Three Stooges Episodes Update vs. Find Metadata

[Cortopassi]

Hi,

In trying to get some photo thumbnails working, Sage support had me do a rescan files under Detailed Setup/Advanced. This totally messed up the metadata on all my TV series (Brady Bunch, Three Stooges, Stargate Universe, etc, etc). Universally, it replaced distinct Episode Titles with the generic Series Title, and also adding a relative path to the title field. All other metadata seemed to be left intact (series #, episode #, description, etc)

I have been able to get all back to their previous state relatively easily by using BMT/Update Metadata and unchecking: "Only update items that have not been updated previously"

However, hundreds of episodes of Three Stooges will not cooperate.

If I do find metadata on a specific episode and hit search, I get the three possibilities as shown in the attachment. If I select the first, the episode data fills as expected.

Is there anything I can do to get BMT to use the first entry, or set something globally across the files so it will use the first entry (or any other specific entry for other cases)?

Thanks!

[stuckless]

What is the filename for a three stooges episode?

You can do a manual lookup on an episode (as you've already don) and then click "Add Matcher", which allows you to create a rule, or matcher, for matching additional shows. You may have other questions when you open this dialog

[Cortopassi]

The file names are of the format:

The Three Stooges - e001 - 1934 - Woman Haters.avi

No season #

Thanks.

[wrems]

I think that convention might give you fits trying to match against TVDB data. It essentially looks like that is Season 0 Episode 1. Since there is no season zero... Matching would be tough.

Fixing it wouldn't be too big of a deal. I would manually go through them and just change the e001 convention you're using to just say 101. Which means S01E01, so 201 would be season 2 episode one....

If after you modify the suspect ones, you could process the file names the theRenamer http://www.therenamer.com. You can then set up the convention and details as you like. Plus, you'll be sure it will match specifically to TVDB and BMT will grab a match no problem then.

So your files would temporarily look like this:

The Three Stooges - 101 - 1934 - Woman Haters.avi

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Cortopassi

...This totally messed up the metadata on all my TV series (Brady Bunch, Three Stooges, Stargate Universe, etc, etc)...

It takes courage to admit that you have archived The Brady Bunch!

[Cortopassi]

--Watching the Brady Bunch again with my kids. You know what, it actually was a damn good show!

Wrems -- as for the season naming, I have used a renaming program before to do the same -- but the difference with the Three Stooges episodes is the episodes are named e001 to something like e189. There is no season reference, so it really is a manual process do hit all 189 episodes or so to look for what the season was.

Which brings up another point, maybe a request for a future version, once I've saved correct metadata to the file, a nice feature would be to be able to automatically batch rename the avi files based off the metadata so in the future if the data was lost or accidentally changed, there is enough info in the filename, formatted as expected for tvdb?

Thanks.

[wayner]

That's a good idea on the file renaming - as a fallback I believe that if you create .properties files using BMT then you could reimport the files with metadata.

[wrems]

I see... That does present an issue. Maybe Sean can pipe in here? I believe that there's a way to match on the title of the episode contained in a filename. If you have them there for all your episodes it can match them without the SxxExx info. It's less accurate but depending on the accuracy of the titles could get you pretty close.

[wrems]

Originally Posted by Cortopassi

maybe a request for a future version, once I've saved correct metadata to the file, a nice feature would be to be able to automatically batch rename the avi files based off the metadata so in the future if the data was lost or accidentally changed, there is enough info in the filename, formatted as expected for tvdb?

That does sound like a good request

[Cortopassi]

I do have .properties files for every episode, and those .properties files are named:

The Three Stooges - e001 - 1934 - Woman Haters.properties

and they all contain all the correct episode/season/etc data in them. That's one of the main reasons I was wondering why the episode names were lost since each avi file already has a .properties file associated and it seems update metadata does not have any effect in fixing the episodes by pulling from the associated .properties files? But I'm still not clear on how they all interact. I have read some previous posts about BMT not even using the .properties files, but I thought BMT actually created them!

So the bottom line is I just want to fix these files with the least amount of manual labor possible at this point since I had already spent hours doing it once already.

Thanks.

[wayner]

If I recall correctly BMT does not use the .properties files but it can generate them. Think of these as "backups" of your metadata. If you were moving all of your files to a new server then you could move the .properties files as well and (hopefully) it would populate the metadata. Of course that means that your video files have to be named consistently with your .properties files.

[stuckless]

The renaming is good idea... but I'm not sure i'll implement it BMT already gets enough flac when it "screws up"... I can only imagine the outcry when bmt renames 100s of episodes of brady bunch to stargate atlantis

As for .properties... bmt does not require them (and typically won't use them), and it does not automatically create them. They are created as a side effect of using the sagetv apis for writing metadata. BMT can generate them, if manually requested, via the tools menu in the web ui.

BMT supports a TV scraper in the format, "Series -- Episode Title", so if you removed the episode and year from the filename and used a double dash separator then bmt would attempt to do a lookup using episode title matching. This was added some time ago for playon/netflix i think.

[Cortopassi]

stuckless,

Thanks. The renaming to series -- episode title got virtually all the files without a problem!

[wrems]

I'm glad you got it working!

I'm wondering if SJQ could handle the renaming files...

[Cortopassi]

Stuckless,

With the latest changes, I am seeing the following:

1) I previously renamed all my 5 seasons of the Brady Bunch to "The Brady Bunch SxxExx" This allowed BMT to get data successfully for almost every episode.
2) There are a few episodes it did not get, in particular for this post I am describing Brady Bunch season 3, episode 16.
3) When I do "Find Metadata", and change the show title to The Brady Bunch, and put in season #3 and episode #16, the data and description all are pulled in fine.
4) However, now when I go and try to save the data I get a new message saying "ExternalID cannot be blank" I have never seen this in 4.9.19.
5) Episode 15 has an ID of MF333032. Episode 17 has an ID of MF333041. And it looks like episodes in general increment by 4 or 5. So I tried to get around what I was seeing by entering an ID for episode 16 of MF333036. When I hit save after doing this, all the metadata that was brought in correctly now ends up getting cleared in the saving!

I now seem to have no way to successfully save metadata to files BMT did not pick up automatically because of this ExternalID request. Help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

[stuckless]

Any time you see an empty external id... that's not good. That field is populated by SageTV and BMT will manipulate that field from time to time, if needed, but it never blanks it out... and it won't do anything if the field is blank.

I'm guessing that the file is corrupt for some reason (at least in the wiz.bin). Try deleting the file, then adding it back in, and see what happens. Be sure to refresh sagetv after each delete and import.