BMT Multiple Genres for the same movie??

[mkanet]

I'm not sure if there is an option for this or not. For the most part BMT is one of the few apps that run in the background that just work fine.

However, I'm having a problem with Movies being assigned multiple genre/categories. This just makes the list of genres/categories unnecessarily large; and, having to manually adjust metadata to be in just one category for the Genre view in my STV to be realistically manageable. Hopefully, there's just a setting somewhere to choose the most appropriate category with no sub-category under the BMT web interface. If there isn't, hopefully there's an easy way to add this feature to reduce the extensive list of duplicate categories for the same movies.

Thanks!
Michael

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I'm not sure if there is an option for this or not. For the most part BMT is one of the few apps that run in the background that just work fine.

However, I'm having a problem with Movies being assigned multiple genre/categories. This just makes the list of genres/categories unnecessarily large; and, having to manually adjust metadata to be in just one category for the Genre view in my STV to be realistically manageable. Hopefully, there's just a setting somewhere to choose the most appropriate category with no sub-category under the BMT web interface. If there isn't, hopefully there's an easy way to add this feature to reduce the extensive list of duplicate categories for the same movies.

Thanks!
Michael

I thought there was a setting for the max number of genres. If you search the web UI configuration for 'genre', then you might find the field that I'm thinking of. Of course this could have been a field from another version of bmt, but I have vague memories of implementing this.

[mkanet]

Hi Sean, I looked and looked and looked. I didnt see a genre section; or anything that looked like might be able to filter out anything except the primary category.

I did see a setting under the properties file called:
bmt/sageMetadata/genreLevels=1

but, not sure what that does or how to use it if it can do what I need it to.

Would you mind taking a quick look at BMT 4.6 to see if there is any clever way of filtering out genre examples such as action/adventure or comedy/romance, Sci-fi/drama? 99% of the time I just want it to be in the first genre given; and wondering if there's a clever way to filter out anything after the first genre shown. That would be such a life saver. I'm guessing I would be way out of line to ask for a small unofficial patch for BMT 4.6 to remove all the secondary genres given under metadata during a rescan and not include anything other than the primary genre until you might be able to expose it in the WebUI? PLEASE?

You wouldnt believe how much I tried to mess with existing options to se if maybe something might help. Hopefully, there's a univeral reset to default BMT 4.6 options in case I screwed up an option.

I would be entirely greatful for you; especially since BMT 4.6 is now so good, its considered a set-it-and-forget-it addon that just works.

Im so motivated for this feature request, Id be willing to make a modest donation to BMT development.

I couldn't find a shameless "I beg you icon" asking for patching this to work until 4.7

Sincerely,
Michael

Originally Posted by stuckless

I thought there was a setting for the max number of genres. If you search the web UI configuration for 'genre', then you might find the field that I'm thinking of. Of course this could have been a field from another version of bmt, but I have vague memories of implementing this.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Hi Sean, I looked and looked and looked. I didnt see a genre section; or anything that looked like might be able to filter out anything except the primary category.

I did see a setting under the properties file called:
bmt/sageMetadata/genreLevels=1

but, not sure what that does or how to use it if it can do what I need it to.

That is the old field... in the new 4.6 (Sage7) version, I allow for a 2 genre levels (hard coded) where the first genre goes in the category field and the second goes into the sub-category field.

I need to review that code again, so see if this is really happening or not.

Would you mind taking a quick look at BMT 4.6 to see if there is any clever way of filtering out genre examples such as action/adventure or comedy/romance, Sci-fi/drama? 99% of the time I just want it to be in the first genre given; and wondering if there's a clever way to filter out anything after the first genre shown. That would be such a life saver. I'm guessing I would be way out of line to ask for a small unofficial patch for BMT 4.6 to remove all the secondary genres given under metadata during a rescan and not include anything other than the primary genre until you might be able to expose it in the WebUI? PLEASE?

You wouldnt believe how much I tried to mess with existing options to se if maybe something might help. Hopefully, there's a univeral reset to default BMT 4.6 options in case I screwed up an option.

I would be entirely greatful for you; especially since BMT 4.6 is now so good, its considered a set-it-and-forget-it addon that just works.

Im so motivated for this feature request, Id be willing to make a modest donation to BMT development.

I couldn't find a shameless "I beg you icon" asking for patching this to work until 4.7

Time is my biggest hurdle right now. I have several other non-sage projects on the go, that bmt, is really taking a back seat. I have to look at a couple of other bmt issues tonight (perhaps), so I'll test the genre stuff, and see if there is anything quick that I can do.

[PLUCKYHD]

I would think this more fails on the developers of the UI not so much the scraper itself. Every scraper I remember using has always scraped Categories and sub Categories. It is up to the developer of the UI (be it phoenix,SMM,ortus,SageMC) to decide if they want to consider the subcategories or not when grouping them together.

My 2 cents.

[mkanet]

Hi Sean, I can't thank you enough for looking into this so quickly. It means a lot. Both me and my wife would be able to finally use Genre view much more easily. It turns into a big mess when you have the amount of movies I do; which really shouldnt have more than 6-8 genres at most.. not 20 of them. I dont know why, but I picture you as one of those mad scientist coders "tearing up code" like the Tasmanian Devil

Purpose of feature enhancement: Remove genre "clutter" and movies that dont seem to belong in certain genres; such as a sci-fi movie that also ends up in my drama category as well

I think there may be two feasible options at this point from what I understand. However, I'm guessing with your limited time, you might only have time to do the first option for now as a quick fix. Id be surprised if you could pull off the second one anytime soon with your schedule.

1- Make a temporary "patch" file with a quick and dirty omission (or commenting out) the code responsible for inserting the sub-category metadata; and, also the ability to the sub-category metadata field for all files that get scanned (something I can quietly and temporarily replace the original file without interfering with the plugin version tracking system)

2- A more substantial enhancement be to add a BMT web-based interface option to toggle subcategories on/off during scans (which would also remove the subcategory tag from existing properties files subcategories are set to be disabled).

This would significantly help people who have pages and pages worth of genre due to duplicates; This would be compatible with sageTV 7 My Video (Category view) as well as SageMC - My Videos (Genre View).


I'm sure there will be STVs which natively support Movies with a parent/child hierarchy to respect Category/Sub-categories; which, then BMT can just turn off this toggle to scan/review subcategories.

Good luck, and if you need a tested, I'll be near my sageTV setup this evening.

Thanks again,
Michael

EDIT: I dont know if this helps any below, but it looks like "Genre" is mentioned once under: custom_metadata_properties=

Guest;
Actor;
Description;
Director
;DiscNumber
;EpisodeName;
EpisodeNumber;
EpisodeTitle
;ExtendedRatings;
ExternalID;
Genre;
IMDBID;
MediaProviderDataID;
MediaProviderID;
MediaTitle;
MediaType;
OriginalAirDate;
Rated;RunningTime;
SeasonNumber;
Title;
UserRating;
Writer;
Year

There is something odd I dont understand. Every database item gets it's own unique respective name to pull respective data from the online database via items listed under "custom_metadata_properties" names. "Genre" is the only one I could see that's listed twice in a row in a sageTV movie's respective properties file

For example:
...
Genre=Action
Genre=Action;Adventure
IMDBID=tt1424381
...

I am guessing the items listed under custom_metadata_properties are supplemental items to the original items not exposed in the BMI web Interface.

So, what happens if I take out "Genre" from custom_metadata_properties? Will it remove "Action;Adventure" or just "Action"? It's hard to tell which one actually gets exposed into the STV. I have no idea what I'm doing... but desperate enough to poke around to the best of my ability.

Does anyone know if its possible remove just the subcategory without screwing up the primary one? Or, is it much harder than that?

Thanks in advance for anyone that can help.

Michael

Originally Posted by stuckless

That is the old field... in the new 4.6 (Sage7) version, I allow for a 2 genre levels (hard coded) where the first genre goes in the category field and the second goes into the sub-category field.

I need to review that code again, so see if this is really happening or not.



Time is my biggest hurdle right now. I have several other non-sage projects on the go, that bmt, is really taking a back seat. I have to look at a couple of other bmt issues tonight (perhaps), so I'll test the genre stuff, and see if there is anything quick that I can do.

[stuckless]

I think you have way too much faith in my abilities... Even I could review all the genre related stuff tonight (which is doubtful), then I;d still have to make the changes, test the changes, etc... When i say that I could have something soon... I'm meaning "weeks", not "hours"

[mkanet]

Actually, honestly I didnt have a clue if it was something as simple as omiting/commenting a line of code or having to go through hundreds of cryptic symbols, etc like when you try to view an entire STV via wordpad.

I just have two questions:

1. If I were to remove the word "genre" from the long list of user-defined metadata items listed under "custom_metadata_properties", would it populate the movie's properties file with the primary category/secondary category or would it have the desired effect of only leaving the built in pre-defined metadata also called "genre" with just a primary category?

If you look at any properties file associated with a movie, you will see there are two genre metadata tags both labeled the same. Maybe genre needs to be queried twice to get the sub-category? Hence (I wish), deleting the genre entry from custom_metadata_properties would only query the primary category only. Im not sure if anyone knows how this works. I tried my best to describe it in my previous post.

2. I'm very paranoid when it comes to poking around settings I dont understand under the BMT website. I didnt see a "reset to installation/default settings" Could you tell me the easiest hasslefree way to reset to the default settings?

Thanks in advance, for however you can help. I am not certain, but if I were to simply remove the second genre entry from a movie properties file, would that cause the movie to be placed in the primary category only? I probably could make an automated script to look for any newly created properties files under my movies folder and remove the second genre entry out.

Hopefully, someone here understand what kind of an affect this would have.

Thanks Sean, no pressure..
Michael

Originally Posted by stuckless

I think you have way too much faith in my abilities... Even I could review all the genre related stuff tonight (which is doubtful), then I;d still have to make the changes, test the changes, etc... When i say that I could have something soon... I'm meaning "weeks", not "hours"

[stuckless]

I'm curious what people's thoughts are on this...

In my collection, I'm seeing movies with genres like,

Action and Adventure
Action/Adventure

My thinking is that I should should probably split those types of genres into 2 genres... ie,
"Action and Adventure" would actually become,

Action
Adventure

and "Action/Adventure" would become
Action
Adventure

Since we only store 2 genres per media item, then if you had the following...
Action/Adventure
Comedy
then you'd end up with
Action
Adventure
and Comedy would be dropped, since there is no place to store it.

What are your thoughts on this... should I split out genres that appear to be multiple genres into separate genres?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Since we only store 2 genres per media item

You can now use comma or semicolon separated lists of category/genre names to assign multiple categories for items.

- Andy

[PLUCKYHD]

Sean,

For what it is worth I split them in my ploxee code something I always did in smw and I just added that code to ploxee. So if you want to do it for me I won't resist.

I am also still of the opinion you should scrap ad many as you can and the devs can decide if they only want the first or how many. I see no reason to add add a limit to the scraper. Some people prefer multiple categories as some movies are comedy and drama

Cheers

[mkanet]

Hey Sean, I think Im just being dense. Maybe you can help clarify. The whole point of my post was that pretty much each movie I have (after it get's automatically processed by BMT 4.6, ends up with a category\subcategory. For example, Braveheart (1995) gets assigned Action\Biography automatically. I think it might be a matter of personal preference, but I certainly wouldnt want to see Braveheart listed under my Biography Genre AND Action Genres. I doubt if I had a guest over at my home he wouldnt intuitively think to look in the Biography section of my genres instead of Action.

I have an idea which could make most people happy. However, it would need a little STV update for the BMT plugin and an update in the BMT web page.

a) Have a user defined option under BMT web menu to automatically default to either the Primary or Secondary category/genre when a new movie is scanned.

b) Have the ability easily toggle between the primary or secondary category of a movie from the BMT webpage and the standard SageTV STV movie info page (with a single two-way toggle using the remote control select button.

This will give the easiest control of which category a movie belongs to in a perfect world scenerio... reducing duplicate/redundancies; especially for people with an extensive collection of movies who REALLY depend on the most intuitive genre to find a movie without having to type in a search every time.

As far as purposefully trying to split up a movie's genre into two separate genres, that would be the complete opposite of what I was trying to avoid in the first place since duplicates just make a big mess if you have enough movies per genre. Plus, the number of genres/categories can be reduced from 20 or so, down to 6-7 which can actually fit on one screen. Who would want to scroll and scroll to look through all the different genres when they should be able to fit in one screen.

Just my two cents. Hopefully, what I'm trying to say makes sense; especially from an efficiency standpoint as people's movie collections grow.

-Michael

Originally Posted by stuckless

I'm curious what people's thoughts are on this...

In my collection, I'm seeing movies with genres like,

Action and Adventure
Action/Adventure

My thinking is that I should should probably split those types of genres into 2 genres... ie,
"Action and Adventure" would actually become,

Action
Adventure

and "Action/Adventure" would become
Action
Adventure

Since we only store 2 genres per media item, then if you had the following...
Action/Adventure
Comedy
then you'd end up with
Action
Adventure
and Comedy would be dropped, since there is no place to store it.

What are your thoughts on this... should I split out genres that appear to be multiple genres into separate genres?

[stuckless]

I think at this point, I'm inclined to do nothing. I think that everyone will have different views of how the genres should work, and as such, bmt's roles is simply to fetch metadata, not decide how people what to see it, etc... That's the role of STV.

BMT populates 2 genre fields, based on what has been provided online.

For my purposes, for example, I don't want to see 2 genres that look similar showing up in my list....ie,

Action and Adventure
Action/Adventure

Both of which are valid, and both of which are return from different providers online. I'd rather just see 2 genres listed,

Action
Adventure

I also think that people will use genres in different ways. You seem to want to use Genres to find a specific movie (which I'd never do,personally... i'd just search)... But others will use genres to discover a movie that fits their current mood. "Hmmm... Tonight I feel like watching an action movie, let's see what I have in Action". That's how I use it, and it's for that reason, I'd like to be able to have more than 2 genres per movie, but 2 is OK.

I may end up adding some genre tools, later, where I'll try to provide an option to simply null out the second genre field, which I think will work for your needs, based on your original request.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Opus4

You can now use comma or semicolon separated lists of category/genre names to assign multiple categories for items.

As of what version? I recall doing this before (using semi-colons), and when I would call GetShowSubCategory, it would return all the additional genres as the sub category. ie, if I stored,

Action;Adventure;Comedy

then GetShowCategory would return Action, and GetShowSubCategory would return Adventure;Comedy

[Opus4]

It was updated a few versions back. The default STV's video browser allows assigning multiple categories to videos & it displays the on the detailed info screen for the video via the GetShowCategory() call; they don't get tacked onto the sub category call.

GroupByMethod() has been updated to split the multiple category assignments apart and put each video into as many groupings as it belongs to -- that's how the new Category view works on the video browser.

Oh, and filtering by categories works via an API call, as used in the recordings menus.

- Andy

[mkanet]

Thanks Sean, at least you'll be able to filter it out based on what Andy suggested. From what he described, it doesnt sound like it would take a whole lot of time to make a little quick and dirty change; at least until you have a chance to polish it and expose it in the web interface.

I know I mentioned this a few times. but I'm curious what would happen if I were to remove the "genre" entry in the long list of added custom_metadata_properties items listed. Would that break something, do nothing, or possibly have the desired affect I'm looking for? I noticed in each properties file, there are two genres listed (one that just has one category) and the other one that has both). I dunno, maybe its such a dumb idea that has nothing to do with what I want that it's not worth replying to.

If I knew which line in the properties file of a movie is is responsible for putting a movie in a second genre, I could at least make an automated script to fix all my properties files with an automated batch text editor. Maybe Andy or you could be kind enough say what I can do with a brute force text edit.

Lastly (and very important): Ive spent so much time poking around the different values in BMT's webUI Im paranoid I might have changed something that i shouldnt have. I didnt see a "restore to defaults button" in the web UI... so, what's the easiest way to restore all the settings back to the installation defaults without any hassle? I'm sure there will be times when someone might make a mistake (like just changing one character) and wished he could just revert back to the installation defaults.

Thanks again, hopefully if I'm lucky, I might have good solutions to both of my questions here. Sorry for asking so many times, I just wasn't sure if you guys actually knew the answer or not; or, willing to take the time to say how to do it manually in a crude temporary method.

Opus, if you happened to know how to filter the second category via an API call by just editing my STV by changing soemthing very minor via wordpad.exe, would you be kind enough to tell me? There's no telling when Sean will have time to do this in an official BMT release.

Thanks so much for all your help,
Michael

Originally Posted by stuckless

I may end up adding some genre tools, later, where I'll try to provide an option to simply null out the second genre field, which I think will work for your needs, based on your original request.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Opus4

It was updated a few versions back. The default STV's video browser allows assigning multiple categories to videos & it displays the on the detailed info screen for the video via the GetShowCategory() call; they don't get tacked onto the sub category call.

GroupByMethod() has been updated to split the multiple category assignments apart and put each video into as many groupings as it belongs to -- that's how the new Category view works on the video browser.

Oh, and filtering by categories works via an API call, as used in the recordings menus.

- Andy

Good to know thanks Andy I also didn't realize the group by call was splitting them like that.

I am confused by your filterting by categories remark is the the custom categories for users or are you still talking show categories (which is really genres )

[mkanet]

Hi PluckyHD, although I am barely able to grasp the concept whats going on. The main reason I was hoping for something in BMT that would offer a user defined category filter number such as setting it to =1 (via the API call Andy mentioned), is because this setting would work on SageMC, sageTV3, SageTV7, and any other STV that uses phoenix based metadata. This way every STV wont have to be adjusted separately.. it would be just one setting by the user in the BMT web page.

-Michael

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

I would think this more fails on the developers of the UI not so much the scraper itself. Every scraper I remember using has always scraped Categories and sub Categories. It is up to the developer of the UI (be it phoenix,SMM,ortus,SageMC) to decide if they want to consider the subcategories or not when grouping them together.

My 2 cents.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

I am confused by your filterting by categories remark is the the custom categories for users or are you still talking show categories (which is really genres )

I think the Category & Genre terms are pretty much interchangeable.

I was wrong about filtering, though -- the FilterByMethod()'s "UserCategories" option will filter by checking the category, subcategory, and all the possible UserCategory comma separated values for an item, but it currently still expects category & subcategory values to be single terms.

- Andy

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I was wrong about filtering, though -- the FilterByMethod()'s "UserCategories" option will filter by checking the category, subcategory, and all the possible UserCategory comma separated values for an item, but it currently still expects category & subcategory values to be single terms.

Update: this has been fixed for the next version - you can use FilterByMethod()'s "UserCategories" filtering method with comma separated cat & subcat values.

- Andy