n00b: best practices for good results?

[aweber1nj]

I'm only getting about a 40% hit rate on BMT scanning and finding correct fanart for my DVDs.

Is there a link/document/page that describes how BMT analyzes files to determine what they are and thus what info and fanart to d/l? Does it use filenames? Some kind of metadata within the files (if so, what video formats are best)?

Before I rip all the rest of my collection, I'd like to get that kind of info so I can get the best results.

Thanks very much for all the hard work to-date!

-AJ

[wrems]

The format of the movie does not matter. What you want to pay particular attention to is the naming. That is what BMT uses to find your movie.

I find it best to look up the movie in IMDB and use that name and year in parentheses. For example my wife is watching Dirty Dancing. So my file/folder for this movie is named:

Dirty Dancing (1987)

This movie happens to be in DVD folder format so the folder that contains the vobs and etc is name as above. If I convert it to an MKV I will still keep the folder and have the movie (MKV) named the same as the folder and identical to IMDB.

I find it best to just copy and paste directly from IMDB, that way you can avoid typos, FFS etc.

TV files are a whole different thing. But you said movies

[aweber1nj]

Exactly the kind of info I was looking for.

Thank you for your quick reply.
-AJ

[jgourd]

What if the filename is simply the IMDB tt number?

[wrems]

Originally Posted by jgourd

What if the filename is simply the IMDB tt number?

Not sure, but I would think no... You could test it to find out.

I've not had any issues with BMT matching on the IMDB name plus year combo.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by jgourd

What if the filename is simply the IMDB tt number?

It would probably fail, just because of how the matching algorithm works. While imdb might return a match, bmt won't consider it a "good" match unless the title matches, and in this case it wont.

Originally Posted by wrems

Not sure, but I would think no... You could test it to find out.

I've not had any issues with BMT matching on the IMDB name plus year combo.

When you format your filenames as "Movie (Year)", then a search is performed for "Movie" and then bmt will use the Year that you've provided to narrow down the best match. That's why including the year in the title will almost guarantee a perfect match.

BMT also doesn't care if the titles are "exactly" the same, they just need to be close within a tolerance (current set to .9 out of 1.0). A user can change the tolerance if they want, but typically .9 works quite well.

[jgourd]

I used to use a long ago and forgotten media manager that came up with a lot of ambiguous results from IMDB when using title (year) format so I manually renamed several thousand AVI and MKV files to the tt number and with that media manager it worked perfectly. Now I'll have to write a script that renames the files based on its parent folder name.

[wrems]

Originally Posted by jgourd

I used to use a long ago and forgotten media manager that came up with a lot of ambiguous results from IMDB when using title (year) format so I manually renamed several thousand AVI and MKV files to the tt number and with that media manager it worked perfectly. Now I'll have to write a script that renames the files based on its parent folder name.

You may be interested in this thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...80&postcount=1

There are a few bulk renaming utilities that have been identified by various users. One of them may be the ticket. Also check into YAMMM. I know that it was capable of taking video files that were not inside folders and creating a folder for it to reside in. One of these tools could save you some hassle.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by jgourd

I used to use a long ago and forgotten media manager that came up with a lot of ambiguous results from IMDB when using title (year) format so I manually renamed several thousand AVI and MKV files to the tt number and with that media manager it worked perfectly. Now I'll have to write a script that renames the files based on its parent folder name.

If your parent folder name has the movie title, then you could probably write a filename scraper and add it to bmt userdata/Phoenix/scrapers/ area. The bmt filename name scrapers basically are regular expressions that parse out relevant information. You are given the complete filepath as input, so you could implement the GetTitle portion of the scraper and to parse out the Title as being [\\/]([^\\/]+)[\\/]tt (that matches on \Terminator\tt2343343.avi for windows paths, or /Terminator/tt23423423.avi for unix paths)

If your title has a year in it as well, then you an simply make the regex more specific and part out title and year.

If you are interested in going down this route, then I can certainly guide you as well. You can check out the existing moviefilename scrapers in STVs/Phoenix/scrapers/xbmc/moviefilenames/

[jgourd]

Actually, BMT seems to have scraped many of these just fine. For now, I have removed my movies from SageTV and am focusing on the TV.

It doesn't appear to be automatically fetching fanart and metadata when SageTV imports a file.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by jgourd

Actually, BMT seems to have scraped many of these just fine. For now, I have removed my movies from SageTV and am focusing on the TV.

That's good know

It doesn't appear to be automatically fetching fanart and metadata when SageTV imports a file.

This is pretty much the only way I run bmt, so I know it works. If bmt doesn't automatically fetch fanart/metadata for shows that you've added, then I'd check the logs/phoenix-metadata.log and see if says SKIP or ERROR... (It'll say UPDATE for that it updated).

Most likely cause for BMT not automatically fetching tv is that it could not find a series match, along with specific season and episode #s in it's tvdb search.

The phoenix-metadata.log will show the "fields" that it scraped for each each item when it failed, so you'll be able to tell what it thought the series name was, and the season and episode values, etc.