Show dvr-ms info in My Videos (1 Viewer)

[Bosso]

I put old TV recordings wich I wish to keep for a while in the my Videos catalog. But when browsing them there, the program info is gone, and the only thing I can browse is the filename.
(also when upgrading MP version with new database I have to browse recordings this way)

It would be nice if MP could show all info, as it is done in My TV/Recorded TV
if a dvr-ms file is selected in my videos.

Additionally it would be nice if there was a feature to "save" recordings from My TV/Recorded TV.
My save, I mean move them out of the Recorded TV database without deleting the dvr-ms file. Optinally also move the file to a "saved recordings" directory which then can be browsed from my Videos.

/Bosso

 

[huh]

great idea, save movie from Recorded TV to MY MOVIES with optional conversion from dvr-ms

 

[juvinious]

That's because the description info is retained in the database. When the database changes, you lose all your data from before. This shoud be resolved from the next release onward, as there will be an option to export most of the info saved in the TVDatabase, including Recorded info, to XML and restore it in the new database.
That should take care of your old recordings and lost info.
In sense, with this ability you shouldn't have to worry about moving your recordings to where you have to watch them under My Videos, because they will continually be available under My TV.

 

[mPod]

This shoud be resolved from the next release onward, as there will be an option to export most of the info saved in the TVDatabase, including Recorded info, to XML and restore it in the new database.

As a suggestion, this could be done automatically, rather than exporting/importing it by hand. If MP finds an older version of the DB, it could put the data in the newly created DB (if you like with a yes/no dialogue), so there's no need for export/import by hand. How should I know if the DB has changed? If I'd notice that, I'd have to remove the new version of MP, reinstall the older one again, export the files, remove the old version, install the new version again and then I can import the data again.... Not usable in my opinion. And this can be solved without a problem. More user-friendly.
But as usual, the current solution with export/import by hand is an iterim solution, so hopefully, MP will do it automatically in the future. :wink:
That can be done for all databases, of course.

 

[Bosso]

I tried to manually export and import database info, but since I'm a novice handling databases, I gave up.

Still I think the function "save recording" would be nice, simply because the list under my Recordings easily gets big over time, and not possible to sort easily to find for example a whole TV series.
Maybe the program data has to be saved with the dvr-ms file to make this function well.
Maybe saving it in a file with the same filename but .xml with all the info would be a solution.

but of course I am very pleased to hear about the new database->xml->database stuff. It will help.

/Bosso

 

[samuel337]

I'm curious about something else - the dvr-ms format enables tv program data to be stored within the file (similar to how artist, title, track etc information is stored within a MP3 file). Does MP do this? If not why? Because this is a potential solution to all these problems...

San

 

[juvinious]

Does the dvr-ms format contain tags or metadata that holds video information, names, series, or any other extra information? I did several searches on the web and found that many people had several complaints about the format itself but nothing quite clear on specifications. As far as I see media portal retains all that info in the TVDatabase.
About the auto upgrade stuff above, I'm sure when the software goes alpha or is in a much more stable state, consideration will be placed on automation. I mean you still have to manually update MP (i.e. uninstall, re-install new ver. etc etc).

 

[samuel337]

Does the dvr-ms format contain tags or metadata that holds video information, names, series, or any other extra information? I did several searches on the web and found that many people had several complaints about the format itself but nothing quite clear on specifications. As far as I see media portal retains all that info in the TVDatabase.

I'm not 100% about this stuff, but this is what MSDN says:

The DVR-MS file format contains audio, video, and closed captioning data, but it also contains metadata describing the file and its contents. This is where information such as a television show's title, description, cast, and original air date are stored once the show has been recorded. What's cool is that this data is easily accessible to your own applications through the IStreamBufferRecordingAttribute interface, which is implemented by the DirectShow StreamBufferRecordingAttribute object. This object can be created using its CLSID as I've done with other DirectShow objects in this article.

See this article, especially the 'Accessing DVR-MS Metadata' section for more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/smartclie...y/en-us/dnxpmce/html/dvr-ms.asp#dvr-ms_topic8

Sam

 

[klestor]

Anybody know a of a DOS command line based util that can extract meta-data from dvr-ms?