such it will prompt you for matches that it cannot automatically choose. It can run as a STV plugin and download metadata/fanart for epg items, sage recordings, and media items. It can also run as an automatic plugin, so that as new media is added to your collection, it will automatically find and download metadata and fanart. As a result, bmt can run in a very simple command mode, like mediaScraper, or it can get more involved as you try to setup automatic metadata downloading, etc. If you install bmt as a STV plugin, then that will give "on-demand" lookups, but if you want to scan your entire collection, then you'll need to use the automated plugin or command line.

This is by means a comprehensive comparison, but maybe it can give you some ideas.