Season Folder Auto-detection.

I've just started using TVRename and I think it could be very useful, but there's one major problem that makes it essentially unusable in my case. My shows are organized like this: Show Name\Season #\File.ext, which is a pretty "normal" setup, but I have one minor difference that seriously confuses TVRename: My season folders are not just "Season 1", they may be "Season 1 (Complete - BluRay-Rips)" for example. When TVRename attempts to scan the show folder it won't find a folder named exactly "Season 1", and asks me to Create/Browse/Ignore, etc... This wouldn't be a problem if my existing collection was just a few shows, but I have just short of 400 individual shows (with multiple seasons per show of course) that makes it practically impossible to manually browse to each and every season folder. My suggestion is to look for a folder that *contains* the text "Season 1" rather than looking for an exact match.

There is a similar issue using the automatic show detection in the Folder Monitor. The folders for my show names include the channel a show is from: 24 [FOX]. I had to manually search for every show to link them each to TVDB IDs (this is partially the fault of TheTVDB for being so strict with requiring nearly exact match searches).

you could take the part in paranthes and name a file with it .info and put in each folder.

I dont understand why you make a sub folder with EXT is that file extension it seems sort of useless Do media players even know how to read this.

I know I have over 50tb and just use

tvdrive1/tvshare1/tvshows/showname/season nn/metadata

I share from the tvshare folder to the lan any files not wanted to be seen on lan I move to drive1 folder.
the metadata folder contains pics of actor etc it is made for some media players

I create nfo and xlm data files for each show with metadata these go in the season folder along with the show videos
the showname folder just has folder.jpg and show.xml for browsing the shows.

you could take the part in paranthes and name a file with it .info and put in each folder.

I shy away from any sort of metadata because I like to have all of the most important information immediately available no matter how you are browsing my archive. Metadata would work fine if I wrote an import plugin for it in my HTPC frontend (Meedio), but it's essentially useless when browsing the folders directly and that's where it's most important that I see that information instantly at a glance.

I dont understand why you make a sub folder with EXT is that file extension it seems sort of useless Do media players even know how to read this.

".ext" is not part of my actual folder or filename structure, I just typed it that way in the post as a placeholder for the actual file extension.

I use xbmc and with the meta data it allows me to look for shows by actor genre etc
after watching a show and like some actor I can search for another show with them easly by remote control.

There is metadata programs for xbmc popcorn microsoftmediacenter and a few others.
I just use a pc connected to the tv and run it by a remote control that I got for $9.00 on ebay a while back
I had to adjust the windows icons to large and make the fonts a bit bigger to see but with as small as a 46 inch tv you can sit back 5-6 feet from tv and read the screen pretty well.

The problem with metadata nfo thumbs and folder pics is they are small and and many it causes lots more drive accesses and if you use large cluster sizes on the drives since they are mostly videos you will loose lots of space from the small files.
What I tend to do it have compression off for the whole drive but select all the small text files and compress them individually using properties. This frees up a few megs.
also for browsing if you have the proper codecs installed for the files you are watching in windows filemanager the extended attributes for the files will work like witdh height framerate etc. on xp or windows 7 this works pretty good with a fast computer but on vista the search is slow so it is a pain.

If you want to just browse without a media player I found moviejukebox program to be quite interesting it creates html of all you movies you can browse like a web page and lets you look up by genre year etc.


MeediOS verses XBMC for Windows - should I migrate? http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=41392