Does Auto Organize work with .wtv files?

[politby 88]

I have ponted Auto Organize to my Recorded TV folder, where series episodes are saved by WMC using the naming format

Showname-Season #, Episode# - Episode Title.wtv

E.g.   Criminal Minds-Season 2, Episode 23 - No Way Out.wtv

The WTV metadata has the same information in the subtitle and episode name fields:

 

 

Yet Auto Organize just says it is "unable to determine the series name".

 

 

Should not this be working? The file name and metadata are both pretty clear so what is wrong?

Edited February 23, 2014 by politby

[ebr 16173]

I don't believe we are interrogating any metadata at this point.  The feature is brand new.

[Luke 42078]

review the wiki for our list of file naming conventions that we support. that isn't one of them.

[Danee 57]

... But will it be?

[ebr 16173]

... But will it be?

 

The feature hasn't even been released yet.  Let us get it out in its first incarnation and then evolve from there.

[politby 88]

review the wiki for our list of file naming conventions that we support. that isn't one of them.

 

I am aware of those, but isn't the point of "auto organizing" to rename and move TO a standardized format? If a file already has a name format as specified in the wiki, it would mean it already has been matched to the correct show/episode and does not need a whole lot of organizing.

 

There are already lots of tools available which organize "media of questionable origin"  but none I have found that can take WTV metadata (which should not be that difficult to parse), find matches on thetvdb, and organize for MB3.

 

IMO maybe this should be a more important feature for MB3 than organizing files from torrents and usenet.

 

That being said, I realize this is a new feature and I have no business picking on something that isn't even a beta yet.  

[Danee 57]

The feature hasn't even been released yet.  Let us get it out in its first incarnation and then evolve from there.

I know, don't want to rush you or anything just eagerly awaiting what's comming

[politby 88]

Okay, I have managed to get WMC to name my recordings according to the following pattern:

 

Show name SxEy episode title.wtv

 

E.g.

 

Treme S4E4 Sunset on Louisianne.wtv

 

which is in accordance with the list of naming conventions in the wiki. And it exists at themoviedb.

 

I still get

 

[Latchmor 584]

Hi, as far as I remember all the conventions have preceding zeros in the Season and Episode numbers so your example above should be S04E04.

 

Give it a go. I could be wrong if the conventions have been updated.

 

Cheers

[politby 88]

My bad. I misinterpreted the error message. I now understand the series has to exist in the TV series folder otherwise it won't work. After I created a series/season folder plus a dummy episode file, it worked!

 

Zeros not required.

 

Is there any particular reason why it won't create a new series from scratch? Let's say I start recording a new series, this means I have to have it in the library for auto organize to work. If I just started out recording the series I won't have any episodes, so then I have to manually create folders and a dummy episode, plus rescan the library, before auto organize will work.

 

So close now... 

[Tikuf 663]

Is there any particular reason why it won't create a new series from scratch?

 

Yup it wasn't coded. I think Luke has fixed this (i'm getting old and cant remember lol)

[politby 88]

Yup it wasn't coded. I think Luke has fixed this (i'm getting old and cant remember lol)

 

Knew there was a good reason. 

 

I stopped installing dev builds so if Luke did fix it I'll just wait for the next beta...

[wallaceff 3]

Shouldn't it be set to insert it into the episode name rather than the show title? Wouldn't this otherwise break series recordings? (And look very ugly as it currently looks on your pic)?

[politby 88]

Okay, I have managed to get WMC to name my recordings according to the following pattern:

 

Show name SxEy episode title.wtv

 

E.g.

 

Treme S4E4 Sunset on Louisianne.wtv

 

which is in accordance with the list of naming conventions in the wiki. And it exists at themoviedb.

 

 

 

This post resulted in a bunch of PMs asking me how I did this so I'll explain below; maybe it will help someone.

 

My source of EPG data for WMC is an XML data provider (timefortv.com) from where I grab an XMLTV file every 24 hours. This XML file has properly formatted series data for most shows, unlike Microsoft's EPG or the in band data from most providers. Note timefortv.com covers a number of northern European countries plus Italy (I am in Sweden) so you will need to find one that covers your area.

 

The grabber app (XMLTVGUI) reads the XML, inserts the SxEy episode string into the show title field and then saves a new XMLTV file which is used by DVBlink, the TVserver software I use, to populate the WMC EPG. This gets me a properly formatted show title which then becomes part of the recording file name as per the registry changes described in this forum.

 

 

There are other tools, e.g. BigScreen EPG, which can load an XMLTV file into the WMC EPG, provided you have the XMLTV source.

 

So the key to this is the XMLTV grab process. The XMLTV spec stores season/episode data in a special field called "xmltv_ns" but there are no corresponding field(s) in the WTV metadata. So the season/episode data must be copied into the "title" field before the XML is loaded into WMC. Hence the need for post processing the XMLTV file, and XMLTVGUI does that for me (I had to a make few small tweaks to its script).

 

Also this will be needed even if/when MB3S starts parsing WTV metadata because there simply is no season/episode data in the WTV schema. In the U.S., "first aired date" is sometimes useful for matching episodes to thetvdb, but that date is generally meaningless here in Europe, if at all available.

 

Hope this helps, let me know if you need more details.

Edited March 3, 2014 by politby

[politby 88]

Shouldn't it be set to insert it into the episode name rather than the show title? Wouldn't this otherwise break series recordings? (And look very ugly as it currently looks on your pic)?

 

Good catch. I had gotten the parameters mixed up. This is the correct result.

 

Edited March 4, 2014 by politby