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Author Topic: Multi-Episode File Recognition in Carnac & Lookup on TVDB  (Read 750 times)

glynor

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Multi-Episode File Recognition in Carnac & Lookup on TVDB
« on: October 11, 2019, 10:29:35 pm »

I have an 8-year-old daughter who watches a handful of shows which are produced and aired largely as 2 roughly 11 min long episodes. They throw in an occasional ~22 min long "special" episode here and there, but most of them are two short episodes which air together in a block. A couple of examples are Star vs. the Forces of Evil (which, by the way, is utterly hysterical and quite well done) and Vampirina. There have been many others over the years too, like Paw Patrol (ugh).

In any case, this is a common kids-show format. It would be nice if MC handled it a bit better.

These files, since they are aired together as a block, are rarely separated into individual episodes (you'd have to do it by hand on each file because they're all different lengths). So they typically come in with the episode numbers encoded in the filenames either like S02E29E30 or like s04e27-28.

TVDB, however, treats them as separate episodes with separate metadata.

I've been manually bashing these files into submission for years now. I think MC actually recently started handling them slightly better (in looking up only the first episode title, rather than barfing all over them), but it would be really nice if Carnac and TVDB Lookup could be enhanced to handle these better.

What I'd like is for:
1. Carnac to recognize these file name schemes, and to import them as [Episode]=27-28.
2. Look up Episode 27 and 28 on TVDB
3. Merge the field contents of [Name] (delineating with a " - ").
4. Merge [Summary] (delineating with a newline or two).
5. Use Episode 27's values for everything else, since artwork, dates, and whatnot can't be multi-assigned (and the dates usually all match anyway).

I do this by hand now, but only to fix [Episode] (after I do the lookup on the lower of the two episode numbers) and then I manually "merge" the [Name] field. I'd take even just that! (But it would be nice to have the Summary concatenated too and I've been known to do it by hand on a file or three here and there.)
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glynor

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Re: Multi-Episode File Recognition in Carnac & Lookup on TVDB
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2019, 10:48:35 pm »

I should also note, it wouldn't be exclusively for Kids shows. My Library is full of examples:
* Documentaries and Mini-Series aired as a set.
* Special two-part episodes of many shows (aired as a block, syndicated and re-run as 1-hour long pieces).
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fitbrit

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Re: Multi-Episode File Recognition in Carnac & Lookup on TVDB
« Reply #2 on: October 11, 2019, 11:43:59 pm »

+1

or should I say +1-2?
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