Tools and other software Media-Buddy - the MKV Buddy successor. (1 Viewer)

[Lehmden]

Hi.
Her comes the first version of our new tool named "Media-Buddy".

If you prefer reading in German, here is the German post:
Media-Buddy, die "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" unter den Medien-Tools.

The main goal of Media-Buddy is to simplify and speed up daily work with video files. The basic use is pretty simple. You choose what you want to do, select the folder to work on and let Media-Buddy do the rest without further interaction.

The new Media-Buddy brings you wizards for any kind of media rework. The program can decide if a video or audio file needs to be recoded, remuxed or only be renamed and enriched with fanart and metadata with a single mouse click.

Aside this all options known from MKV-Buddý are available too, most of them are enhanced or completely redone. Since you now can not only edit video, but also audio files, the old name did no longer fit so we changed it. In addition to the already working function (mass) transcoding of audio files, there also should be functions for generating .nfo files for audio, quite similar to the known .nfo for videos. This feature is being under heavy development atm. There are already positive results. But some fine-tuning is still needed.

A manual is not available today, also we are working on it. So if you ran into trouble using Media-Buddy feel free to ask in the forums...

In addition, next to the processing of music (transcoding, alter metadata and assistant) there is a manual post-processing of fanart and metadata for movies, series, videos and later also music available. A switch from MKV Buddy 2 is worthwhile in any case ...

Movies - Metadata:

Movies - Fanart:

Series:

Episodes (and Season fanart):

Sorry, the screenshots are in German only, but the GUI is fully translated to English (as good as I'm able to translate)...

The most recent version is 1.3.0.9 and you always can find it on our Webseite.

 

[Digsy]

@Lehmden : Does Media Buddy work in the background and automatically update metadata / tags / art, etc for new media files (like Yamm does), or do you have to manually run it each time you add new files?

Yamm worked great for WMC, but there seems to be no way to change the default filenames for the .nfo files and artwork, and they are not recognized by MP2.

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.
Media-Buddy does not run in the background. It is meant for a complete preparation of Video and Audio files before!! you add the media to your library.
The "normal" workflow is:
First configure Media-Buddy as you like or need. Be aware that settings done in e.g. video transcode are used for the wizards as well. As you normally need to do this only once it's not a big deal... Then you can start with the "daily business"

You are recording, ripping downloading,... your media files. Collect them in a few "input" directories. One for movies, one for other types of videos, one for music and one for series where the series folder should have sub- folders for any series you currently are working on and the music folder should have the same for every Artist. You can locate those folders wherever you like but best is on a local disc to get maximum speed out of it.
On the other hand you have some "output" folders. Movies, Videos, Audio and Series. You also can place them anywhere you like but best is on a local disc, preferred a different one then the input folders.

Music files need to be already tagged as Media-Buddy only adds the missing stuff that is not available in ID3 tags. This mainly is for Artist fanart and metadata.

Movies best are named ttxxxxxxx.ext where ttxxxxxxx is the IMDB-ID of the movie. This way there always is a 100% perfect match with a damn short file name. Anything else in the filename will be ignored as long as a tt number can be found. If there is no tt number, Media-Buddy tries to "guess" as good as possible which movie it is. Things like the release year in the file name are helpful but this never is as reliable as the usage of the tt number.

Videos are attached with a .nfo file and also fanart and poster, generated from still images out of the video. You can set a default genre or you can use subfolders (like "holidays", "documentary", "family",...) as you like. If selected those sub- folders are used as "genre" for the video files instead of a default genre valid for every video prepared in this run.

Series did not use the IMDB-ID in file name. Here you should place an already existing tvshow.nfo inside the output series/seriesname/ folder. If you don't have a tvshow.nfo because you are preparing episodes from this series the first time you also can place an empty text file with name "TVDB-xxxxxx.txt" into the output series subfolder where xxxxxx is the TVDB- ID of the series. The same is working with "TMDB-xxxx.txt" here you need to use the TheMovieDB ID of course. This is useful if a series is not listed/allowed on TVDB but is available on TheMovieDB. This way you will get metadata and fanart even for those series not available on TVDB at all...

If there is neither a tvshow.nfo nor a TVDB-xxxxxx.txt then Media-Buddy tries to "guess" the series from the "seriesname" sub- folder (in output). But this is not 100% perfect as there are too many series with identical names and the TVDB API didn't use the year to specify a result, excerpt for the series, where the year is inside the "official" series name...

Episodes needs to be named in a way the season and episodes number can be identified. S01E01 is working as 1x01 do too. Even 101 is working as long as this is the last part of the episodes name. "tvs-navy-cis-new-orleans-dd51-ded-dl-18p-azhd-x264-420.mkv" is working (season 4 episode 20) but "tvs-navy-cis-new-orleans-dd51-ded-dl-18p-azhd-x264-412-rp.mkv" is not. Here you need to remove the "-rp" from the end of the file name to get this working...

Now you can run (one of) the wizards. For Audio the wizard is not ready. We're working on it right now. Media-Buddy then scans the input folder for all e.g. movies and decides (based on your settings) if the video is too big and need transcoding or if it needs to be remuxxed or only copied. Once all movies are transcoded/remuxxed/copied Media-Buddy starts adding metadata and fanart to your movies. When done it renames the movies as you set this up in Media-Buddy and, if they are in .mkv container after preparation (strongly recommended) it also tag the video files (it's very common for music but, also it is easily possible, not that well known for video) and attach the fanart into the video file. Only a few video container supporting metatags for videos, mkv is the most complete of all and the only one where MP2 can use those metatags to identify a movie/series. This way you only need one single mouse click to prepare "tons" of movies completely... As transcoding is taking a long time it's great to collect some movies and let Media-Buddy ran over night. If a few of the movies didn't need to be transcoded, Media-Buddy takes care of. And Media-Buddy can send the PC to sleep or even shut it down completely when the job is done...

After the wizard is finished you can control and/or modify the automatic results by replacing graphics and/or changing text from inside the Media-Buddy GUI easily.

When you're done with the movies you can run e.g. the series wizard and meanwhile move the prepared movies into your media library, where they are perfectly recognized by MP2 (or other tools like Kodi or similar)...

Sound complicated? It isn't. Once you get used to it you never want something else as it's the easiest and fastest way to get perfectly prepared movies/series. Generating fanart and .nfo for "other videos" is a completely unique feature you didn't find anywhere else.
I've start coding this tool as I'm very unhappy with all existing video tools available those days. Ever since then I use it daily and I never ever can miss it again... TotalCommander, Chrome and Media-Buddy are the the most often used tools on my system... Everything else only is very little used compared to those 3...

 

[sridharb]

Hi Lehmden,

I already have converted the media items that I am interested in.

I was using TMM (tinyMediaManager) to organize and create meta-data.

However, it looks like the settings that it uses to write the metadata and the settings that MP2 uses to read are not compatible (at least the settings that I use).

Could I make media-buddy run over my media folders, read the existing meta data (if possible) and rewrite the metadata in MP2-understandable format? No need to reorganize the files/folders, but just write the meta data in such a way that MP2 recognizes it.

I am guessing that after this is done, it doesn't need to download Details and FanArt from the internet anymore?

Thanks,
Sridhar

 

[ge2301]

However, it looks like the settings that it uses to write the metadata and the settings that MP2 uses to read are not compatible (at least the settings that I use).

Of course it's compatible. You need just to use MediaPortal as output format. It should even work, if you use the KODI settings.
All my data are prepared like that since several years and all items were recognized correctly.

 

[sridharb]

Thank you, I think the default was movie.nfo and this is not being read. So, this itself should improve results quite a bit. Could you please also send pictures of your other settings, especially the TV section of TMM and the Media Sources section of MP2?

 

[ge2301]

Thank you, I think the default was movie.nfo and this is not being read. So, this itself should improve results quite a bit. Could you please also send pictures of your other settings, especially the TV section of TMM and the Media Sources section of MP2?

The mentioned settings are customized according to your needs and should not influence the detection result.
For "Renamer" just use the default settings, as Scraper I'm using TheTVDB for series.

In MP2 deactivate (Download nothing) online sources, if you want to use the FanArt and nfo content available from tMM.
For caching FanArt I recommend to activate both options.
The "filters to populate ..." takes longest time during import. If you don't need/want to filter for artists etc. and having images for them, then leave this off.

 

[sridharb]

I don't know. At least with movie.nfo, I get details about the movies/TV series, but no images.

Yes, your other settings (that you have mentioned above) are the same as mine. I recently activated the "Download nothing" option and reimported. The import went through succesfully.

This is when I get no images.

I show you the MP2 screen where you can see information about the movie, but no images related to it.

I also show you the options in MP2 and TMM that I have chosen. I had previously chosen movie.nfo (for the movie NFO file naming option, have changed it to your option, but have not tried it yet). I also had chosen poster.ext and fanart.ext instead of the newly chosen options in red.

Thanks,
Sridhar

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.
This is a very complex topic also it looks easy at first glance...
In general the naming schemes in Kodi are more restrict than in MP2. MP2 can use more different naming schemes than Kodi. But some things need to be different to be fully working for both. MP1 and MP2 are also not fully compatible in this respect. Especially for Series there is no way to use local fanart and metadata in MP1 at all... tMM's "MediaPortal" settings are made for MP1, not MP2. For movies this would work in MP2 too as MP2 is nearly 100% compatible to MovingPictures (from MP1) here. But for series you only will have Kodi compatible fanart and metadata as there is none in MP1. As Opposite Media-Buddy is mainly based on the MP2 standards, also we're working on a completely configurable and multi- compatible version. As example. Kodi expects season poster in the "root" series folder named "seasonxx-poster.jpg" where xx is the season number with 2 digits (e.g. season01-poster.jpg). MP2 expects those as "poster.jpg" in the season folders. Episodes thumbs for Kodi must be named "{videoname}-thumb.jpg" where MP2 prefers "{videoname}.jpg". Aside this it has to be "disc.png" for MP and "discart.png" for Kodi,...

Movieset fanart generally is not handled in Kodi. Instead of the movieset-fanart and movieset-poster it uses fanart and poster from one randomly picked movie belonging to this set... In my local Version (not jet released to public) of Media-Buddy there is a tool available to manipulate the Kodi Database to use the correct movieset fanart instead of a random movie fanart as it does ootb. And so on, and so on..

tMM can handle multiple online sources but the user needs to select which one to use. Media-Buddy uses theMovieDB, fanart.tv and TVDB all together and tries to get the best possible result. And if you still not satisfied you always can change things after the automatic scrapping. In my series collection there about 30 series not even listed on TVDB and about 20% of all my episodes don't have localized (German) description on TVDB. Many of them did have localized descriptions on TheMovieDB and additionally some of those series not listed on TVDB are available on themoviedb. Choosing only one online source could not deliver a close to perfect result. That's why Media-Buddy tries to get the best out of as many possible sources as available...

The "Final" version of Media-Buddy, once it's ready, will be able to store all fanart and metadata in a way it is compatible with both, Kodi and MediaPortal2. MediaPortal1 is not planed to be a part of this due to a lack of fanart support for series in general... For movies it is compatible to MP2 so MP1 can be used without issues too.

Could I make media-buddy run over my media folders, read the existing meta data (if possible) and rewrite the metadata in MP2-understandable format?

To answer this, yes you can. Some things (like episodes thumbs or discart.png) are not recognized when they are in Kodi naming scheme in the released version of Media-Buddy. Those things will work in the next public pre- release planned for early spring this year...
Hopefully we also will get the "final" version out in summer, but this can not be promised...

 

[ge2301]

I also show you the options in MP2 and TMM that I have chosen. I had previously chosen movie.nfo (for the movie NFO file naming option, have changed it to your option, but have not tried it yet). I also had chosen poster.ext and fanart.ext instead of the newly chosen options in red.

Just look into the folder of the media item first if tMM created the nfo file and the fanart and renamed all files. You can see it directly with your windows explorer.
If yes, what I guess, you have another problem in MP2 and you need to upload your log files after an import (but please not in this thread, as this is for media buddy). Before that: Why do you do use the "browse media" mode? Switch it to library view to have the full data available. "Browse Media" is not inteded for that, is just offeres an explorer-like navigation according your folder structure.