Movies Title Not Identified / No Metadata Retrieved

[Guest]

Dear Sirs,

 

About 2 years ago I was a user of MediaBrowser (dunno witch version), at which time movies were identified without a problem and metada was always retrieved successfully.

 

Now I've decided to try out Emby, but my movies are not identified. I've discovered the reason for this - my unique naming scheme. Here is how I name my files:

 

.....

 

[1955] Rebel Without a Cause

[1976] Casanova

[1979] Manhattan

 

....

 

I found out this was the case when I saw "[1968] 2001 - A Space Odyssey" appeared on the Emby Theater library just as "[1968" (yes, missing the final "]") and set as year "2001".

 

It seems out of about 200 movies, very, VERY few (no more than 10) were identified, ammong them "[1960] Spartacus" and "[1983] Zelig".

 

I also noticed that when I I tried to edit the file through the Broswer Dashboard, when trying to click "identify" (manual search), nothing came up.

 

Furthermore, I've tried deleting library.db and rescanning the library, to no avail.

 

Anyway, I'm at a loss as to how to solve this, and don't understand why a few movies do get identified.

 

Thanks for your assistance and for all your work into making this software!

 

 

 

 

[Vidman 589]

I name my movies "moviename (year).ext" and have very few issues with any metadata fetching software

[ebr 14959]

Square brackets are a convention for something to be ignored in the file name.  Typically it is information such as resolution, source, etc.

 

See our wiki on naming conventions for what is supported.

[Guest]

@Vidman: I think as long as the movie is properly named, It should work. Also, personally I don't find your naming scheme very usefull. When it comes to movies, I don't care for alphabetic order, I don't find it insightful when organizing or looking for specific files.

 

@ebr: OK. But why won't it ignore what's in the brackets and just consider the name of the movie? Right now, in virtually every case it is not considering anything - just blank.

Edited December 6, 2015 by dboccia

[Happy2Play 8356]

Identify does a blank search with brackets preceding name.

 

2015-12-05 18:39:06.0446 Info HttpServer: HTTP POST http://localhost:9096/emby/Items/RemoteSearch/Movie. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.73 Safari/537.36
2015-12-05 18:39:06.0446 Info App: HttpClientManager GET: http://www.omdbapi.com/?plot=short&r=json&s=&type=movie
2015-12-05 18:39:06.1278 Info App: MovieDbProvider: Finding id for item:
2015-12-05 18:39:06.1278 Info App: HttpClientManager GET: http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669&query=&language=en
2015-12-05 18:39:06.4094 Error App: Error getting response from http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669&query=&language=en

 

Using Identify with just name, doesn't display anything even though the log sees the request.

 

2015-12-05 18:34:02.5942 Info HttpServer: HTTP POST http://localhost:9096/emby/Items/RemoteSearch/Movie. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.73 Safari/537.36
2015-12-05 18:34:02.5942 Info App: HttpClientManager GET: http://www.omdbapi.com/?plot=short&r=json&s=Casanova&type=movie
2015-12-05 18:34:02.6153 Info App: MovieDbProvider: Finding id for item: Casanova
2015-12-05 18:34:02.6153 Info App: HttpClientManager GET: http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=f6bd687ffa63cd282b6ff2c6877f2669&query=Casanova&language=en
2015-12-05 18:34:02.7463 Info HttpServer: HTTP Response 200 to ::1. Time: 152ms. http://localhost:9096/emby/Items/RemoteSearch/Movie

[Vidman 589]

@Vidman: I think as long as the movie is properly named, It should work. Also, personally I don't find your naming scheme very usefull. When it comes to movies, I don't care for alphabetic order, I don't find it insightful when organizing or looking for specific files.

 

@ebr: OK. But why won't it ignore what's in the brackets and just consider the name of the movie? Right now, in virtually every case it is not considering anything - just blank.

Really as I said it's a pretty universally accepted convention if you want your folders/files automatically identified Edited December 6, 2015 by Vidman

[Luke 37258]

Well even though you're not going to get an automated solution, hopefully you'll give some credit that an effort was made . I took a look at our parsing. Changing this would be quite challenging, just look at these regex expressions to "clean" the name:

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby.Naming/blob/master/MediaBrowser.Naming/Common/NamingOptions.cs#L163-L172

 

I verified the behavior you're seeing and that happy2play confirmed. Everything to the right of the braces is braces is stripped. So I then went a little further - we borrowed these regexes from Kodi, maybe the code running the regexes could be adjusted. But as it turns out, we're doing  it correctly according to Kodi standards (the convention we've chosen to adopt):

 

See http://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#cleanstrings

Clean unwanted characters from filenames or folders by using a list of Regular Expressions. Please note that everything right of the match (at the end of the file name) is removed, so if you would have a file named Super movie.mp4 and would add <regexp> </regexp> (only a space), the only thing that would be left is Super, which is probably not what you want.

So your solution is to use the Identify feature and enter the title of the movie as search criteria.

[Deathsquirrel 741]

You can use the identify function to manually identify the movies.  If you do this, be sure to save you metadata in the media folders so you don't have to do it again if something happens to the Emby cache.

 

Alternatively you can rename the movie files.

[Guest]

To all who've responded:

 

Thank you so much for diving into this problem and explaining it to me. Now I understandd better the technical aspect of this issue.

 

Anyway, I guess I'd rather rename them using RenameMaster...

 

Would changing the brackets for parenthesis work? As in "(1955) Rebel Without a Cause"? I'd really like to hold on to cronological sorting.

[chef 3749]

Also, I believe there is a filter you can apply to your library view which will sort your movies in cronological order.

 

Therefore you could technically remove the year altogether and select "year" as the sorting order.

 

The year information is saved in the .nfo/.xml metadata file.

 

This would of coarse not be present in your physical file system.

Edited December 6, 2015 by chef

[Deathsquirrel 741]

Also, I believe there is a filter you can apply to your library view which will sort your movies in cronological order.

 

Therefore you could technically remove the year altogether and select "year" as the sorting order.

 

The year information is saved in the .nfo/.xml metadata file.

 

This would of coarse not be present in your physical file system.

 

You can but then remakes become a PITA.  The format 'Movie Title (YEAR)' is the most reliable one for matching records against the metadata sources and not mixing up two movies with the same title.

[chef 3749]

You can but then remakes become a PITA. The format 'Movie Title (YEAR)' is the most reliable one for matching records against the metadata sources and not mixing up two movies with the same title.

Good point, Hollywood loves the remakes.

 

When I look at my physical drives I realize that I named the folder that the media file is in with the date: "name(year)".

Edited December 6, 2015 by chef

[Happy2Play 8356]

Tested in Dev Version 3.0.5818.30281, You can keep your naming scheme, but have to identify without bracketed year.  With all your movies that way it will be a lot of manual work for you to identify every movie.

[Vidman 589]

To all who've responded:

 

Thank you so much for diving into this problem and explaining it to me. Now I understandd better the technical aspect of this issue.

 

Anyway, I guess I'd rather rename them using RenameMaster...

 

Would changing the brackets for parenthesis work? As in "(1955) Rebel Without a Cause"? I'd really like to hold on to cronological sorting.

Why do you care how file system stores them, if they are identified and the correct metadata is downloaded easily and automatically, you can use that to sort by what ever criteria you want within the emby system (or any other media library software) Edited December 6, 2015 by Vidman

[Guest]

Tested in Dev Version 3.0.5818.30281, You can keep your naming scheme, but have to identify without bracketed year.  With all your movies that way it will be a lot of manual work for you to identify every movie.

 

Oh, ok! That's great news. Thanks for looking into it. Indeed it would be a lot of work, and not a "futureproof" solution in my view - who knows if and when I might only partially copy some of these files to another machine with Emby and have to decide if I would waste less time by searching and copying the individual metada for the respective files or just going through "identify" again...

 

Why do you care how file system stores them, if they are identified and the correct metadata is downloaded easily and automatically, you can use that to sort by what ever criteria you want within the emby system (or any other media library software)

 

Well, When manually brwosing these files in windows - something I do fairly frequently to copy/move/replace itens - I find it easier to do so with my naming scheme. But if you'd like to know, thats pretty much how I name a great part of my files - music, pictures, many excel spreadsheets... - It's just what I've personally chosen as a naming convention. Bear in mind you are talking to a guy who made high resolution scans of over 5000 family negatives that were basically all ramdomly cut into various sized strips and almost completely unsorted, as well as another 2000 itens including printed pictures, letters, cards and other memorabilia and made great research efforts so as to have it all organized by DAY. So yeah, I like having my stuff throughly organized, and I like to maintain a pattern. It will be a burden to me having to break a pattern I`ve sucesfully enjoyed using all over the rest of my system.

 

PS: Also, I do not like to think myself dependant on any software to correctly view my files, being that all software can cease to exist, become obsolete or simply change the way it works. I like to be independant. Thats why I keep my OS in one HD, and all other files in another HD. The files are really the only thing that matter, and I want them far and away from any other transitory data.

Edited December 7, 2015 by dboccia

[Guest]

Tested in Dev Version 3.0.5818.30281, You can keep your naming scheme, but have to identify without bracketed year.  With all your movies that way it will be a lot of manual work for you to identify every movie.

 

 

Hello! I susbtituted the " [ ] " for " ( ) " and a few more got identified, but most are still suffering from the same problem as before. I tried using identify and it is still isn't returning any results.

[spootdev 56]

You could try feeding them into Filebot and renaming the works.  I've had very good luck with that tool.

 

Or perhaps just a quick script to take the "[nnnn] title" and rename it to "title (nnnn)" would solve most of the issues as well.

Edited December 13, 2015 by spootdev

[Luke 37258]

Hello! I susbtituted the " [ ] " for " ( ) " and a few more got identified, but most are still suffering from the same problem as before. I tried using identify and it is still isn't returning any results.

 

can you give a specific example?

[Guest]

can you give a specific example?

 

Sure!

 

The following movies are now identified:

 

(1982) Blade Runner

(1982) Koyaanisqatsi

(1988) They Live

(2008) Wall-e

(2014) Lucy

 

 

The following movies continue to be unnidentified:

 

(1939) Gone With The Wind

(1940) The Great Dictator

(1976) Casanova

(1993) Falling Down

(2007) No Country for Old Men

[ebr 14959]

We probably are sending the complete string to tmdb as a search since we don't recognize it as a year in front of the name.

 

If I search tmdb for "(1982) Blade Runner" it finds Blade Runner.  If I search it for "(1939) Gone With The Wind" it returns no results.

[Luke 37258]

Exactly. This convention is still not on our supported convention list for movies, but I do expect that it will at least produce better results than the brackets.

[Vidman 589]

You could try feeding them into Filebot and renaming the works. I've had very good luck with that tool.

 

Or perhaps just a quick script to take the "[nnnn] title" and rename it to "title (nnnn)" would solve most of the issues as well.

 

 

Well, When manually brwosing these files in windows - something I do fairly frequently to copy/move/replace itens - I find it easier to do so with my naming scheme. But if you'd like to know, thats pretty much how I name a great part of my files - music, pictures, many excel spreadsheets... - It's just what I've personally chosen as a naming convention. Bear in mind you are talking to a guy who made high resolution scans of over 5000 family negatives that were basically all ramdomly cut into various sized strips and almost completely unsorted, as well as another 2000 itens including printed pictures, letters, cards and other memorabilia and made great research efforts so as to have it all organized by DAY. So yeah, I like having my stuff throughly organized, and I like to maintain a pattern. It will be a burden to me having to break a pattern I`ve sucesfully enjoyed using all over the rest of my system.

 

PS: Also, I do not like to think myself dependant on any software to correctly view my files, being that all software can cease to exist, become obsolete or simply change the way it works. I like to be independant. Thats why I keep my OS in one HD, and all other files in another HD. The files are really the only thing that matter, and I want them far and away from any other transitory data.

Edited December 14, 2015 by Vidman

[Guest]

We probably are sending the complete string to tmdb as a search since we don't recognize it as a year in front of the name.

 

If I search tmdb for "(1982) Blade Runner" it finds Blade Runner.  If I search it for "(1939) Gone With The Wind" it returns no results.

 

My experience differs from yours. If I go to  IMDb.com and search for "(1939) Gone With The Wind" I do get results (as is the case for all the other unnidentified movies).

[Luke 37258]

we don't use imdb as it's not a freely available source. we use others such as TheMovieDb.org and omdbapi.com

[Sigma9 0]

So if the square brackets are ignored in the file name why can't you set up the file name as [year] movie name (year)?? 

 

I do not know much at all about that kind of stuff but from reading the replies in the thread it sounds like the [ ] get ignored anyway. Is that right?