In having 4 kids that like to watch shows, and essentially curating their selection, I’m in the position now that I have movies, tv shows, cartoons, etc, in a fairly messy folder structure:
Example 1:
/Video/Movies - G rated/Keep/Spirited Away (2001) [dub]/Spirited Away (2001) [dub].mp4
Example 2:
/Video/Movies - PG - PG13 rated/Try out/Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (PG-13 for violence)/Indiana.Jones-Raiders.of.the.Lost.Ark(1981).mp4
(this way, these two folders can be shared separately, and anyone can go in to anything in the G rated folder even when my 4 year old is around)
There are also cases where I have (in my folders), two copies of a movie, such as:
/Leon; The Professional (720p cut)
/Leon; The Professional (uncut)
As far as I can tell, there’s no “comments” or even “ignore” in the naming guide
Homogenizing my collection makes me die a little each time, and I’d love to be able to have some way of keeping track of “arbitrary” information.
“Rated PG-13 for violence” is a great example of this, since I now go through each movie I want to show them, and check it at http://www.kids-in-mind.com/ / http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews before putting it into the “Try” folder for us to watch together.
Am I missing something? (I hope) Or should I start thinking about how to program this?
Where did you want to store the information you’re talking about? Would it be in the comments section or just using the ratings that’s available? I see on my Plex setup that TV shows have ratings, but in my current view, it doesn’t seem like movies have the ratings.
We just created a new metadata agent at http://thevideosdb.com - you can always try it out and let us know if there’s things we can add to make your life easier.
On the Plex front end, I’d love to see the information as something I can filter by and also in comments, though having it convert from filename just in to comments would be 90% of the way there.
TheVideosDB; how this works is unclear from extensive skimming… My guess so far is that it is a more ‘personal’ version of TVRage, in that it is used in conjunction with a scraper; is this correct?
If so, I see how it /may/ work, but it looks like a lot of heavy lifting on my end.
You are correct that the metadata agent would require a scraper/plug-in, but the plug-in has already been developed. You can download it as soon as you sign up for a free account.
As for the descriptions of the actual videos, what you want/need to put on there is really up to you. If you are customizing video descriptions for your videos, then you are basically already doing the description work. Of course, if there's a way to make things easier for you, we're all ears. :)
The reason that I don’t see your service as something that fits is because (again, I’m guessing on how it works) I’m only looking to add a small custom tag into the existing metadata of the movies.
I certainly wouldn’t want to take something like indiana jones, hop over to your service, copy/paste everything, try to sort out rating, actors, posters, and all that other wonderful stuff the Plex is amazing at, and then add this small tag into (what I hope) would be an appropriate field.
I know it would only have to be done ‘once’, but I’ve been growing a collection since DVD drives existed, and the tagging work that gets done is the stuff that’s either automatic, or specifically for my kids: I’m thankful that every 18 months or so, I end up re-installing and find even more metadata and smarter automatic choices for the movies and TV shows that have been with me for a while.
heavy lifting, even done ‘once’ is too much when that data exists already.
Also, there is a benefit to having these tags in the filename, since I also use airvideo and afp to watch video.
Thanks for the feedback - that is totally understandable. The reason we love Plex is the same - the automatic import of metadata. TheVideosDB mainly focuses on videos that don't have downloadable metadata like home videos or one off specials that TheTVDB rejects - but every once in awhile, we do find people who want to customize their commercial metadata. I know I had to play around to get the movies' descriptions to download correctly because I wanted the plot, not the box office figures.
If your needs change, or if there's a way to import the info from a XML file, please let us know if we can help.
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