(original thread) MP-TVSeries (2 Viewers)

[lampie]

Thanks guys the delete works There is also a small skin problem. When you play a series and push the back button on the remote, the small screeen showing the series is overlayed upon the series text (on the left). If this textbox would be smaller in height it would fit nicely

Done it allready

Change in TVSeries.xml:

<control>
<type>textboxscrollup</type>
<description>Description</description>
<id>31</id>
<posX>60</posX>
<posY>280</posY>
<width>620</width>
<height>414</height>

TO:

<control>
<type>textboxscrollup</type>
<description>Description</description>
<id>31</id>
<posX>60</posX>
<posY>280</posY>
<width>620</width>
<height>214</height>

So you change height 414 to 214

You can do this with:

MePo skin wide
BlueTwo wide
Razor

And others based on Bluetwo wide

 

[Bobb25]

Will fiddle tonight with .6b when i get home tonight when i get a chance(wife gets bloody grumpy when i am fiddling and faffing with the HTPC and all she wants to do is watch Without a Trace!)

I have a request that should let me track my backed up episodes easily. Rather than having a flag which you can set with every episode which reflects a distinguishing character in MP to highllight which eps are backed up, could we have an option to display file size in MP-TVseries? That way when my wife sees that an episode is 700kB, she knows it is a placement avi for a backed up episode!

 

[mcbelly]

Will fiddle tonight with .6b when i get home tonight when i get a chance(wife gets bloody grumpy when i am fiddling and faffing with the HTPC and all she wants to do is watch Without a Trace!)
!

Yeah, wifes can get pretty mean, when it comes to their series (here : Gilmore Girls), and after all : We´re doing this for OUR fun, THEY don´t need it. Until it doesn´t work for some reason ,-)

Back to topic :
Same problem with the series description, I have ~3800 files, which are on several network shares, so the average import is ~800 files. Probably the same problem Bobb25 described.

Another one : Series are ordered by their "parsed name", not by the name of the series. Remember how series on network shares are not parsed correctly (first letter missing) ? Guess what happens to "Battlestar Galactica"...suddenly it appears before "Alias"....


However, still my favourite Plugin !

mcbelly

 

[Jetboy]

Usually it looks something like this:
the.daily.show.11.30.06.dsr.xvid-crimson.avi
the.daily.show.11.28.06.dsr.xvid-crimson.[VTV].avi

but sometimes it's like this:
The Daily Show 19th October 2006.avi

I don't know if it's possible to try to parse the air date in different date formats, it sounds kind of complicated.

I don't know if this plugin can solve the problem, but I hope so. I've seen the air date naming thing in a few of my girlfriend's Top Model episodes as well. For now I'll just keep renaming the files.


Oh and I don't think I've mentioned this before: This plugin is truly excellent!

Even if you managed to parse every possible combinations representing a date with regexp (good luck), it doesn't change the fact that the entry point to retrieve data about an episode on the server DB is series ID / season index / episode index.
No way to ask for things by date or something else.
Of course it *could* be possible to implement some kind of interface that would remotely enable a client to ask for a specific value in a specific data field, but it would still pretty difficult to have valid matches this way.

Yeah, I kind of figured it would be difficult/impossible. Anyway, thanks a lot for this great plugin!

 

[zeflash]

Hi zeflash -

OK, I finally narrowed this down as being related to the size of the tree/number of episodes. Bobb25 and I both have in excess of 2TB/5500+ episodes, and if you specify the video root, and make MP-TVSeries parse/import the whole thing at once, for whatever reason, the epsiode summaries are not imported/updated.

If however I add the series paths individually, and parse/import them individually (this took a while with 55 different series collections), the episode summaries are correctly imported/updated, therefore this must be a problem related to the number of episodes that need to be imported/updated in UpdateEpisodes phase in one import pass. (could we be using a shortint vs. a longint somewhere?)

I seem to remember that you used to do large numbers of UpdateEpisodes in 'chunks' of N (can't remember what 'N' was), eg. 'Updating N episodes, X left', but this iterative update loop doesn't seem to work with these big numbers of episodes.

-m

You are totally right, I removed that when Zsori told me it wasn't needed anymore (he changed the way the update works on the server side as it used to be limited before).
But I guess that in your case, there is still the *other* issue I forgot about on the server side, the size of the generated xml response. Maybe that was changed because what I remember is that the xml would just be cut off if asking for too many items at once, therefore making the whole update fail (and not just the summaries).

Anyway, I'm putting back the batch mode, I'll do 500 episodes at a time, and everything should be fine

Thanks to you again for those splendid reports . It makes my life tracking bugs so much easier !!

 

[patrick]

Another one : Series are ordered by their "parsed name", not by the name of the series. Remember how series on network shares are not parsed correctly (first letter missing) ? Guess what happens to "Battlestar Galactica"...suddenly it appears before "Alias"....

I use a network share and do not see this problem with a missing letter in the parsing.

Any chance you want to supply the regex used and a full path/filename example?

patrick

 

[mst3kroqs]

Hi zeflash -

You're welcome. (I am kind of 'in the business', so to speak). :^)

OK, so as you seem to be nearing the point of squashing the last of the bugs, I have withheld major feature suggestions, but here are a couple you could possibly consider. (and have probably heard before)

Many of us have extraneous series-related/episode content which are definitely associated with a series, however do not line up to a tvdb entry. For instance, specials, documentaries, etc.

What would be really nice is if you could allow the user to name their files in the same standard way as they do for the rest of the files for that series, except placing this content in season #0, and arbitrarily assigning an episode number, eg:

Family Guy [0x01] This is a Family Guy Special.avi

MP-TVSeries would of course parse a valid <series>, <season>, <episode>, <title> and <ext> for this, it's just that there would usually (not always) be a corresponding Season 0 on tvdb. Obviously, if there is a Season 0, and episodes associated with it, you'd proceed normally, pulling the info from tvdb, however for any episode that did not have a corresponding Season 0 tvdb entry, just go ahead and add that to the local db, and then when displaying the seasons, either display this as 'Season 0', or allow an override in the configurator which would allow us to put in the label of our choice for Season 0 (eg 'Specials' or 'Documentaries').

We can then manually edit details in the db to fill in our own description, etc.

Now to be clear - if there is an entry in tvdb for the special/content, we'll probably all just renumber to match that, however this would provide a good generalized way to allow our own 'custom' content to appear with the series in the plugin display. Currently, I have to switch over to 'My Video', and navigate back to it.

The only other primary thing on my 'wishlist' is the multiple/combined episode import, and my suggestion for that logic would be as follows:

Allow us to specify a 'delimiter'. Many of us use either '-' or '&'. My multiple episodes are named as such:

path\path\<series> [<season>x<episode>] <title>.<ext>

When I have a multiple episode, it is named:

path\path\<series> [<season>x<episode1>-<episodeN>] <title>.<ext>

In fact, the current logic actually works pretty good, it actually parses and assigns the file to the db entry associated with episode1, and from my perspective, all that has to happen here is to also assign the same combined local filename/content to the corresponding episode data found in tvdb for episode2. Frankly, if you never added the feature, I for one could live with that.

But, if you wanted to try to do this, I guess you need to 'internally' check if the character following the text parsed as '<episode>' matches the specified delimiter character, and if it does, assign that value to <episode1>, remove the characters+delimiter associated with <episode1>, then execute the same parsing logic again to obtain the <episodeN> number. Now, do the normal tvdb episode lookup logic from episode1 to episodeN, and assign the local filename accordingly to all of the retrieved entries.

Much easier described than done, I'm sure, and I'm sure there are also a number of other better methods.

I have a number of other suggestions for the plugin, but these are my 'Top 2'.

Having said all of this, I believe that once you fix the mass import issue, you are very very close to a 1.0 thing, and the above suggestions are more geared towards suggesting ways we can break it after that. :^)

Congratulations!

-m

 

[mcbelly]

Another one : Series are ordered by their "parsed name", not by the name of the series. Remember how series on network shares are not parsed correctly (first letter missing) ? Guess what happens to "Battlestar Galactica"...suddenly it appears before "Alias"....

I use a network share and do not see this problem with a missing letter in the parsing.

Any chance you want to supply the regex used and a full path/filename example?

patrick

Sure, no problem.

path : N:\Malcolm in the middle\Malcolm in the middle S07e02.avi

The Regex I use, are the ones provided with the plugin, no change there.

Attached is an example.


mcbelly

 

[patrick]

Many of us have extraneous series-related/episode content which are definitely associated with a series, however do not line up to a tvdb entry. For instance, specials, documentaries, etc.

What would be really nice is if you could allow the user to name their files in the same standard way as they do for the rest of the files for that series, except placing this content in season #0, and arbitrarily assigning an episode number, eg:

Family Guy [0x01] This is a Family Guy Special.avi

I would also love to be able to add episodes AND series that
are not in TVDB to the tvseries database, but I would suggest just
adding them just as they are parsed, no special handling required.

So for example, Family Guy [3x999] This is a Family Guy Special.avi
shows up with the other season 3 episodes just as episode 999
with what ever information was obtained with the parsing.
Same would apply for any series and/or episode not in the TVDB.

The only other primary thing on my 'wishlist' is the multiple/combined episode import, and my suggestion for that logic would be as follows:

Allow us to specify a 'delimiter'. Many of us use either '-' or '&'. My multiple episodes are named as such:

path\path\<series> [<season>x<episode>] <title>.<ext>

When I have a multiple episode, it is named:

path\path\<series> [<season>x<episode1>-<episodeN>] <title>.<ext>

I would not even worry about requiring a delimiter, just check if the
regex string has "episodeN" fields instead of a single "episode" field
and again just let the parser do the work.


Just my 2.5 cents

patrick

 

[patrick]

Another one : Series are ordered by their "parsed name", not by the name of the series. Remember how series on network shares are not parsed correctly (first letter missing) ? Guess what happens to "Battlestar Galactica"...suddenly it appears before "Alias"....

I use a network share and do not see this problem with a missing letter in the parsing.

Any chance you want to supply the regex used and a full path/filename example?

patrick

Sure, no problem.

path : N:\Malcolm in the middle\Malcolm in the middle S07e02.avi

The Regex I use, are the ones provided with the plugin, no change there.

Attached is an example.


mcbelly

I think there is an error in the code but you can add a regex to
work around it and use the filename instead of the path.

\\(?<series>.+)(?:s(?<season>[0-1]?[0-9])e(?<episode>[0-9]{2})|(?<season>(?:[0-1][0-9]|(?<!\d)[0-9]))x?(?<episode>[0-9]{2}))(?!\d)[ \-\.]*(?<title>[^\\]*?)\.(?<ext>[^.]*)$

Worked for me in parsing the sample you provided.

As for the possible error in the code it is @ line 35 in Filelister.cs

line 30
// trim the import path root from the filenames 
line 35
pair.sMatch_FileName = localFile.Substring(importPath[DBImportPath.cPath].ToString().Length + 1);

I think it should be "Length" not + 1 to trim the import path


HTH,
patrick