Auto - import blank movies. (1 Viewer)

[Steven81]

Hello I've been using (on and off) moving pictures for years now but one thing that always perplexed me (and was the reason to always try other solutions eventually) was the fact that movies are not added unless they carry a very certain name that the scrapper is going to recognize.

Being a foreigner sometimes the titles are in my language yet in Latin characters so no scrapper can properly recognize them. Other times I may be too lazy to give them a proper name up until later in the year. Other times yet I may need to add custom made movies (home made) which will never be recognized by any scrapper in existence.

Now I understand (especially for that last part) moving pictures may not be for me, but I honestly love its presentation and 9 times out of 10 my movies are being added properly in the first try (and when they don't it's often a fault of mine), and most importantly I want to have all my movies (except the tv series) in one place and for that reason I would greatly appreciate if there was a way to slightly change the functionality of moving pictures by letting the scrapper to auto import unrecognized movies as blank.


Thanks.

 

[RoChess]

If it adds unrecognized movies as blank, then that negates the whole purpose, as every movie Moving-Pictures is designed for has a detail page on the internet somewhere. Exceptions would be home movies, but you can use MyVideos plugin for those otherwise, or generate XBMC NFO files with artwork to have them import the way you want.

Try adding a scraper-script that will recognize all your crazy filenames otherwise. If you give me some examples of filenames that fail; I can modify IMDb+ to work on them (although I would be supprised if it doesn't work already).

And it is easy to know which movies failed to auto-import. The log file contains all the details, and you can write little scripts that give you a quick overview, or rely on the MovPic GUI importer if needed. Of course your problem might be with the noise filter, and then those movies aren't even picked up to be imported correctly.

 

[Steven81]

If it adds unrecognized movies as blank, then that negates the whole purpose, as every movie Moving-Pictures is designed for has a detail page on the internet somewhere. Exceptions would be home movies, but you can use MyVideos plugin for those otherwise, or generate XBMC NFO files with artwork to have them import the way you want.

Try adding a scraper-script that will recognize all your crazy filenames otherwise. If you give me some examples of filenames that fail; I can modify IMDb+ to work on them (although I would be supprised if it doesn't work already).

And it is easy to know which movies failed to auto-import. The log file contains all the details, and you can write little scripts that give you a quick overview, or rely on the MovPic GUI importer if needed. Of course your problem might be with the noise filter, and then those movies aren't even picked up to be imported correctly.

I don't think it negates the point. My parents are elderly and it was hard as it is to let them use moving pictures as it is. They can't handle having to go back to myvideos for home videos and unrecognized movies, I tried it and it didn't work. So I uninstalled moving pictures and they started using myvideos exclusively, but they much prefer the presentation of moving pictures (with the large art etc al), easy for them to recognize 90% of their content and for the rest 10% blank is just fine... that's my thinking anyway, one plugin that does what both could only better.

Sure it's not for everyone but my situation is very specific, I guess I'd try to find a workaround then, it should had been easy though for any movie not recognized by the scrapper to be imported as blank (with the filename as title). I mean if it was a hidden option in some configuration file for very special situation like mine.

 

[RoChess]

You still didn't explain what filenames or movies we are dealing with here.

So these are 10% home videos?

Look into XBMC NFO then, you can just create a template for it, and all your movies will import as blank.

 

[Steven81]

Well I'm not entirely too sure since most of the filling up of their library is done by my sister (I live in a different city) but I can say 80-90% are recognizable movies, 3-5% home movies, and the rest is unrecognized movies (a small percent since indeed the scrappers are working great, I have added sites in my language too), some Youtube videos and the occasional tv show episode or two (yeah I know). For the most part it is still being used as moving pictures team intended it to, I just find it a shame that I should use sth else all because of the exceptions... I call it their videorama where every kind of moving image is being put on (they also have a second button which shows their pictures and that's about the most they can reliably handle with their HTPC experience )



Edit: Basically i wanna tell the scrapper "if you won't find the movie don't worry just add it as blank". It should not be that hard, is it?

 

[RoChess]

Everything is possible, it is open-source afterall.

You still didn't provide any real-world examples though on all the filenames that work+fail which I asked for, so there is no point in me seeing about adding an option to IMDb+ to do what you are after. Adding a feature like that brings a lot of risk to break existing functionality, so would require a lot more info on real-world data.

 

[Steven81]

Like I said it's very hard to offer you such data as I'm in a different city than my parents, I'll be visiting for holidays and I thought that I may install moving pictures to them (they are asking for its lavish representation). The filenames are typically like this "t.r.2013.mp4" or "YouTubevideo.mp4" or "eksormisi.avi" or "telos.mkv" . Hope that helped.

 

[RoChess]

On your next visit configure concurrent RDP so you can look at what happens in the background at the same time they are using it (ideal to debug import issues). Or something easy like TeamViewer to take full remote console control.

Otherwise look into MediaPortal v2 usage to combine everything in one.

I personally prefer the seperation of TV shows in MP-TVSeries, movies in Moving-Pictures, music videos in mvCentral, trailers/online in OnlineVideos, and finally all other crap in MyVideos. Each plugin easy accessible from MediaPortal 'Home' screen. You can always rely on 3rd party tools to ensure 100% import ability, such as CouchPotato, SickBeard, Sonarr, etc.

 

[Steven81]

Yeah, I prefer that as well (which is how I run my personal setup), but it didn't work with my parents, they have a hard time to navigate in menus, they get confused a lot, my father is almost 80 so I must be thankful that I was even able to hook them up on such things. I have reconfigured their remote, through the press of one button (the red one) to get into movies/media and through the press of another (the yellow) get them into pictures. That's the most they can manage, everything else that I tried failed eventually (even though at first they seemed to get it, but in the end they would look for movies in myvideos, and other videos in moving pictures and got frustrated, and they stopped using it, which is why I made the myvideo plugin as their "media portal")...

...I didn't expect that it should be as hard of a problem to solve especially since others could manage it. Anyway thanks for trying to help me, I really appreciate it and if I find a solution on this, my elderly parents would appreciate it too. They're in love with moving pictures (especially cover flow) so they keep asking for it and I always have to explain to them that they would "lose" their other videos in that way.

 

[RoChess]

If they are able to add media, then they simply need to do it right at that point in time.

Easy to write a batch script that replicates a blank-movie import template for the XBMC NFO scraper, so you have full control over everything.