How to rename Metadata

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

THIS IS ONLY FOR FW VER 2.02.19 OR EARLIER

I don’t know if this has been covered yet, but I thought I would post this for those that need it.

This is how to rename your metadata.

First, from you PC click on you WDTV Live Hub, then click on the Metadata folder.  Then open the Movies folder.  From there find the metadata for the movie that you want to change the name of.  Once you’ve found your metadata, rename both the .jpg file & the .xml (make sure that you use “%20” for spaces & “%3a” for “:”).  Now open the .xml file and change the name.

For an  example, using “Pirates of the Caribbean”, the jpg & xml will be:

OLD: Pirates%20of%20the%20Caribbean%3a%20The%20Curse%20of%20the%20Black%20Pearl

         (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl)

New: Pirates%20of%20the%20Caribbean%201%3a%20The%20Curse%20of%20the%20Black%20Pearl

         (Pirates of the Caribbean 1: The Curse of the Black Pearl)

Now, once that is done, you will have find the .xml named “movie” and open it.  Now find your movie (if you are using Windows Notepad you can go to Edit/Find and type in the first word in the title to find it), then change the name to match the name that you change the jpg & xml too.

For an example, the line:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearlfile:///tmp/media/usb/Local/WDTVLiveHub/Movies/Adventure/PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN  - The Curse of the Black Pearl.mkv

will now be:

Pirates of the Caribbean 1: The Curse of the Black Pearlfile:///tmp/media/usb/Local/WDTVLiveHub/Movies/Adventure/PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN  - The Curse of the Black Pearl.mkv

Just make sure that all your names match, if all the names don’t match you may not see your metadata or coverart.

Once all that is done, then go to the HUB, select “Setup / System / Media Library”, then select “Clear Media Library”.

After the Media Library finishes rebuilding you should (if you renamed everything correctly) see the new name of your file.

Anyway, that’s the down & dirty of it.  Hope it helps someone.

EDIT:  Clearing the media library does NOT delete the metadata for the movies that you already have.  I only clears the data in the flash memory, once the library has been recompiled the metadata for all the movies that you have already gotten will reappear.

2

Just a note, if you have tried doing something before, you may have more than instance of your file in the “movie” .xml.  You will need to make sure that you don’t have more than one instance of your file listed.  If you do, the HUB seems to always revert back to the old file name & the metadata will not show up correctly.

Also, I have noticed that you can only have one instance of metadata exisiing at a time for movies that are of the same name.

For example:

If you have “Alice in Wonderland” the animated version & “Alice in Wonderland” the live version, because the name is the same for both the coverart & metadata for one will show up for both (even if they are in separate folders) & if you change the info for one it changes it for both.  The solution to this is to get the info for one, then change the name as shown above, clear the Media Library, then get the info for the next one.

3

Is there any chance WD will fix this issue in a firmware release? Right now I only have 2 movies affected (The Italian Job, old & new) and the thought of clearing the library and doing the get info thing a couple hundred times, again, does not appeal to me.

4

I don’t know if WD is going to do anything about this, but it should be mentioned on the “Ideas” page.

As far as having to do the “get info” a couple of hundred times again, if you are talking about having to get the content info again after you clear the media library, then you don’t have to.  All clearing the media library does is clear the info in the flash memory, it does not clear the metadata for your files.  Once the library recompiles all the metadata that you have already gotten will reappear without you having to do anything else, you don’t have to “get content info” again.  Once you clear the library, it allows the metadata to be reread and applies the changes that you have made.

5

Thank you for the post. Yes it is a programming bug and it should be a simple fix "parsing the file name not the query name ".

6

As a newbie to the Hub (2 weeks) and even more so to metadata and cover art manipulation (24hrs!), thanks for these useful tips.

A few observations based on that bit of experience and other threads, which may prompt comment, or laughter! (and may even be useful).  So far I’ve only worked with music files, so may be different for movies, where Adobe Bridge will no doubt come in handy?

Editing the xml file looks quite clunky (but no doubt effective)… I found that removing a file from the hub back to the PC, editing the metadata with Mp3tag (+ adding cover art where needed) and then moving it back to the hub seemed to work nicely in terms of overwriting the existing data.  Working on the data directly in the hub (with Mp3tag) didn’t work so well, as new data doesn’t overwrite existing, it just fills in any gaps.

7

Since the original post indicates an older FW, I’m guessing that this was changed in a recent firmware release?

I have the WD TV Live Hub running 2.04.13 and as far as I can tell there is no “metadata” folder.  I’ve seen it referenced several times in this forum, but I don’t see it.  The only folders I see from Win7 Networking (that I didn’t create) is a “.wd_tv” folder.  It contains the subfolders “theme” and “thumb”.

Is there a way to rename metadata in the newer firmware?  (For example, changing sequel names to contain numbers so they fall in the right order.)

8

The metadata folder no longer exists in the new firmware, which is what you have. 

The metadata now is located where every you movie file is.   It will be an xml with the same name as your movie.

Yes you can change the name, just open the xml and change the name the appears between    , then resave the file.  It may take a few minutes, but if your HUB is already on, the WD light on the front should start flashing and on the Home screen it should say …compiling.  Once done you should be able to look at the file and the new name will appear.

9

Have you actually gotten this to work?

I’ve tried editing these XML files and the title field seems to be used only for the “View Info” screen.  There is clearly someplace else where this information is being stored for the file listing.

This thread (from January) mentions this as a bug:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Custom-content-info-xml/m-p/120976/highlight/true

Also several threads indicate that any content edited in this way is not taken up by the Media Library.  For example:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Question-on-XML/m-p/144636/highlight/true#M7117

10

What firmware are you using, if you are using version 2.03.24, then yes there is a bug and changing the xml will not work.  If you are using the most current version 2.04.13, then it should change.

However, and I should have mentioned this before, this will only work for Gallery view, since the other views still have a bug.

11

Yes, I’m using 2.04.13… and I hadn’t tried the gallery view.

Having now looked at this, I see this as only partially supported at best.

  1. The entries are still ordered according to the original names (“Get Content Info” or raw file name if none)

  2. The entries initially populate with the original information then update after a fraction of a second to the local XML content. 

So clearly there is a shadow copy of all of this data (e.g. the “Media Library”) which is neither user editable nor updates to reflect the current contents of the local XML files.  I guess I can understand loading the XML data into a database for caching/filtering/indexing purposes, but there ought to be an option to replace the cached data with the local XML file… rather than always from tmdb. (Don’t get me wrong, the ability to pull this info down to the device is great, and it’s easy to add new items to TMDB, but it is a _movie_ database, not an ‘every random thing I might put on my media player’ database.)