v2.3 released: WDTVHubGen - Looks up Movies, TV Shows and creates XML for the Hub

getting server not found to dowload the new version

Yikes, well that was me fat fingering the url. it had and extra http:// on it. all fixed now in both places. thanks.

This looks like a very good program. I am at work now, but very exited to try this tonight.

Thank you for the effort and for sharing this.

(I am a developer myself and did an attempt to create something like this. Off course I was too busy at work to complete it, and now… well… I probably won’t anyway :-)). So your program comes really in handy.

Looks great!

As discussed before, if you don’t mind sharing the code please make a project page for it on eg. code.google.com . Then you have immediately a bug-tracker, source control (if you haven’t used subversion yet, I don’t have a lot of experience with it either but I put two small project there a few weeks ago and I love tortoiseSVN to retrieve the code, check in/out,… works great!),…

http://code.google.com/p/wdtvlivemetadataloader/

Some feature requests after first quick check (in order of importance):

  • Search movies recursive through the subdirectories (no rocket science, but I have the code for this, it is available in the project I linked to above, so you can take the code there, of I can give it, or I can build it in…) 

  • In the list, a right-click/“Explore file path” would be practical to go immediately to the colder containing the movie.TV show) 

  • Documentation on how to name your movie/TV show files to have the best search results

  • A screen to choose the settings in the config file would make it easier to use the tool…

  • Automatic fetching of subtitles

  • Would be nice to be able to choose the language in which the meta-data is fetched…

  • Rename movies automatically using a standard (or configurable) naming convention + each movie in seperate folder or not) 

  • A trailer for a TV show would be nice (I think I have some code lying around for that as well) 

  • … inpiration comes with using a tool ;-)…

And, as mentioned before, I don’t mind contributing… your tool is a lot more advanced than mine at the moment, so it’s better to combine efforts starting from the most advanced code base…

Great list. thanks. I"ll start working on some of those features right away.  I haven’t put it in source control yet becuase of the way I develop. I use dropbox on my home computer and travel computer (I flew 195,000 air miles last year and have already flown 33 times this year) and they “share” a common development directory so I can just literally pick up my laptop and work on it while flying, when I land it syncs and i can work from home without copying and without “checkign in and out” from a repository.  hmmmm I’ll have to think about using one now, because I would love the help. :slight_smile:

The directory thing was a choice I made because I organize all of my shows/movies by genre and not by individual directory, so I have a full directory of season 4 of chuck, not a directory full of directories…    Making it recursive (or just allowing .net’s getfiles to search below directories is easy, what I will have to do is extend my object model to allow for a full path and not a relative one… easy enough, just will require a lot of testing… I’ll work on it this evening)

The feature request of “document how to name your tv show/movie” that is one of hte features that originally started this effort. I wanted a program that would “filter” all of the uploaded naming bs out of the title for me, I have almost 1200 movies and probably 50 TV series, all with ■■■■ download names that I wanted fixed.  That is why the config file has the “removewords” sections, it was a list of all of the garbage that gets removed by the filtering in teh program.  ultimately even that wasn’t enough so I added “aggressive” lookup which is supposed to just find the first two words and look/search for them.  One of my biggest complaints is that themoviedb.org has a very strict search regimen, doesn’t allow wild cards, but I recently learned it will actually allow single words, so I might play with the aggressive search algorithm a little.

Configurable naming of movies/tv shows. love the idea, what kind fo elements do you guys want? tell me now so I can think about the best way to do this (probably replacement strings like thumbgen does)

languages. yikes. ok.

a config screen… yeah, that is in the works, but surprisingly i want to make it flexible, so I will get back to you on it.

thanks for all of the feedback… love it!

Jeff

Subversion, as a source control system, is actually pretty good in the scenario you explain (a you may or may not know). In subversion you don’t lock files if you check out (<> good old visual sourcesafe). Everyone can edit them (in theory) and once you want to submit it to the code base, the client campares if the server version changed since you started adding changes… if not, the check in just happens, otherwise it asks you to merge your changes in the server version with a diff tool…

So in the scenario you describe, you

  1. get the latest version on your laptop,

  2. you get on the plane and can work on any file you like

  3. you get off, check in the added files, and if no files on the server were changed this is automatically OK, otherwise merge

  4. You get the latest version on your other computer…

So it is some overhead, with dropbox you eliminate the getting of latest versions and the checking in, but you get versioning and the possibility of several contributors in return…

Now I think about it, maybe you can combine both… syncing the versioned directory… I’m not sure if it will work, but it’s worth the test because after all a versioned directory on the client is just a directory with some extra hidden directories/files that indicate the statusses of the files + configurations. If you sync all of that together… probably that will keep working…

Tommyboy wrote:

Very cool program

 

is there anyway to change the runtime from 90 min to 1h 30 minutes

I don’t think that’s possible.

The Hub just sees a NUMBER in the XML.

90

It formats it internally to add the minutes.   There’s no way to force it to interpret that number as Hours / Minutes.

funny. I did update this alrady in the new version. let me see how ti tests out :)  I dont think the hub does anything but put it on screen.

I’ve had a similar issue with a date I had first formatted DD/MM/YYYY (european style), but the hub could’t handle it… But testing it is the only possibility…

ok. so it appears that the hub doesn’t process the numbers it just puts them pu and adds a minutes after. so I did this… check out the screen shot to see what I did. configurable if people want just minutes or hours and minutes…

Cool program. But I cannot get it to recognize the folders on my compputer. It allows me to select the folder but will not process it. Seems like it thinks there is nothing selected.

Any ideas or thoughts?

Thanx in advance.

Does teh folder have the actual files/movies in it? or is it a folder of folders?  i’m working on a “all folders” below option for 1.0.7 if that is the case.

Yes it is a folder of folders.So that would explain it not retrieving them :slight_smile:

I tried to run just a movie - DVD VIDEO_TS folder/VOB files but it did not retrieve any results. Do I need to change a setting to get it to search according to the folder name? About half of my rips are in VIDEO_TS format.

Thanx again

is http://code.google.com/p/wdtvlivemetadataloader/downloads/list now the correct place to get the latest version of the App?

No, that is a different application written by another member. the best place to get it is from the first post (I update that everytime… ) but teh url is : (edited to new location) wdtvhubgen.codeplex.com

Great suggestion. never htought of doing that, I’ll add it to the roadmap.  just to be clear. you have a full directory of Video_TS (basically a dvd rip) in a root directory called MovieName … so I would search for the movie name, and drop in an xml and jpg for that movie, but what do you “play” when you click play inside the hub? a video__ts.vob file? becvause I will have to rename that file to the “moviename” for the metadata to work according to hub standards.

thanks

Jeff

Sometimes I click the VOB and sometimes Its the VIDEO_TS folder.The HUB doesn’t play the same files the same way with the VIDEO_TS folders. Seems it plays the VIDEO_TS folder when there is a folder.jpg image. Otherwise it makes me sleect the VOB file. Kind of strange.

I have a bunch of meta data strored on my home server as I use WMC and MediaBrowser everywhere else in the house and some of the images do show up in the HUB.

Not all of my movies are VIDEO_TS. SOme are AVI ( OLD rips ), some are mkv ( BLU RAY rips ) and some are MP4. All of them are stored in the same master folder called “Movies” on the Home Server. My HD movies are in a seprate folder called “HD” and TV series are in another folder called “TV.” All of these media folders are in the “Videos” folder on the server. Every moive has its own folder.

Hope this helps

Great description thanks. at the end you say “every movie has its own folder” does that mean every movie you have, or just the video_Ts rips?  thanks.

That would be every movie. MKV, MP4, AVI, VIDEO_TS, WMV, etc. All of them, every video file is in its own folder… Each folder also contains a mymovies.xml file ( MediaBrowser uses this format in WMC for meta data ), a folder.jpg (or .png ) and a backdrop.jpg ( or .png ).

Seems like you are on the right path :slight_smile: You may want to check into a Meta data program called MetaBrowser. I use it for my metadata on my Win Media Centers using MediaBrowser.

Thanx

Hey Jeff, finally got a chance to try out 1.06 and the tv section works now but i am having trouble with the movie section now.

I don`t know if the moviedb is having trouble but i get this everytime i click a movie

2011-03-28 19:55:51,587 [1] ERROR Error Message: The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable.
Inner Exception: No Inner Exception
Stack Trace:    at TheMovieDB.TmdbAPI.MovieSearch(String title)
   at WDTVHubGen.frmMainForm.LoadMovieDetails(MovieItem item)> > edit- Must have been a problem with the site because its working now> I see in the screen shot you have hours and minutes , did you get it to work and if so where do i change it> > thanks