I’ve been using Plex for a long time now, and overall the experience is great. The only thing that consistently annoys me is that very often TV shows in my library will be mislabeled. I’m sure many people here have experienced this too, and there’s a lot of reasons it can happen, but it generally has to do with there being different ways of determining the episode numbers for a particular show, and the files I have using a different (though arguably still legitimate) numbering than theTVDB.
The one thing that would really squash this common annoyance is if video files could be tagged using a perceptual hash, much like Plex does with music when you have a Plex pass subscription. Is there any chance of this happening?
I’m guessing the biggest problem right now is there needing to be an open or licensable database of hashes / fingerprints for videos that is relatively comprehensive. But it would be an extremely big boon to Plex if this could exist. And there’s always the option of having Plex intelligently falling back on the file name of a video when the hashing falls through.
I have seen this used in finding matching subtitles by a program called OSCAR. I loved that program because it could identify a show and tell me whether it was recorded off the air (HDTV) or if it was from the WEB (WEB)… no matter how the file had been renamed - all because it used a hash to identify it in order to find the correct Subtitle at OPENSUBTITLEs.ORG.
The problem with OSCAR is that if you pre-transcode your videos to get them in the format you want them to be in there will be no hashes available. Same with recorded TV if you cut commercials, etc. You end up with a unique file/hash.
I took over Hama (an anidb/tvdb metadata agent) but i know this other anidb agent while not supporting things like episode summary does support video file hash but need to read the file fully so it’s not very fast
That should give you the mechanics to implement a hash. if you pick the same hash and have an api to link it too, you should be able to allow an opensubtitle.org agent to fetch it for you…
I am replying to my own thread and marking this reply as having answered it so that the forums will quit bothering me to mark this thread as answered, even though this is an open ended question and marking it as answered doesn’t really apply.
I guess it’s my fault because I probably clicked “Ask a question” instead of “New discussion”. Doesn’t look like there’s any way for me to change it to a discussion, though.
