Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="dir" data-source="post: 194955" data-attributes="member: 24485">You can only select banners that it has already found via the Internet (I assume).  You can't select, for instance, to use a banner you have in d:\mybanners\tv\fraiser.jpg.  When the drop-down list is empty, I just want to navigate to the banners I already have.You'd have to add in every special character into this list.  That doesn't seem logical when everyone's using Windows file system, which doesn't allow these characters anyway.  Why force every user to add these manually when it's already impossible to match them as it stands?Not sure what you're referring to, but the manual selection method for large collections takes several days to complete.  Here's why:You start the importer running, and since it's going to take a while (usually an hour or so to get through the first pass), you go off and have a life doing other things.  When you come back, it's prompting you to select "Allo Allo".  You select it, and it goes off for a while to do some things.  You don't know how long it's going to take, and after waiting about 5 minutes, you again have a life and do other things.  You get back to it later, and it's prompting you for "Bionic Woman" because there's "The Bionic Woman" and "Bionic Woman" and a few other possible selections.  You click "Bionic Woman", and again it goes off.This repeats over and over and over and over and over and frikkin over, and it takes about 2 to 3 days to complete the entire exercise because eventually I have to go to bed, or work, or let the family use the TV.  I can't afford to sit at my tv waiting for this to complete and be ready each time to click on the right selection, because I'd go mad waiting. I accept that for some series there's some ambiguity that needs clarifying, but I've learnt over the years to name my directories and files as close to exactly correct as possible so that I don't get these sort of prompts.  So the solution, in my mind, is to have the logic "Strip out every special character first from the retrieved entries and compare it against the stripped out series name.  If there is an EXACT (and I mean, truely, exact - case exact, spacing exact, but again after stripping !, ?, -, :, (, ), ampersand, $, and everything else that isn't A to Z (for english language anyway) and 0-9) match, then use it.  Even if there are multiple possibilities.Example:My directory = "Bionic Woman"Possibilities:  "Bionic Woman" and "The Bionic Woman".Use Bionic Woman.  If I'd meant "The Bionic Woman", I would have named my directory "The Bionic Woman".  Example:My directory: "Mr. Bean"Possibilities: "Mr. Bean" and a few others.Use "Mr. Bean".  But it doesn't see these as equal because (I assume) of the period.  Or quotation mark, or question mark, or a bunch of other things.  If you ignored these characters, they're exactly the same.  But Windows doesn't allow all these characters so I can't name my directories exactly the same, so I get penalised.Sure, for new users with messy, unstructured directories, they have to standardise and cleanup.  But I'm sure we've all gone through the pain of realising that it's really just better to clean up your media collection file names so that you don't have problems all the time.  So if you're going to clean things up, you might as well get the names as close to correct as possible.Therefore, it would be far better to have the option to automatically select exact matches rather than prompting the user, for those of us with clean systems and large collections.  The current ability to tell it to automatically choose if there's only one choice doesn't work if there's multiple selections retrieved.  You're forced to choose the correct one, even though it's spelled identically.   It's nice that "Cash Poker" retrieves about 20 possibilities because there are lots of TV shows that happen to have "Cash" somewhere in their title, but honestly, it's overkill for those of us that have named our directories exactly correct.My collection's always been larger than usual and I'm usually the first to feel the pain that others eventually feel.  So I like to be vocal about these sorts of things early in the development cycle so that it's not so painful later on when a re-write is necessary once the majority of users' collections start getting large.  Things like the speed of display and retrieval, concurrent database access, searches, installation, parsing, etc. are all performance issues that hit me especially hard even though they may not appear to be significant issues (yet) for others.Apologies if this comes across as unduly harsh - I don't mean to be, nor critical. I'm just trying to give a clear rationale for something that causes me so much grief and thus I feel passionate about.  I went through months and months of pain with Meedio because plugin authors with small collections didn't see the point of catering to users with large collections.  Of course, I eventually learned that money talks louder than long rants, so I happily have contributed several hundred dollars over the last 2 years to Meedio authors, and I'll do the same again here!I just want what everyone else wants - high WAF, low maintenance, more quality couch time, and my collection presented neatly, visually, comprehensively, and audaciously!</blockquote>

Verification