How do you automatically move Movie recordings to your My Videos area?

[gveres]

I try to keep My TV for TV shows and My Videos for movies. So when I record a movie off one of the movie channels, I compress it, rename it by stripping off the showID and move it to one of the appropriate My Videos folder. I have different folders for each of the people in the house:

Sandra
Greg
Movies
Kids Movies

I do all this manually using Handbrake on my Mac Pro or MediaScraper on the sage server (PC).

I have SJQ running well and it does a great job processing my TV shows. Since I upgraded the sage server to a quad core, I would like to get the movie processing to happen on the sage server and done using Mediascaper and SJQ.

Does anybody keep their recordings organized this way? If so, how do you do the conversion and move to MY Videos?

I know that SJQ can look at all kinds of properties of the recording. I was kind of hoping that I would be able to set some property in SageMC and trigger the compression/ move off of the presence of that property.

Any ideas? I was thinking I could maybe use the Archive flag. I have no idea what the real purpose of that flag is but I never use it so I figure it's probably fair game.

The other idea I had is that there is a Sent To menu item for each recording, it would be great if i could some how create a send to item for each of video folders I mentioned above. That would be the most intuitive option.

Thanks
Greg

[wrems]

Sounds like a lot of work. Why are you doing this? What do you do about shows that you and Sandra both like? Are you placing copies in each folder?

I could see an occasional show or movie being offloaded, transcoded and archived for later retrieval, but every show….

[gveres]

It's not really that much work - I only do this for Movies, TV shows are left in My TV.

I do this because between the Adult TV shows and the Kid's TV shows, there are about 50 TV series in My TV. I also have about 50 Movies in our common movie directory, and probably another 75 in the Kids Movies directory. Having all of these movies in the My TV view just pollutes it and makes it much harder to find out that there is a new episode of Heroes to watch for instance.

So I keep the Movies that I record off the Movie channels in the My Videos directories. I then put some organization into My Movies with different directories so that it is easier to find the right movie among the couple hundred movie files.

If I had an easy mechanism to tag a recorded movie while it was in the My TV space to say "compress and move this to Greg's folder in My TV", the maintenance of this would be down right trivial.

I can't believe that i am alone in wanting this type of organization to our recordings or that I record more than others. I do this with a single tuner and I know others have many many tuners. I just don't like having Movies in the My TV view.

Thanks,
Greg

[gveres]

Originally Posted by wrems

I could see an occasional show or movie being offloaded, transcoded and archived for later retrieval, but every show….

When I re-read your message I realized I don't understand what you mean by this statement. What do you mean by "offloaded, transcoded and archived for later retrieval"?

Out of all the verbs you used, I understand transcoded. but I don't understand what you mean by offloaded or archived and later retrieval. I must admit I have no idea what the archive flag does other than seems to lock the file against the auto-deletion algorithm, but I have read posts that seem to indicate that archival is some feature for sending a file to some other storage somewhere.

Greg

[Fuzzy]

Have you tried the Malore menus? They automatically group movies into their own category, so they don't clutter up the tv view.

[wrems]

I thought you were doing this process for all recordings, now I understand that you are selectively processing certain files that you wish to archive long term (archive – not in the SageTV sense). I used the term offload because I figured that since you were transcoding the files you were also offloading the files to a NAS or different drive than your active recording drive and thus keeping them archived for later retrieval.

[gveres]

Originally Posted by wrems

I thought you were doing this process for all recordings, now I understand that you are selectively processing certain files that you wish to archive long term (archive – not in the SageTV sense). I used the term offload because I figured that since you were transcoding the files you were also offloading the files to a NAS or different drive than your active recording drive and thus keeping them archived for later retrieval.

I am moving them over to another drive in the server, but really I think of it as moving it out of My TV and into My Videos so that when my wife and I are in the mood to watch a movie instead of a TV program, we go look at the movies we have recorded and delete it when we are done (we don't like watching movies multiple times so we don't keep them around).

Now the Kid's movies are different since they want to watch them hundreds of times.

If I want to add something to the Send To menu, I assume i have to write an STVi and use Studio? I can write the script that does all the background work of doing the transcoding and moving the movie, I just need a nice convenient way to kick off the script from within SageMC.

Greg

[gveres]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Have you tried the Malore menus? They automatically group movies into their own category, so they don't clutter up the tv view.

Yea I did a couple years ago, but I really hate the standard STV and I didn't think the Malore menus was the way I wanted to use the UI. I think I really should take a look at TV Explorer. I have been holding off because I don't like the Malore style of display and TVE seems to bring that to SageMC.

Greg

[Fuzzy]

TV explorer is very much like the Malore menmues, but lacks a lot of the customization. What it does to is add fanart. There is also a Malore port to SageMC, though it's a much older version thatn what is currently available, and also lacks a lot of the custom filters.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

TV explorer is very much like the Malore menmues, but lacks a lot of the customization....

some of the customization is coming... i know i keep saying that but life keeps getting in the way of my sage tinkering... its getting closer everyday. The next release of TVE will include movie grouping. It won't include the advance view customization / searching / filtering (that you really want) but that code is also getting closer too... most of the backend work on that is done but the stv code hasnt been started yet...

What it does to is add fanart.

the other big thing it brings to the table is grouping recorded and imported TV into a single interface.

There is also a Malore port to SageMC, though it's a much older version thatn what is currently available, and also lacks a lot of the custom filters.

I am pretty sure (actually 100% if i understand the code correctly) that the malore menus in SageMC call the Default STV Malore menus. So the malore menus in SageMC are the same as in the default STV.

[Fuzzy]

Last time i had used them, the sagemc malore menus did NOT have much of the default's features. And even the styling was a bit different. They don't seem to call back to the default stv.

[bits]

Originally Posted by gveres

I try to keep My TV for TV shows and My Videos for movies. So when I record a movie off one of the movie channels, I compress it, rename it by stripping off the showID and move it to one of the appropriate My Videos folder. I have different folders for each of the people in the house:

Sandra
Greg
Movies
Kids Movies

I do all this manually using Handbrake on my Mac Pro or MediaScraper on the sage server (PC).

I have SJQ running well and it does a great job processing my TV shows. Since I upgraded the sage server to a quad core, I would like to get the movie processing to happen on the sage server and done using Mediascaper and SJQ.

Does anybody keep their recordings organized this way? If so, how do you do the conversion and move to MY Videos?

I know that SJQ can look at all kinds of properties of the recording. I was kind of hoping that I would be able to set some property in SageMC and trigger the compression/ move off of the presence of that property.

Any ideas? I was thinking I could maybe use the Archive flag. I have no idea what the real purpose of that flag is but I never use it so I figure it's probably fair game.

The other idea I had is that there is a Sent To menu item for each recording, it would be great if i could some how create a send to item for each of video folders I mentioned above. That would be the most intuitive option.

Thanks
Greg

I pretty much do what you are doing regarding recorded TV movies and have been for 6+ yrs. One difference in my setup is that I automatically do a comskip scan and generate a Vprj file for cutting out commercials. No sense in archiving anything with commercials in them. If I re-encode I use TMPGenc Movie Style to wmv. This app has a watch folder so when I output the commercial free video from VRD I put it into the watch folder and re-encoding begins. I use wmv because it is pretty much as good as h264 and it can be played by all of my network media players. My other network media players are old and can not do nearly as much as the HD200.

The actual number of movies I do per month is small so the process is not really a chore. I have only been using SageTV+HD200 for a few months. I was already using Dirmon2+comskip to automatically scan for commercials so this integrated very nicely into SageTV MC.

IMHO there are not enough TV movies that I want to record and keep because of the poor quality, wrong AR and changes made in order to insert commercials. Therefore I personally do not put any effort into an auto transfer.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Last time i had used them, the sagemc malore menus did NOT have much of the default's features. And even the styling was a bit different. They don't seem to call back to the default stv.

See the attached jpg of the code. Looks like it points back to and loads the default stv to me.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

See the attached jpg of the code. Looks like it points back to and loads the default stv to me.

Is that in the SageMC install now? I had not seen anything about a version that redirects to the default STV. What I have seen is BobPhoenix's version, which was basically a port of one of the original (V5 I think) Malore imports.

(Admittidly, I don't use SageMC in practice, so haven't played around in there much for a couple years now)

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Is that in the SageMC install now?

ya that screencap was from SageMC 6.3.9a_45 without any imports. I'm not sure how long it's been in there but my guess it has been there since SageTV released 6.4. In 6.4 they (sage) added support for calling/loading a different STV on the fly.