Imported meta-data for TV shows?

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09-27-2011, 06:49 AM
millercentral

Imported meta-data for TV shows?

Let me start by saying I just recently found Mezzmo and it just makes me sad I didn't find it earlier. It is AMAZING. I'm using it to feed videos to my Samsung D6000 series, and playing with other clients as well (Xbox 360, Panasonic VT25, etc). Everything is working well right out of the box, but I do have a couple of questions:

Library maintenance / Mezzmo desktop app

Does the Mezzmo desktop app have to open for the library to be updated? I have scheduled a daily update in the options, but I'm hoping the update can happen via a background service, as the PC doesn't always have a user logged in. Is there any other part of the service that depends on the Mezzmo app running?

Metadata importing for video files

When I setup the service it automagically imported all the XBMC .nfo files for my videos. In general this worked perfectly, except around television shows. First, some background:

My videos are stored on network shares, one share for movies (one movie per folder in that share), one for Television. On the television share, the structure looks like this:

Code:

\\{server}\{share}\{tvshow}\{season}\{episode}.mkv example: \\homeserver\television\fringe\Season 3\3x01 - Olivia.mkv

The imported metadata places the episode name into "Title", the actors into "Artist" and the containing folder into "Album" (which in the above example means Album = "Season 3"). The show name does not appear to be imported. The air date also appears to be imported even though it is not shown in the Mezzmo property page, as my Samsung TV displays it. While this metadata import is not super important when browsing the content by folders, it breaks down when using the cool playlists capabilities of Mezzmo's library system.

So my question is, can this import logic be customized on a per-share basis? For my television share, I'd rather be tagged with the show title in Album, a customized version of the episode title (using a string replacement) that includes the episode number in Title ("1|24 - Olivia" for example), and episode number in Track. I wish there was a logical place to put the season number, but I don't see one...

Can this be done? I think this could allow for much more compelling action playlists around Television series, for example.

Lastly, is it possible to have custom or additional keywords/property types? I'd love to have a property that let me specify if the video is a Movie, or TV Show, or Other for use with Smart playlists (although in my case, maybe I could use the file path matching.... hmmm.)

Clearly I have more experimenting to do, but I can't wait! Thanks again, -james
09-27-2011, 10:59 AM
Paul

Thanks for your kind words. Glad you're having fun with Mezzmo :)

Quote:

Does the Mezzmo desktop app have to open for the library to be updated? I have scheduled a daily update in the options, but I'm hoping the update can happen via a background service, as the PC doesn't always have a user logged in. Is there any other part of the service that depends on the Mezzmo app running?

The Mezzmo application needs to be running for schedule maintenance (i.e. Maintain Library dialog). We'll consider making this also operate with just the service running.

Quote:

So my question is, can this import logic be customized on a per-share basis?

There are no customization methods currently in Mezzmo as you suggest, but you do have a lot of control over the metadata that is imported. Mezzmo supports reading XMBC's .NFO/.TBN files, ThumbGen's .tgmd files, series.xml files and mymovies.xml files. These are all popular metadata files that either third-party applications or web sites can create for you. All of these external metadata files will let you the customize the metadata that is imported by Mezzmo - such as title, album, artist, year, genre, album art, etc. In your particular case of TV shows, I think series.xml is well suited to your needs and your folder layout.

Quote:

Lastly, is it possible to have custom or additional keywords/property types?

There are no user-defined fields for your media files as yet. We'll certainly consider it for a future version of Mezzmo.
09-27-2011, 03:00 PM
millercentral

Thanks for the response. I've been experimenting more and have gotten closer to my goal:

- I setup a Smart Playlist that shows all videos contained in a filepath that includes "Movies\". This makes a single folder with all my movies with their box art. Perfect.

- I setup a standard playlist called "TV Shows" and copied all the folders from my Television share into it. It looks like this will work for showing a structure of Show Name > Season Number > Episode as that is how my folders are already setup. I assume I'll have to manually add any new show folders to that playlist if I add any new folders to the television share.

This gets me really close, except the Episode numbers aren't displayed in the video file titles.

Another question/feature request: Can folders that have a "folder.jpg" within them use that image as a thumbnail for the folder item itself? That would be very nice.
09-27-2011, 03:11 PM
Paul

Quote:

Originally Posted by millercentral

- I setup a standard playlist called "TV Shows" and copied all the folders from my Television share into it. It looks like this will work for showing a structure of Show Name > Season Number > Episode as that is how my folders are already setup. I assume I'll have to manually add any new show folders to that playlist if I add any new folders to the television share.

Instead of that, try using the "Add Folder" command and add the root of the Television folder (if you have it as one folder on your share). This will preserve your folder structure and it's also automatically updated whenever you browse or maintain it, so you won't have to drag-and-drop folders.

Quote:

Another question/feature request: Can folders that have a "folder.jpg" within them use that image as a thumbnail for the folder item itself? That would be very nice.

Yes, that's planned for a future version, but not many devices support showing custom folder icons.
11-28-2011, 01:01 AM
SteveG

MyMovies.xml data mapping

Dennis, you mention earlier in this thread that a lot of customisation of the metadata Mezzmo uses is available by using mymovies.xml and series.xml files from MyMovies application. Can you give a list of the data mapping mezzmo uses when it extracts tags from these files, i.e. which xml tag map to which mezzmo field?

I'm streaming video to a Samsung C TV and I want to use the Album field in Mezzmo to hold the name of a TV series and then use a "smart playlist" to give a view of all episodes by season. I get most of the metadata from MyMovies but I can't see which tag can be used to populate the Album field, which at the moment is picking up the folder name that the video files are in - episode 1, episode 2 & etc. I hope you follow all this!!

Since there is quite a range of metadata file types supported I assume there must be some sort of order of preference which the data is taken in if more than one file type is present. Knowing this would also be useful.

The same applies to thumbnails. I have created thumbnails specifically for my Samsung and put these in the folder as filename.jpg but the cover art reference in mymovies.xml seems to take precedence in Mezzmo's scheme of things. Is this so?
Regards
SteveG
11-28-2011, 10:39 AM
Paul

The order of preference is like this:

<movie>.xml, mymovies.xml, <movie>.nfo, movie.nfo, tvshow.nfo, series.xml, .\metadata\<movie>.xml

XML art takes precedence over in-folder art.

Regarding specific tags Mezzmo reads from XML, they are (depending on the specific XML format some are present, this is the whole list): title, productionyear, description, localtitle, sorttitle, originaltitle, genres/genre, persons/person, series (item), episodename, seriesname, overview, actors, gueststars, firstaired, year, plot, director, artist, movie

Can you please send one of your XML files to support (or post here), so that we could check what's happening?
12-03-2011, 12:12 AM
SteveG

Data Mapping

Thanks for the response, Dennis.

My current approach is to use a <movie>.xlm file which has the the following format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<Title>
<LocalTitle>S01E01&02 - Rising</LocalTitle>
<LocalTitleDisplay>S1E01&02 - Rising</LocalTitleDisplay>
<OriginalTitle>Stargate Atlantis</OriginalTitle>
<SortTitle></SortTitle>
<SortTitleDisplay></SortTitleDisplay>
<Genres>
<Genre>Television</Genre>
<Genre>Drama</Genre>
<Genre>Adventure</Genre>
<Genre>Science-Fiction</Genre>
<Genre>Action</Genre>
</Genres>
<Persons ActorsComplete="False">
<Person Type="1">
<Name>Joe Flanigan</Name>
<Type>Actor</Type>
<Role>Lt. Colonel John Sheppard*/ ... (99 episodes, 2004-2009)</Role>
</Person>
<Person Type="1">
<Name>Rachel Luttrell</Name>
<Type>Actor</Type>
<Role>Teyla Emmagan (99 episodes, 2004-2009)</Role>
</Person>
<Person Type="2">
<Name>Unspecified</Name>
<Type>Director</Type>
<Role>
</Role>
</Person>
</Persons>
</Title>

Example Stargate Atlantis television series, season 1 episodes 1 & 2 a two parter entitled Rising. The video file is "Rising.avi" and I have the xml file as "Rising.xml". The folder structure is "TV Series/Stargate Atlantis/Stargate Atlantis S1/Episode 1 & 2". So, each episode has it's own folder named "Episode nn" and the video and xlm metadata files are together in it for each episode.

I make my own xlm file using data from other files and what I'm trying to figure out is what tag I need to add to the xlm file which will map to the Mezzmo album field and I can populate as the series name "Stargate Atlantis". (Of course I could populate this manually in Mezzmo but then if I re-scan the metadata, Mezzmo will overwrite it!

The handling of Movie metadata is one of the weakest parts of Mezzmo. It doesn't handle multiple genre fields nor cater for multiple staring actors both of which are things that I would hope to be able to manage in a flexible way.

Hope you can help

Regards
SteveG
12-05-2011, 10:59 AM
Paul

Typically, in your folder structure, you should have a file called "series.xml" in the parent folder of all your episode folders. "series.xml" describes the TV series and Mezzmo retrieves the series name from this file.

"series.xml" looks like this:

Code:

<series> ... <SeriesName>Stargate Atlantis</SeriesName> ... </series>

We have better handling of multiple genres, artists, etc. on our development list. Thanks for the feedback on this.