Y'all know I love MC right?
Loosely related to this:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,128338.0.htmlBut regardless of tagging support, I took a systematic approach to get MC to properly fetch movie info, and unfortunately, it failed on almost all of them. Let's see what happened (or at least, what I think is happening):
On import, MC reads a tag from (in this case MKV file), a field called "Name". This field is written by the tool creating the mkv file, but often these tools don't have the proper info to write those tags. So what happens is when that tool doesn't have any info, it falls back to the filename and writes that to the "Name" field instead.
Since my files are properly organised on disk, I decided to first use the Library Tool "Fill properties from filename".
Example files:
├── Ad Astra (2019)
│ ├── Ad Astra (2019) - Remux-2160p - KRaLiMaRKo.jpg
│ └── Ad Astra (2019) - Remux-2160p - KRaLiMaRKo.mkv
└── Star Wars (1977)
└── Star Wars (1977) - Remux-2160p - FGT.mkv
I used the following Template in MC:
Directory: [Name] ([Year])
Filename: [Name] ([Year]) - [Source] - [Notes]
Now that MC has the proper name and year for all movies, I select all, run Get Movie & TV info. Unfortunately, it only got about half of them right.
So, on a movie that didn't work, I select it (a single movie) and run get movie and tv info manually. The following happens (see attachment).
It actually worked!
So, if that worked, first hit is spot on, then why didn't MC fetch it the first time around?
In addition, why does MC insist on using the Name tag for querying a database, when that is actually a very unreliable way to get the movie name (see above)? I have never actually seen that tag being properly set to the movie name, and no other program that I know of actually uses it properly (all rely on folder and filenames for movies and series).
I really hope we can improve this. Many people will organise movies (and series) by name, year (or season), and so forth. MC could fall back to using folder and filenames if it detects the Name tag isn't reliable. It shouldn't be difficult to extract the name and year (often between braces) from file and foldernames, many free tools to download an organise movies will organise the same way (as Name (Year)). I think its a more reliable way than tags (at least until the rest of the world starts realizing tags are actually very handy and start using them too).
Next step would be to enable MC to write those tags back to the file
.
Thanks for considering!