Not real happy with upgrade

I do know you guys do an overall excellent job. I had held off with upgrading to 4.0.6.0 to make certain that it was stable. After reading the glowing praise I bit the bullet. Actually I think I shot myself in the foot.

Things that have occurred.
1. A great many of my smart playlists have disappeared. I had a playlist "By Set". This had in it a smart playlist showing all movies in a particular set. So for instance Star Wars would have in it all of the star wars movies. I had a playlist for every movie series that had 2 or more movies in it. So there were a lot of playlists. After the upgrade I have 6 playlists. This is a little bit weird but I know how to create playlists so it will just take a lot of time to recover. I believe they disappeared because when the titles changed there were no longer any entries so the list was deleted.

2. Almost all of my movies have been marked as tv show. Most now have the title: All Movies: S0000 E0000 Actual Title
All of my shows are stored on a NAS. It is configured as:
\
\AVIs
\BluRay
\DVD
\DVD\Series
\DVD\Series\24
\DVD\Series\Ally McBeal
\DVD\Series\Babylon 5
\DVD\Series\Babylon 5\Season 1
\DVD\Series\Babylon 5\Movies
\DVD\Family
\DVD\All Movies (this is where all of the movie titles are stored unless the movie is part of a tv series then it would be under series)
3. The actual Series (not all of which were recognized as such) Are now marked: 24: S0001 E0001: 24: S0001 E0001: 12:00 A.M.-1:00 A.M.

So at present my library is pretty much unusable until I go through and change probably 90% to what they should be. I have 2,184 video files to go though. I am afraid to look at what it did to the music library

May I make the suggestion that when/if the system is going to alter something like the title you show the user what the current title is and what it will become. Then allow the user to make changes and update that entry. It could also be use to make they changes to the template for the entire library.
John

Hi John,

Sorry for the poor upgrade experience. We'll get you back up and running. From the description of your issues, I can guess that you did not run Maintain Library after upgrading. We highly recommend that you do this after upgrading since it ensures your titles are correct and that Mezzmo collects all the new metadata that has been introduced in Mezzmo v4.x. After maintenance, I think your titles & playlists will return to a more expected form.

So first step is to run Maintain Library. On the Maintain Library dialog, select the "Update all attributes" radio button and select the "Update media properties", "Update artwork" and "Update subtitles" checkboxes. This will make sure all your metadata is re-collected and corrected if wrong. After maintenance has completed, check the Properties dialog for one of the movies, TV shows, etc. and check that they are OK. After active playlist processing step has completed, then your playlists should look better also.

Further notes:

1. Your playlists should not disappear from your Mezzmo library (...I have not seen this before). You may have no files in your smart playlists and this will be due to the metadata collected for your files - but your playlists should still exist albeit empty. Please turn on logging in Mezzmo (see http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread...nostic-logging) and restart your Mezzmo server. Exit Mezzmo app and start it again. Browse some of your playlists in Mezzmo and then stop your Mezzmo server and exit Mezzmo. Zip up all your log files and email them to us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com.

2. After maintenance, I expect your movies to be correctly regarded as movies now. If not, let us know via email with a set of logs and we'll look into it. Note: The Movies and TV shows playlists now use the Category value to determine if a movie or TV shows should be listed the Movies or TV Shows playlists. You will see a new Category field on the Properties dialog. Movies will have a category value of "Movie" and TV shows will have a category value of "TV show". Mezzmo automatically assigns these category values to your files when it collects metadata from external metadata files or from the internet.

3. After maintenance, your TV shows should be named correctly again. Also, you can change your titles using the new Display Titles feature, Display Titles let you control how you want your titles displayed for different types of files that you have - including your TV shows, movies, music, photos, etc. See this FAQ to change them as you wish - http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread...ur-media-files.

Let us know how you go.

Hi Paul,
Let me clarify. I shot myself in the foot. The software works as it was intended to do. I started using Mezzmo a long time ago. Back then it did not have all of the amazing features it does now. Many of those things Like TV Series etc did not exist. So I cleverly (I thought) found interesting ways to do them within the scope of what the SW allowed. Now of course it is better to use the tools/methods available.

I did in fact perform a maintain library when I first installed. I did that to allow the db to update. But I had set it to not overwrite the info which was already there. That was the mistake that cause things to be mis-marked. Once I ran maintain again and allowed it to overwrite all info the system did correct the errors. Here is the kicker it also changed all of the genre information to match IMDB and TVDB. That was one of the things that I really did not want since much of that is based upon someones opinion. Many times they can not follow a simple convention i.e. is it Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Science-Fiction, SF or something else they though was cute? I prefer mine to all be the same. (Yes I know it can be fixed easily). Then there is the TV series naming and playlists. Since they got all turned around I have decided to go with your standard. AT least future upgrades should be easier.

I do not know what had happened to the play lists. After several hours they re-appeared. Perhaps the system was doing something in the background and had not finished. The status had shown it was complete but whatever they are back. It will make them easier to modify to support the new naming anyway.

The movies names have reverted to movie names but many are not correct. As with any automatic system not all choices can be made perfect. For instance the Movie Batman & Robin with George Cloony had defaulted to the 1949 version. So pretty much everything from IMDB for that movie was incorrect. I will have to check all of the other titles to put things back in order. The easy ones are those that it did not find a match for so it shows a screen grab the ones that have real artwork showing will be a little tougher to find.

Hi John,

Thanks for the explanation. It sounds like you are mostly up and running now - except for tweaking your Mezzmo library to your liking.

Regarding TV series naming, you can change them as you like now using Display Titles - and this will be maintained during future upgrades. For example, right-click on the TV series playlist and click Properties. On the Properties dialog, click the Display Titles button and you will see the Display Titles for that particular playlist.

Regarding movies, if you are getting mismatches on originals vs. re-makes, you can append the year to the file name to help Mezzmo decide which movie to choose (i.e. the original or the re-make). For example, "Batman and robin (1949).mkv" vs. "Batman and robin (1997).mkv". And, if you find a bunch of movies that are not matched correctly, you can email us the full path of the video files for these mismatches and we will test them here to further tweak Mezzmo's movie matching (e.g. F:\Videos\Movies\Inception-HD-1080P-AC3.MKV).

If you find any other issues after upgrading, let us know and we'll help out.

Yes I am back up and running. It is not difficult since I hav adopted many conventions to make my life easier. I did decide to move over to your way of doing things now that they meet my needs. Hopefully no future upgrade will cause problems. There is one thing that you said that triggered a concern. That was when you said: 'Regarding movies, if you are getting mismatches on originals vs. re-makes, you can append the year to the file name to help Mezzmo decide which movie to choose (i.e. the original or the re-make). For example, "Batman and robin (1949).mkv" vs. "Batman and robin (1997).mkv". And, if you find a bunch of movies that are not matched correctly, you can email us the full path of the video files for these mismatches and we will test them here to further tweak Mezzmo's movie matching (e.g. F:\Videos\Movies\Inception-HD-1080P-AC3.MKV).' On one level that does explain how to make it easier for the system to select the proper movie. But at the same time it makes me wonder why that would be needed during an upgrade. I gave the Batman & Robin.mpg example, there were others such as 2001.mpg. Now my concern is that these were movies already in the database with meta-information about them already stored. Why would that information not be migrated over to the new database? If new fields are required that would *require* that new information be downloaded why was the information available not used to identify the movie properly? It sounds like that information was disregarded and just the filename used to try to populate the database. If a db migration occurs in the future can we avoid some pain by using the backup/restore db tools?

Hi John,

The Mezzmo 4.x upgrade was a major upgrade since we added Display Titles which changed the way your titles are displayed and Mezzmo is now using a lot more metadata for movies, TV shows, music and photos and this needs to be collected from external metadata files or online web sites. That was the reason for the recommended maintenance. Normally, you not need to to maintain your library after a Mezzmo upgrade. The upcoming Mezzmo v4.1 will not require maintenance.