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[akira54]

After the upgrade it is time to try yet again to organise all that I have. The easiest way to do this would be to use the built in Media Sub Type tag which offers basically all the various types one needs ........ if it weren't for the fact that it is trying to do more than one thing at the time by also using two of these tags to look up Movie or Show info. Why, oh why could this not have been kept separate from the Media Sub Type tag. I now run into all sorts of problems, to name but a few:

-some operas need to have the subtype Movie or their info will not be found but they should be tagged as Concerts or Music Video so that they can be listed together with all other music videos and don't turn up in the Movies section
-the same applies to many documentaries which should be given the tag Educational

I would love to be able to have categories like Movies, Documentaries, Shows, Concerts and I manage that more or less using searches based on a combination of keywords and genre but that is not really a satisfactory solution, if only because so many different keywords end up assocated with the same file which can easily lead to a confusion of different categories.

How did you solve it?

[CountryBumkin]

In Standard View go to Video>Files and add the column for Media Type and Media Sub Type by right clicking on the header. A drop down box will let you put a check mark next to the fields you want to see.
You can change what is in a field or add information by clicking on the file row to select it, then hit F2 key for edit mode. Now you can change or add to the fields (use Tab and Shift+Tab to move from field to field on a row.

-some operas need to have the subtype Movie or their info will not be found but they should be tagged as Concerts or Music Video so that they can be listed together with all other music videos and don't turn up in the Movies section
-the same applies to many documentaries which should be given the tag Educational

Media Type would be Video
Media sub Type (built-in) can be Movie, Music Video, Educational, Concert, TV Show etc. This would take care of your concern - unless I am misunderstanding your post.

[akira54]

I must have expressed myself badly. My problem is a tagging one, not a display one ... at least not primarily. What I was trying to explain was the problem one runs into when trying to work with the predefined tags in the Media Sub Type menu. The tags are fine and should do the job of sorting my library according to the views I prefer without problem ... if it weren't for the fact that a few tags have an additional function, namely to allow the user/program to find info on the web for the Movie or TV Show tagged as such. I would not want to do without this function, but it makes the Media sub type tags less useful than they could have been because now we are FORCED to use these tags (at least at first) for items which would be better served with another tag. Think of documentaries (tag: Educational) which have ended up in TMDB as a film and thus require the Sub Media Type tag "Movie" otherwise the Internet look-up fails. It would have been better to separate this look-up function from the Sub Media Type group of tags.

[CountryBumkin]

I see what you mean now.

My work around is this - I have the sub tags "Movie" and "TV Show" automatically applied to all files going into specific folders, then after Carnac has looked up the meta data I go back and change the sub tag as needed. So if I record the TV Show NOVA it goes into recording folder "TV Recordings" and everything in that folder gets media sub type "TV Show" automatically applied. Carnac does its thing. Later when I do my "maintenance" I move the TV Shows to their permanent folders and update the tags if needed (so in this example, I change sub tag TV Show to Educational for NOVA).
It's not a perfect system but we have to work with what we have.

Maybe, in a future version, JRiver good allow one to select what Internet lookup source to use for each sub type. Then you could selectively assign media sub types "TV Show, Educational, whatever" to use TVDB and "Movies, Music Video, etc." to use IMDB or such.

[akira54]

That sounds similar to what I do. I too have separate directories for movies, shows etc and then change the tags as needed after the look up has taken place, but that is kind of crazy and a lot of work to boot. Your solution is actually much better than mine, so let's hope the MC programmers agree.

PS. What is Carnac?

[blgentry]

You can make this easier on yourself if you want.

Make a new Custom Field in MC's Library.  Use that to store the Media Sub Type that you want to assign to the file.  Use this NEW field as the sorting field in your views that use Media Sub Type.  So for example, your Documentaries view would look in the NEW field instead of the "official" Media Sub Type field.

So you can set the Media Sub Type field to be the correct value to make automated lookups work correctly.  But your NEW field will have the Sub Type that you really want to assign to the file for sorting purposes.

It's the best of both worlds and doesn't require you to change anything after the fact.  It will always have your assigned type for sorting and the required type for lookups.

Brian.

[blgentry]

PS. What is Carnac?

Carnac is the algorithm that MC uses to try to convert file names into Movie or TV show names and episodes so it can do database lookups.  I think the name is a joke based on an old Jonny Carson routine he did where he pretended to be a psychic named "Carnac".

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Carnac

Brian.