AMC Updater v0.7.3 Now Available!

[OrionHall]

Originally Posted by jamieo

I have a problem though, the program imports many files that I keep inside of hidden folders - I do not want to delete these files but do not want them imported either, could you please add an option not to import a file if it, or it's parent folder is hidden?

Also, perhaps a feature request: my files are not named with the exact movie title but the parent folder is - this obviously limits how useful some features of your program are to me but an option to use the folder name instead would correct that - and be awesome!

Edit: something I tried to work around my first problem was to try using wild cards in the excluded paths file (ie, '*\*extras*\*' would ignore any file in a folder with 'extras' in it's name) - as you'll already know, this isn't supported but would be a nice ability to have...

Hi Jamieo,

Glad you like it

Hidden files and folders - well there's one I've not heard before! But yeah, it makes sense not to scan folders marked as hidden. It's a tiny change to do - I've just tested it so it'll be in the next release.

Getting the name of the movie from the parent folder however might be tricky. It's an unusual (to me) way to store your files. At present the folder name is only used for DVD rips, where a VIDEO_TS.IFO file is found. It'll then try and find a folder name that isn't 'VIDEO_TS' or similar, and will assume that's the title. It may not be possible (or rather, not easy) to make that optional for all files.

The excluded paths file is, I'm afraid, not an exluded paths file! It's for excluded files only, so really can't work the way you describe. I'm guessing your folder structure is fairly complicated then, so presume you have a movie in a folder with subdirectories for associated content (like Extras as you mention). This should be fairly easy to add however, but will need a bit of thought.

How many folder names would you envisage excluding? Few or lots? I can easily change the folder scanning code to do a 'like' comparison against a given string or list of strings. On the other hand I worry that this could cause unpredictable imports - so %extra% would stop the import of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Not the best example I admit, but you get the idea! Let me know what you think - as always I need to balance the needs of the many against the wishes of a few! That and my free time, of course!

Cheers,

Orion.

[z3us]

Originally Posted by OrionHall

The DVD label feature isn't hooked in to the manual updater. The reason being that it's only relevant for CDs and DVDs, so how would that work in a manual update scan? I assumed that if you need to scan a load of disks then you put one in - scan it - put the next in - scan it, and so on. But if you do a manual update it would logically be just as easy to type in the value you want and apply that to as many database entries as you need. Let me know what you think.

The reason is that I first store the films in my HD and, when watched or low space in my HD, I burn them in DVDs.
I think that a option for updating MediaLabel of moved files could work fine.

[jamieo]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

Originally Posted by OrionHall

Getting the name of the movie from the parent folder however might be tricky. It's an unusual (to me) way to store your files. <snip> It may not be possible (or rather, not easy) to make that optional for all files.

I agree that automatically using the folder name may be hard to implement. However, I was thinking a more simple option that if enabled would simply use the parent folder name for the film title instead of the filename. It would do this blindly for all files so no fancy logic would be required.

I've actually just wrote a script for amc that will do this for me afterwards, the main line of which just replaces whatever is in the Title field with the parent folder name as can be seen below:

// The part in blue is just a long winded way to get the parent folder name
SetField(fieldOriginalTitle, ExtractFileName(ExcludeTrailingPathDelimiter(Extra ctFilePath(GetField(fieldSource)))));

However, this means I cannot use your program for internet lookups which is a shame as it would be nice to have the basic information already added without having to use amc. It is my hope that the info retrieved by your scripts will become as complete as amc meaning it will not be required (at all?) in future.

Originally Posted by OrionHall

I'm guessing your folder structure is fairly complicated then, so presume you have a movie in a folder with subdirectories for associated content (like Extras as you mention). This should be fairly easy to add however, but will need a bit of thought.

That's exactly how my folder structure is, wrt the 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' I would imagine defining something like 'M:\films\*\*extra*\*.*' so it would only match at a certain folder depth (number of '\' characters). For a film called 'Extras' it will match 'M:\films\extras\extras\makingof.mkv' but not 'M:\films\extras\extras.mkv' .

Originally Posted by OrionHall

Hidden files and folders - well there's one I've not heard before! But yeah, it makes sense not to scan folders marked as hidden. It's a tiny change to do - I've just tested it so it'll be in the next release.

Excellent! This will at least give me an easy way to exclude stuff in lieu of the last point, any idea when your next release (or even just an exe with this change) will be available?

Thanks, Jamie.

[fremel]

i discovered a bug i think
since this new feature with language and sublang i though i would manually update with media info only
so i select media info only in database fields tab and update media data in manual update
worked well but it replaced the Original Title! leaving me manually editing them in amc to fix

other than that thx for this nice program

[seco]

Some improvement suggestions:

1. Scan should be able to handle file names for scene releases like
Black.Hawk.Down.2001.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264.dxva-EuReKA. With current version this is a no go.

2. Scan should be able to scan folder names instead of files (which I think was previously suggested)

3. Exclusions (for sample files etc.) should be possible (which I think too was previously suggested)


Without 1. or 2. the updater is useless for me

[1stdead]

Originally Posted by seco

Some improvement suggestions:

1. Scan should be able to handle file names for scene releases like
Black.Hawk.Down.2001.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264.dxva-EuReKA. With current version this is a no go.

2. Scan should be able to scan folder names instead of files (which I think was previously suggested)

3. Exclusions (for sample files etc.) should be possible (which I think too was previously suggested)


Without 1. or 2. the updater is useless for me

Yes would definitely be needed..
Another thing.. If files allready is mad by AMC, and IMDB the "homepage" allready points out where the movie information is located, why not just use this in the first place? Make this app, if homepage allready there use it, and if not just look up..

[OrionHall]

Hi all,

Wow - I'm offline for a few days and suddenly there's loads of posts here!

Movie Title Handling:
I'm going to change this whole section I think - it's quite inflexible at present. Fremel - that is indeed a bug. It shouldn't update that field but at the moment it does it without asking, regardless of what options are selected on the Database fields tab.

I'll add a new option for 'Original Title' with the following choices:
Use filename (and 'clean' with RegEx)
Use parent folder name
Use Internet Lookup data

At the moment I'm unsure about the regex to clean the movie title. This could be one entry for a fairly complex regex, or I could do a list with individual items to strip/replace from the filename. I'm thinking something like the 'string replacements' option in the MyTVSeries plugin. Comments are welcome!


Excluded Files:
Jamieo - At the moment I'm not sure if I can get my file/folder enumerator (which does the actual file-level scanning) to work like that. The code does a simple recursive loop through the files and folders it finds, and for each file it finds it could be adapted to perform a bit of logic before adding it to the 'found files' list. I'll have a play and see what can be done. If you can give me a more detailed example of your folder structures that would help - PM me if you don't want it public or anything!

Seco - Basic exclusions are already possible - the Excluded Movies file stores these as a simple list with a carriage return between entries. Enter the full path to each file you want ignored and they won't be imported. Excluding files based on dynamic logic is fairly complicated - how can the program tell the difference between sample / additional files and the main movie? For Jamieo's example, he's looking at a very structured file system which could form the basis for such functionality, but I suspect that's a fairly unusual way to store your films.

And finally...

z3us - I'm still not sure how you want the DVD label feature to work. If you move files from the hard disk to a DVD then how would the Manual Updater work? I don't see how it could update the media label like that. It sounds like you should run the main scan against your DVD-ROM drive, and hopefully it will work out that the files have moved; update the location to d:\ (or whatever) and update the media label to match. Does that make sense?

Cheerio,

Orion.

[1stdead]

Originally Posted by OrionHall

Hi all,

Wow - I'm offline for a few days and suddenly there's loads of posts here!

Movie Title Handling:
I'm going to change this whole section I think - it's quite inflexible at present. Fremel - that is indeed a bug. It shouldn't update that field but at the moment it does it without asking, regardless of what options are selected on the Database fields tab.

I'll add a new option for 'Original Title' with the following choices:
Use filename (and 'clean' with RegEx)
Use parent folder name
Use Internet Lookup data

At the moment I'm unsure about the regex to clean the movie title. This could be one entry for a fairly complex regex, or I could do a list with individual items to strip/replace from the filename. I'm thinking something like the 'string replacements' option in the MyTVSeries plugin. Comments are welcome!

That would be quite nice.. Maybe use a string called year .. So if you named your files "test.2006", it searches for test, and if serveral movies appear with the name "test", the year could be used to choose the right movie.


Btw. great tool you got here.. Hopefully we will see an update soon

[jamieo]

Originally Posted by OrionHall

Hi all,
For Jamieo's example, he's looking at a very structured file system which could form the basis for such functionality, but I suspect that's a fairly unusual way to store your films.

Actually, I don't think it's that unusual and seco is basically requesting the same functionality as I am.
We also seem to be in the same situation of being unable to use your program because:

1) Movie Titles are not recognised

This can be rectified most easily by using the parent folder name for the movie title instead - in certain cases this may lead to a few entries with the same title (a trilogy stored in the same folder), but a little manual intervention would be required for those anyhow and if anything it'll make it easy to spot them and add the hierachy info.

For instance, I'll have three entries called "Bourne Trilogy" so I just append the '\' character and the real titles after so they are treated as a group by the MyFilms plugin. Perhaps your program could even help with that by automatically appending the filename to all duplicates ie, "FolderName\FileName" - it would still require manual correction to be perfect but it'll really help.

Btw, seco suggested some regex cleanup operation and MPTVSeries implements this well but only because is also uses the whole path. Looking at my tv series collection it mainly uses the filename for the season and episode numbers only, while extracting the series title from the parent folder name(s). Also, many of my files do not even include the movie/series title in the filename but in the folder name only.

2) Too many extraneous files are also imported

If secos folder structure is anything like mine then simply ignoring certain folders will sort this one. I'll send you a short output from cmd tree /f as an example and I hope that'll clear things up.

At the very least a simple list of exact but case-insensitive names that's checked against would fulfil this in the meantime, ie:

Folder_Exclusion_List.txt:
extra
extras
sample
samples

Psedo code during scan
If the folder name matches exactly* to the list
then ignore this entire folder and carry on.

*Match is case insensitive though...

[seco]

By the way, it seems that the TVSeries plugin is able to parse scene release file names correctly like "stargate.atlantis.s05e05.720p.hdtv.x264-ctu.mkv".

So maybe the algorithm/regexp can be used for the movie file names too with little modifications.

Here's couple of directory structure examples that I have which are the reason for requesting some features earlier.

1.

D:\Movies\Black Hawk Down\Black.Hawk.Down.2001.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264.dx va-EuReKA.mkv
D:\Movies\Black Hawk Down\Sample\sample.mkv

2.

D:\Movies\Black Hawk Down\Black.Hawk.Down.2001.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264.dx va-EuReKA.mkv
D:\Movies\Black Hawk Down\Black.Hawk.Down.2001.BluRay.1080p.DTS.x264.dx va-EuReKA.[SAMPLE].mkv