INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 18 for Windows => Topic started by: maid on December 09, 2012, 05:57:29 pm
-
Is there a way when using this tool to just have the first genre added instead of all the ones it downloads.
-
Is there a way when using this tool to just have the first genre added instead of all the ones it downloads.
That feature was introduced briefly in MC17. You don't want it. really. The genre that you will download will be the first alphabetically. Thus, a disproportionate number of your movies will be labelled as Action or Adventure, even though they could in fact be considered Sci-Fi or Animation etc. by most people.
-
Thanks for that.
The only thing is, the way I have set up MC in theater view my movies show up in all those different genre.
The only way I can stop that is to edit that field when it downloads
-
Thanks for that.
The only thing is, the way I have set up MC in theater view my movies show up in all those different genre.
The only way I can stop that is to edit that field when it downloads
We have the same situation and we do all our playback in Theater View. I find it helpful to have a movie with multiple genre's show up under each of its Genre's. If I am looking for a movie of a particular genre I would like to see all those that apply. If they are filtered to only show one Genre, and that is not the Genre I am looking under, I would possibly miss several choices. Make sense?
Rod
-
Yes it does
-
That feature was introduced briefly in MC17. You don't want it. really.
Are you kidding? This is one of the best features of MC in recent years. I've gone from a minimal amount of metadata that I entered myself, to having complete descriptions, images, actors, directors, everything - it's made my media library look and feel far more polished. The description in particular I find to be regularly useful - I can now easily pick and choose individual episodes of long running shows like Friends and Frasier.
I don't use genre myself (not yet at least) but the rest is absolutely awesome. I can see that if it's auto picking just the first, that could give poor results. But the rest of the feature is so awesome I'd consider this a minor problem.
That said, I would like Media and TV info to have some more options. I think that with just a little more control provided to the user, this feature could become even more powerful and turn MC into an unparalleled media metadata management system.
I would love to see an Options screen that provided configuration of
- The exact fields that get populated - a list of MC library fields allowing me to choose which can be updated by the Get feature.
I picture this as a global Options Screen list, which would then affect all future lookups. But even better would be to have it both in Options, and as a list that appears on each run of Get on the Batch dialogue - allowing me to specify different sets of fields to apply for specific runs only. (Perhaps also with a Save These Settings tickbox to update the global Options from the new settings used in the dialogue.)
So if Genre is currently populated inaccurately, this would allow me to unselect it globally so that it will never gets filled/changed by Get Movie/TV, and then I could fill that data in manually and be sure it would not get overwritten.
- The sources used - a list of all the sites that MC will check, like TVDB and Wikipedia, allowing me to deselect ones I don't want used.
- The ultimate option, which would be very powerful, would be a configurable sources system, allowing the user to add new sources of his own and/or to change the data captured from existing sites.
It would list each site to check, with config that specifies what data it reads from that site and what library field that data will populate. I would imagine this config would be in standard "screen scraping" form: specifying a URL with a query string; specifying what MC data goes into that query string (series, season, episode, etc), and then a field/data mapping table that specifies the name of an HTML element to look for, and then the name of the MC field that the scraped value goes into. This would support the use of MC functions, allowing me to manipulate the data prior to insert: taking just part of a field (substring or regex), changing case, doing basic math calculation, etc.
And with a simple set of import/export buttons, new sites added by users could be shared on the forums.
I'm certain that if the site list was configurable and shareable, we'd quickly get a lot of cool new sites being shared for others to benefit from.
This would also have the benefit of reducing maintenance work for the MC developer team. Inevitably data capture from third party websites requires ongoing maintenance, with changes in the site necessitating the change of screen scraping rules. Giving this power to users would mean that any such changes could be made by Interact members who could then share it and the devs can incorporate it in the next version with little effort.
Am I right in thinking that there's currently no equivalent metadata lookup feature for music? That'd be really awesome to add.
In fact, rather than just adding a Music option, it would be best if the feature was turned into a more generic "Lookup Metadata", supporting the configurable sites/rules I describe above. Then some music-specific sites could be added and then all media types would be possible. A Type field could be added to the site list, specifying if a site is for Audio, TV Show, Music, etc - or more generically, a basic rules system allowing the specification of one or more Library fields with a corresponding value. E.g. Site X, use if [Media Type]=Video AND [Media Sub Type]=Movie; Site Y, use if [Media Type]=Audio AND [Genre]=Classical.
We could then also add lyrics lookups, review text/ratings, and any other data that can be found on the web via repeatable query: quickly our MC libraries could become veritable goldmines of info about the media we use :)
-
I have not read all of this, but just want to say that I agree with Fitbrit.
Getting the first genre only, from a series of genres would provide you with extremely bad genre selections. As genre are probably sorted alphabetically, or just random, you can never count on that to be the main genre. That's why he says you don't want it. And I agree. I would like single genre my self, as long as it comes from a source with only ONE genre. Never otherwise.
-
I can see that if it's auto picking just the first, that could give poor results.
That's all fitbrit meant.
If it only picks the first result from a list that "expects" you to have access to the whole list == crappy experience. And that's all that is "gone" now (and is gone with MC17's current builds too).
The rest?
I think that's more appropriate for a third-party plugin, personally. There were epic discussions on this when the feature was first implemented. JRiver's goal was to provide an automatic system that required VERY LIMITED user configuration or interaction to use successfully. It wasn't trying to be the world's most perfect and flexible automated metadata lookup system.
And I think it does very well at the goal.
-
That's all fitbrit meant.
If it only picks the first result from a list that "expects" you to have access to the whole list == crappy experience.
Yeah OK fair enough. I can see that'd be really annoying for those who maintain and use genre info.
I still think though that the Get feature is awesome and worth using.
So this definitely speaks for a bit ore control over the feature. Obviously it'd be ideal if it stored multiple genre info - the Get feature was able to pick multiple values for a field. But in the meantime, if we could configure the fields that will be recorded to, then we could turn off Genre.
But even as it stands, Get is so useful that I'd still highly recommend it to everyone, even those who have Genres to preserve.
As and when I start to use genre myself, I'll do one of the following:
- Run Get with the "overwrite fields" turned off. So it will only fill in values to empty fields, and wouldn't overwrite Genre.
This would work in most cases, because generally the info provided by Get is info I don't already have.
But one problem I can see is the Name field - which is usually always populated already, but which I always want to retrieve to get the proper episode name. Maybe I could blank it first, though I have some recollection that Name can't be blanked and will auto fill with the filename.
- Create a new field called My Genre. Fill in my genres to that field. Run Get and let it overwrite Genre, then fix it by updating from My Genre.
This is obviously a bit of a pain to do. But still well worth it, given how much data that Get fills in and how much effort it would be to fill it in by hand.
But yeah I'd love to see Get improved further to handle this Genre issue and to allow more customisation of what gets saved and how it's retrieved.
-
Yeah OK fair enough. I can see that'd be really annoying for those who maintain and use genre info.
I still think though that the Get feature is awesome and worth using.
So this definitely speaks for a bit ore control over the feature. Obviously it'd be ideal if it stored multiple genre info
You misunderstand.
It does handle multiple genres just fine. Maid was asking for just the opposite, and fitbrit responded, "it doesn't work that way, but you really wouldn't like that if you tried it."