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[sgomes]

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to do some MC16 automation, but am feeling rather lost as to where to start. Essentially, I want to write a plugin that:
1 - Runs automatically with no user interaction. Not even clicking a button to start it
2 - Scans the MC library for video files that haven't been tagged properly
3 - Guesses what each file is about from the filename, and retrieves correct metadata for it from online sources
4 - Updates the metadata in MC
5 - Renames and moves the file to the correct place

I can do 3 easily enough, but 2 and 4 require MC integration. Now, I see two options for this:
a) Use the MC web service. Should be doable, because it allows for querying files and updating their details. Renaming and moving would then be a case of changing the file on disk and letting MC pick up the change in name and location whenever it scans its media dirs.
b) Use MC automation. This means fiddling around with COM and things I've never dealt with before (I come from a Unix background), but avoids the silliness of going through a web service for something which is running on the same machine, and would likely allow me to rename and move the file directly through MC, instead of having it pick up filesystem changes.

Anyone have any thoughts, suggestions, hints? Any up-to-date starter source code would also be excellent (the stuff in the sticky thread is incredibly old and outdated).

Thanks!
Sérgio

[Scolex]

Don't know if you have been to the wiki or not but here is a link to the dev zone
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DevZone

[sgomes]

I have, yes, but the information there seems mostly targeted at developers with a lot of experience in COM, and not a lot for newbies to Windows programming like me

The tutorials that do seem suitable for newbies are rather outdated, mentioning MC 12.0 and Visual Studio 2005...