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
