Good afternoon Yaobing. Well, good evening for you, probably good morning by the time I hit post on this.
As you may have noticed I am working my way through issues with XLMTV based EPG in MC. Hence the questions and requests. Thanks you very much for listening and making the changes you have so far.
I decided to create this post to share what I am trying to do, and maybe to ask for another improvement. I am trying to get Season and Episode numbers into MC for recorded TV so that it will look up metadata when recorded TV is imported ( I believe MC looks up metadata when it imports TV programs. I could be wrong here. ) As you know, the "Get Movie & TV Info" functionality in MC will only look up TV data if MC already knows the Season and Episode numbers.
As mentioned previously, I am using "EPG Collector" to gather EPG data in XMLTV form by harvesting the Over The Air EPG transmitted by broadcasters. Unfortunately none of our broadcasters here in Australia include Season and Episode numbers in their EPG, at least not in any usable form. But they do include Series and Episode names fairly reliably. In order to get Season and Episode numbers into MC have I turned on the "Metadata Lookup" functionality in EPGC, as it is able to look up the Season and Episode numbers based purely on the Series and Episode names. I believe it even looks the numbers up on the
www.thetvdb.com, which is the same database MC uses, I understand.
Turning on the Metadata Lookup is what extended the runtime of the Load Program Guide process from 2.5 to 18 plus minutes, resulting in the called EPGC process being aborted early and incomplete. Hence I needed to do lots of testing to try and work out why it was aborted. I've delayed that testing until the changes you have made are released.
The EPGC solution isn't working perfectly yet, as there appears to be some data transcription errors. But it does seem to accurately find the Season and Episode numbers based on the investigation I have done so far. However, even when it is working perfectly, the current functionality at least is to output the results via the XMLTV file using the "xmltv_ns" format for Season and Episode numbers. As I understand it MC only supports the "onscreen" format, and even then I'm not sure that it will put the data into the correct Season and Episode fields, or somewhere else for manual review. So there is work still to be done when EPGC starts reliably producing the correct data. Either I have to convince Steve Bickell to output the data in the onscreen format, and then see how that is handled in MC, and possibly get changes done to get it into the correct fields. Alternately I will need a change to get MC to correctly read the xmltv_ns format and place the results into the correct fields.
But in working through this all today I wondered to myself;
If EPGC can look up the correct Season and Episode numbers (and all other metadata) using just the Series and Episode names, why can't MC?EPG Collector is an open source project. You should be able to download the source and see what it is doing. Maybe talk to Steve about that. MC already gets all the metadata that EPGC does, once it knows the Season and Episode numbers. Looking metadata up in both programs is additional work, and load on the internet databases that shouldn't be necessary.
So once again, thanks for you time and consideration of my rambles and requests. I look forward to your comments.
