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[raym]

Audio and tv series backgrounds look fantastic. Theater view's never looked so good. So the question is, are we gonna see this soon for movie views too? I'd actually love to see these backgrounds used everywhere including music videos if possible.

Keep up the great work guys.  

[fitbrit]

It's logical that this is either in the works or that the backbone to make it so is in place. Not a huge priority for me, but most welcome when/if it happens. Great work, team.

[raym]

One thing I've noticed for tv series is that sometimes, the backgrounds shown do not match the actual show. Example: we have a current affairs prog here called "Sunday" and the background shown in theaterview is for a (US?) show called "That Sunday night show". Perhaps the searches could be refined somehow to avoid this?

Another quirk to this system is that you sometimes need to move the cursor off and then back on a given item before the slideshow kicks in. I've noticed this for a while even with audio.

Thanks.

[marko]

I've made a fair few additions to the file "ArtistSearch.txt" to help MC get this right for artists, such as Texas, where I would rather see pictures of the band rather than maps of, erm, well, Texas!!

Could additions to that file also work for TV/Film?

If not, perhaps a way to tweak the results such as already exists for audio could be put in place for video?

-marko

[Matt]

TV images come from TheTVDB.  It shows the wrong 'The Office's for me.  I'm not sure how to solve this.

[rick.ca]

TV images come from TheTVDB.  It shows the wrong 'The Office's for me.  I'm not sure how to solve this.

Looking ahead (just a little, I hope) to the retrieval of meta data from TheTVDb, positive identification of the source will be essential. While attempting to guess or lookup the source might be okay (depending on how auto-tagging works), it can't be 100% accurate. So it seems to me there will have to be the means for the user to specify or override the source record (i.e., TheTVDb URL, ID or unique title). This, of course, would also be used to ensure the correct images are used.

Same applies to TMDb, from which I assume we'll be getting backdrops and meta data.

[raym]

I think with the example I gave, a region check might be enough there. I'd personally prefer to see my default wallpaper if a direct match is not found. I'm not sure how the lookup works but including tags like series and genre might help narrow the search too. It's a tough one coz this may result in more misses than hits!

[MrHaugen]

TV images come from TheTVDB.  It shows the wrong 'The Office's for me.  I'm not sure how to solve this.

I've looked at many examples of this. It's divided in two groups as I can see it. Regions and release year. Very often, there are shows released in the UK first, and then adopted to US. In some cases the other way around. And of course from and to other countries. In other cases there is older Shows that is reworked, and have the same name. This is shown with (Year).

The Shows seems to be added to online databases like thetvdb.com with either (Country) or (Year) at the end. So, I would say that it's up to the users to add Series names with this tags for it to work reliably. It might be difficult for MC to pick this up, if it's neither in MC tags, file names or directory structure.

[Hendrik]

I second MrHaugen's post, year and country tags are quite common.

For example, the new Doctor Who series that started in 2005 is commonly known as "Doctor Who (2005)", while the original series out of the 60's is only known as "Doctor Who".
The Office is a perfect example for the country version. There is both "The Office (US)" and "The Office (UK)". "Top Gear" is another example. TheTVDB lists the original british version as "Top Gear", and lists the US version as "Top Gear (US)".

Its all listed exactly like that on TheTVDB, and i for one also have my folders named like that. I have not yet have the time to try Carnac, but i was hoping it would figure out the difference between "Doctor Who" and "Doctor Who (2005)", or another BBC show "Merlin (2008)", not to be confused with "Merlin (1998)"

If Carnac just listens to the users folder naming, i would see this as the responsibility of the user to either rename the folder, or adjust the tagging.

[MrHaugen]

Yes. Those who uses good sources to tag their Series will get the needed Series name with Year or Country if needed. The slideshow will then work. For those that do not, it would be wise to check the series folder name to pick it up automatically, or the file names. Otherwise it would be hard, if not impossible for MC to figure out by it self. What about a quick check in the "Filename" tag. You can look for the Series name and additional data in parentheses? Both for Path and file names.

For people who have this problem it would then be as easy as to change the single series folder to get correct slideshow. Or to tag it as a full series name with (Year) or (Country).

[rick.ca]

If Carnac just listens to the users folder naming, i would see this as the responsibility of the user to either rename the folder, or adjust the tagging.

The logic of this doesn't seem very appealing to me. We're going to have to use file pathnames that contain the exact series title TheTVDb uses so Carnac can recognize the correct value. How is it, exactly, that Carnac is helping me? And what if I want to use a second source that uses a different title for the series (e.g., one uses country to distinguish a title, while another uses year)? And why should I have to name it "The Office (US)" when AFAIC it's "The Office"? All these compromises for the sake of avoiding the simple solution of allowing the user to specify/override the source reference. It will only lead to more user confusion and frustration.

[Hendrik]

Who said anything about avoiding any solution?

I was just saying that i would prefer if Carnac would simply get that information from my folder layout if possible, because it happens to match how TheTVDB names it.
No reason not to offer a override button in case it still goes wrong for some reason.

PS:
While its true that the show is named "The Office", the suffixes mentioned earlier are kind of "standard" on the web when there is a collision. There hasn't been a mix up of country and year tags yet, because most of the time its pretty straight forward. If the shows are running in parallel in different countrys, they get the country tag, if its a show that just has the same name as another show which aired years ago, it gets a year tag. TV companies are usually smart enough not to re-use names of already running shows - unless its the same show styled for a different country like Top Gear or The Office are.

PPS:
If anything, the UK version deserves to be called "The Office", because thats the original. :p

[MrHaugen]

The logic of this doesn't seem very appealing to me. We're going to have to use file pathnames that contain the exact series title TheTVDb uses so Carnac can recognize the correct value. How is it, exactly, that Carnac is helping me? And what if I want to use a second source that uses a different title for the series (e.g., one uses country to distinguish a title, while another uses year)? And why should I have to name it "The Office (US)" when AFAIC it's "The Office"? All these compromises for the sake of avoiding the simple solution of allowing the user to specify/override the source reference. It will only lead to more user confusion and frustration.

I do agree. However, JRiver is very determined to make this work out of the box and to get a solution that does most things automagically for normal users. When that is completed, let's hope they will give us some alternatives to download metadata and give us some options in the matter. A solution of changing the path ONE place might be a worthy alternative to getting it to work for most users I think.

[rick.ca]

When that is completed, let's hope they will give us some alternatives to download metadata and give us some options in the matter. A solution of changing the path ONE place might be a worthy alternative to getting it to work for most users I think.

This is not a matter of options and alternatives. It's about designing an effective system that's as automatic as possible.  When users have to do things like rename their files so the "automatic" system works, what you've got is not "automagic," it's an annoying PITA. Recording and making the source reference user-configurable not only provides the user with an intuitive and easy fix for the "exceptions" the automatic system doesn't handle correctly, it provides the user with useful flexibility. For example, the automatic system may work correctly if the series is named "The Office (UK)," but if the user would rather use "The Office" they can do so (and simply set the source reference with that for the correct version).

This is also not about providing the greater flexibility demanded by more advanced users. When the supposedly fully-automatic out-of-the-box system fails in some cases, it's the new user who is lost and confused. The rest of us will find some workaround. An automatic system that works perfectly 90% of the time will be wonderful. But we'll all need a straightforward way to handle the other 10%.

[leezer3]

TV images come from TheTVDB.  It shows the wrong 'The Office's for me.  I'm not sure how to solve this.

How about storing the TVDB series ID from when you grab the metadata, and then calculating searches from this?
Won't work for live TV or untagged files, but a decent start

-Leezer-

[Hendrik]

rick,

its not about replacing such an override, its only about detecting data which is already there. IF my folder is already named like that, why not use it?
If its not, i can still have the option to either rename it, or use some functionality in MC to override the lookup from TheTVDB.

[MrHaugen]

How about storing the TVDB series ID from when you grab the metadata, and then calculating searches from this?
Won't work for live TV or untagged files, but a decent start

Not a bad idea. Online show ID's could be used for different sources as well. Now we should have a user editable field called thetvdbShowID, and we could simply override it by editing the number. I think however, that the logic could be there to pick up the (country) or (year) tag in the directory or filename anyway, to simplify things for new users.

[rick.ca]

its not about replacing such an override, its only about detecting data which is already there.

If you would review the thread, you'll see my original comment was in response to Matt's comment he was unsure about what to do in the case the series was not correctly identified. My point was he need not worry about that beyond getting it right most of time since the system needs a user override for such things anyway. I was primarily addressing MrHaugen's suggestion that would not be needed. I didn't even remotely imply the system should not attempt to get the information automatically. That's why I called it an "override."

A useful configuration dialog for this system would include a link to the web page of the item identified. That's what a user is normally going to have to see to understand why the correct information is not being retrieved. While there, they're probably going to find the correct version (e.g., searching for "The Office" to see why it didn't work). From there, the easy fix is to copy the correct reference and paste it into the configuration. Expecting an inexperienced user to understand what has gone wrong and change a file pathname in a way that works is asking too much.

Not a bad idea. Online show ID's could be used for different sources as well.

Apart from what I've already suggested, this might be a good thing to do if it obviates the need for a search each time an episode is added or the data is updated. The system would get the series from the filename, match that to an existing series in the library, and then use the ID to find the data. In the case of a new series or one for which no ID is recorded, it would search the source using the title. But as this relates to what we been talking about—the system automatically identifying the series and retrieving the meta data—this is not going to help. The user will have to provide the information if the identification fails.

[MrHaugen]

A useful configuration dialog for this system would include a link to the web page of the item identified. That's what a user is normally going to have to see to understand why the correct information is not being retrieved. While there, they're probably going to find the correct version (e.g., searching for "The Office" to see why it didn't work). From there, the easy fix is to copy the correct reference and paste it into the configuration. Expecting an inexperienced user to understand what has gone wrong and change a file pathname in a way that works is asking too much.

We're talking about two different things. Matt (and Jim) is interested in a way to do most things automatically, obviously. I hope that is just the basis, and that we can evolve this with metadata scraping and some configuration as Rick is suggesting. But the basis here should be that things like this is recognized most of the time. There are some of us that have differentiated TV Shows with year and country tags already, so why should we not take advantage of that?? It's as easy as reading the directory tag or file tags ONCE to get a match to a Series ID, and from there it's as easy as using the ID. I can not for the life of me see that this should be a problem. And while we wait for this super metadata scraping system, we CAN tell the users to use the explorer in MC and rename the Series directory with (year) or (country) to fix the problem. It's a good default solution, and a temporary fix for those few that have a problem getting correct slideshows for TV Shows.

As usual I agree with your long term plans for this, but this is the initial media categorizing called Carnac. Not a full fledged scraping system. At least not yet, as I've been told

[struct]

Just adding 2c...

mr.haugen,

rick's concerns are extremely valid and important, and it's relevance can't be too far away.  the current goals for carnac may be very simply as you are suggesting, but if it stops there it is next to useless as we will still be using sickbeard or pvd to get all of the other information from thetvdb.  Both of these already do the carnac regex (and much more).

Surely for MC17 it has to be a goal for MC to replace sickbeard's basic lookup, rename, screenshot, show poster, and sidecar.xml file generation?

when mc does start to get more info from thetvdb (I presume this is a near term goal) we are going to need some user interaction and an ability to overide/change a series id.  this can come both from the regex not picking up an oddity, but also the user not realizing there are 4 different Dr. Who series upon their first import.

It seems to me that a simple key being thetvdb id is necessary and must be user accessible.  we want to be able to change that one key on a selection of files and ask MC17 to update tags (preferrable a bullet list of selectable tags just in case we have some that we don't want overwritten), rename the files (e.g. Dr Who (2005) - S01E05 - Episode name), get screenshots, get show and season posters, etc.  Going back to explorer to change names is back to front (not to say that it is not ok in the very short term).
 
The same idea applies to movies, to some extent.  Once I have selected what the movie id is on themoviedb or imdb, MC should use this for lookups on the other databases. 


Craig

[MrHaugen]

I know, and I totally agree. But it is not the point. The point is that JRiver probably want to make Carnac work well with most data first. To make the most out of filenames, directories, codecs etc, THEN let's hope for more automatic scraping and configuring of sources and library fields.