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[mpg732]

So I just came back to JRiver.  I came back because it is by far the best player for HDR and 7.1/ATMOS sound.  The one thing that frustrate me is looking up  Movie/TV info.  I have used many other programs such as KODI and PLEX.  I know none is perfect

I had some files that had no media date embedded in it, all that there was is the title of the file name, and JRiver couldn't get that right.  I would have to say I had to manually look up over 1/3 of my video.

[ErikN]

Can you give more detail into the problem you encounter? I came from other software a few years back imported 1000+ Series and Movie titles and have since added another 1000+. I think I have had to manually enter data for < 10 and they were somewhat obscure.

Or do you mean you had to "help" the Movie/TV lookup to find the correct match? One helpful item is that the Movie/TV lookup method uses specific tags depending on the sub-media type. Movies focuses on the title while TV Series focuses on Series, Season, Episode. Make sure auto-import rules know Movies vs Series.  I rarely have any trouble with Movies. For me, OTA recorded Series was fixed by having good EPG data (e.g. proper season and episode number). Purchased series I make sure file names include "SnnEnn" though you can use custom extraction rules. MC's flexibility is sometimes a bit of a blessing and a curse.

Specifics would help, in particular if you are trying to motivate a fix/feature.

[mpg732]

So my issues was with movies.  I know that some of the files had strange TAGS, especially titles.  I get that.  The thing is other programs use the file name as the main TAG used to look up data.  Here's how bad it was.  I created a dummy video files with no Tags what so ever.  I created these files and copied it over a 100 times.  I then labeled each file with a movie name of a movie I own in VUDU.  I imported it into JRiver.  I do this so I can see what I have on HD and what I have in VUDU.  The first thing I did was set the TAG of sub-media type to Movie for all those files.  Then did the look up.  So all JRiver had to go off of was the file name and that these are movies.  I would say about half was looked up correctly.  To give an example, I had one labeled as AVATAR.  It matched it to AVATAR, THE LAST AIRBENDER.   Another example was JOHN WICK, and JRiver matched it to JOHN WICK 3.  Just frustrating with this part. 

[ErikN]

It might be illuminating to try some of the errant ones manually. MC uses a number of sources for movie info and I wonder if one of them is causing trouble (or missing). By this I mean:
- Select any movie file you want to test with
- Change the title to "Avatar" or "John Wick" -- something that was problematic
- Right click and manually select "Movie/TV" lookup 
- You should see a big list of possible matches from the various sources. I think the first match in the list is the one that gets selected when performed automatically.

The exploration process above can be sped up further by just typing in various titles into the Movie/TV dialogue.

If instead this manual lookup always works perfectly then the solution is elsewhere.

[zxsix]

A filename isn't gonna cut it.
You need two tags filled in properly:
Name and Year.
Then you'll get the movie poster and other available info about the movie filled into the tags.

[mpg732]

I get what your saying.  I know how to do the manual.  The complaint is it takes a lot of work.  Like I said other programs like PLEX and KODI don't have this issue with the same files.  Don't get me wrong, I love JRiver.  It the only media player that does all I need,  Just would love to seed an improvement.  This becomes a lot of work when you have a large amounts of files.  Question maybe you may answer.  If I reload windows and reinstall JRiver down the road, how can plan ahead so I don't have to do this again.  Does backing up your library solve this?

[RoderickGI]

Does backing up your library solve this?

Yes.

So would allowing MC to create Sidecar files for movies, which would then store all the tags for the movie that can't be stored in the file itself. Then even if you lost your Libray and had no backups, re-importing the video files into MC would use the tags in the Sidecar files and get the movie identification correct.


Personally, I don't know how KODI or PLEX could do any better job identifying a movie if only the movie name was known, and that name was ambiguous. Maybe they pick the most popular movie that matches, if the API supports that. Maybe they use sources that MC isn't allowed to use as it is a commercial application.

But MC's movie identification from a filename has been very accurate for me, as I include the movie name and year in the filename, as Zxsix mentioned.

When I rename movie files in MC, which I always do using the RM&CF function for all movies, I always use the structure "Movename (Year).ext", so that it will always be identified correctly if I import it again at some time in the future. That may be something else you could consider doing to avoid having to do all that work again, if you lost everything except the video file itself.