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[antenna]

I recently added over a hundred titles to the video portion of my library.  The Name field of the files being imported had the format:

     Series Name - Episode Name (112 2017-06-11_2300)

where 112 is the season (1) and episode (12), and the rest of the numbers are the date and time of recording.

For the purposes of metadata in the library, I am interested in the series and episode names, but I also want the season and episode numbers.

I could go through and manually enter the data in the grid ("details") view, but a few dozen titles would take too much time.

So.... I started reading about Media Center's expressions language and found the regex function.

I highlighted all of the newly imported video files, and entered the following into the Custom field in the Tag sidebar:

    =regex([Name], /#^.*?\((\d+)#/, 1)

In the above example, the expression places 112 in the Custom field.

Then it is just a matter of using the Left and Mid functions to move the proper values to the Season and Episode.

What would have been probably an hour or so (maybe longer) of manual data editing, was reduced to just a few minutes of learning the expression syntax and running the expressions to updated the fields.

It certainly is very nice to have some real and very flexible capability "behind the scenes" in Media Center!

[RD James]

For what it's worth, there are also "fill properties from filename" and "fill track numbers from list order" tools.

[antenna]

Thanks, I'll check those out.  I'm still relatively new to MC, and I'm finding there's a lot of depth of functionality to explore.   

[antenna]

For what it's worth, there are also "fill properties from filename" and "fill track numbers from list order" tools.

I tried the "fill properties from filename" option, and that got me to the same point as the regex did, but a bit simpler to use.

I still used the left() and mid() functions to fill in the season and episode numbers.   The "fill track numbers from list order" might have worked for what I needed, but the left() and mid() functions are quite easy to use.

Thanks again for the tip.

[RoderickGI]

Well done.

For future reference, if MC knows the Series and Episode names, and the program is listed on TheTVDB, the MC "Get Movie & TV Info..." function will find the correct program and update the Library with the Season and Episode numbers, Description, etc. MC used to rely on having the Season and Episode numbers for the lookup, but that was changed quite some time ago.

CARNAC, the MC functionality which reads the file name on import and "guesses" what it is, can usually get the Series and Episode names correct, if they are structured into the file name. If not the "fill properties from filename" can usually fix that, using a template if necessary.

Next time you have a bunch of files in the above situation, test the "Get Movie & TV Info..." function on just one file without running your above fix, and see if it works for you. If so, just run it on all files at once. Done.

[antenna]

...For future reference, if MC knows the Series and Episode names, and the program is listed on TheTVDB, the MC "Get Movie & TV Info..." function will find the correct program and update the Library with the Season and Episode numbers, Description, etc. MC used to rely on having the Season and Episode numbers for the lookup, but that was changed quite some time ago.
...

I had a chance to use the "Get Movie & TV Info..." tool.  Wow, that is very good! 

The info it provides looks to be a lot more accurate than the series-name/episode-title/etc metadata info that is used by my source.  It cleaned up a lot of junk metadata in the videos I tested it on.  I especially like the program info paragraph and the appropriate "cover image" for each episode.

Thanks for that pointer!

[blgentry]

The expression language is extremely powerful that's for sure.  You can save yourself lots of time and get things just the way you want them without a lot of manual effort.

The Get Movie and TV info is also quite amazing; especially paired with Carnac and the prompting when it can't find an exact match.  When compared to another *extremely* popular home media solution, MC is clearly miles ahead in this regard.  With the other you have to name your files *exactly* as expected, or it just doesn't work.  I could go on, but I'll just leave it at that.

MC, in my opinion, is still easily the most powerful and most configurable media solution I've seen.

Brian.