Metadata

I've been using Serviio since maybe 3 weeks before version 0.42 was released and I must say, it has met most of my expectations. One of the areas it is lacking in is editing metadata. I've gone through the forum and I know the stance is currently "use Swisscenter or MyMovies", but I believe this stance needs adjustment. SwissCenter almost does the same thing as Serviio as least for the devices it supports, and to ask me to install another program that can stream audio/video files plus do a bunch of extra stuff I don't care for on my slightly underpowered machine whose sole purpose is a Serviio server is a bit much. Sure it can probably be on a separate machine, but then the import process for the metadata becomes slightly more convoluted. At the same time I don't want a program like that on another machine in my network. That's a bad deal. Then there's is MyMovies, which seems to only be for Windows Vista and above. Since I'm using an XP machine, I'm pretty much out of luck.

I understand your reluctance to create an editor because there's so many different things to have to account for and that functionality is not core to Serviio. The best compromise I can think of is to at least make an API to the Metadata DB available so that a third party developer, like myself, can make a UI for that. I believe that's a win/win, the community gets what they want and you don't have to maintain a metadata editor.

Can we at get that done?

[zip]

API would be a possibility.

What is the main reason you want to edit metadata? Bad online metadata search results or metadata that is not available in those online repos (ie home movies etc)?

What would happen if you edit metadata of a file, then click Refresh video metadata and it gets rewritten with the original values? It'd have to mark the file as 'never update metadata anymore' or similar.

Somebody requested a local file (in a format, maybe similar to mymovies.xml) where you could override the metadata. You could even do it now with XBMC .nfo files actually.

Well it's a few things actually. Some videos that are episodes in a series are being marked as movies, wrong genre and other things. While I know contributing to an online DB it probably better, the way videos are added in my house isn't consistent. This requires me to then rename the file and hope the metadata matches and then if it doesn't go online add the the DB then what, refresh all my metadata? seems awfully inconvenient just to make my collection contain good info.

You make a good point about the Refresh after a manual edit and I hadn't thought of that. Most of the time I'll just want a way to link a particular entry to my video and it's the matching algorithm that's failing for whatever reason. if you're able to track if there was a match for metadata, that should almost certainly be an indicator if that entry should be updated.

Another way to handle it would be a hierarchy, where a local metadata file takes precedence over the online info. The the API could be just creating the local file but in a unified way through serviio. Though I don't like the idea of the extra files being there.

Thanks for listening.

[n3mmr]

I have thought a bit along the same lines, and you could find those discussions with Zip here and there in the forum.

My thinking is that it could be done in a VERY simple way.

Define a "natural" or "definable" hierarchy. One could live with a predefined fixed hier at first and move on later.

My suggestion is "file name encoded" ->"local metadata file"->"online data"
Local metadata must be simple enough for just editing in Notepad or vi. .nfo files seems very much excessive.
File name encoded could be special character strings framing a limited set of metadata fields: maybe like

-*-Series-*-S01E02-*-Episode Name.ext

causing serviio to present this video as the second episode of the first season of a series it assumes is called "Series", and the episode is stated to have the name "Episode name".

Well it's a few things actually. Some videos that are episodes in a series are being marked as movies, wrong genre and other things. While I know contributing to an online DB it probably better, the way videos are added in my house isn't consistent. This requires me to then rename the file and hope the metadata matches and then if it doesn't go online add the the DB then what, refresh all my metadata? seems awfully inconvenient just to make my collection contain good info.

You make a good point about the Refresh after a manual edit and I hadn't thought of that. Most of the time I'll just want a way to link a particular entry to my video and it's the matching algorithm that's failing for whatever reason. if you're able to track if there was a match for metadata, that should almost certainly be an indicator if that entry should be updated.

Another way to handle it would be a hierarchy, where a local metadata file takes precedence over the online info. The the API could be just creating the local file but in a unified way through serviio. Though I don't like the idea of the extra files being there.

Thanks for listening.

[zip]

I was merely suggesting the .nfo file because it's a de-facto standard and there are even tools that can generate these files without the need to even run XBMC. If there is another 'widely' used format that is simpler (non XML for example), then it would be no problem implementing extractor for that as well. I'm not in favour defining yet another descriptive metadata format that would be particular to Serviio (and therefore - in my opinion - not very often used).

I appreciate all your comments on this, hopefully we can come up with something pretty cool.

Since, my last post concerning the Metadata situation, I've been doing research to see how we could allow the metadata to be updated without Zip needing to build a metadata editor. My first thought was to find the Serviio assigned id of the object that I wanted to update through the UPnP standard so that the metadata could be sent to a Metadata API for update. But then I discovered that the UPnP standard itself has a way to describe all the metadata for various type of media. Technically we should be able to use Control Point software to add the data to Serviio, but currently, it looks like Serviio forbids updates from anything but itself.

I know one of your concerns, Zip, was that a decision by the user to do a metadata reset would cause the manually entered information to be lost, or trying to decide what information to keep in the event of a reset is tricky. My only answer to that is, if I have a way to control the info of each piece of media on the server through the use of a control point type software, why would I ever do a reset? My understanding is that the reset is there for when the provider Serviio talks to updates it info and we want the latest data. That's a valid use if you willing to rename each file in the specific format Serviio recognizes so that it can determine the name of the Movie/TV Show. If that's not the only reason, please educate me.

I haven't found any control point software that works the way I want it to and so I've started to build my own. It will be specific to Serviio as it will integrate the current API into it. I'd love to also be able to work with you to allow metadata updating through the UPnP standard mechanism, which I believe will solve any issue others have about media information even for personal videos. Would you be interested in collaborating on something like that, Zip? I'm not asking you to help me build the Control Point, just making Serviio able to accept the input from my software.

[zip]

Why not, although it won't be any time soon I'm affraid. You can start with creating a bitbucket ticket and describing what has to be done (with references to the UPnP spec etc)

Hello, I just recently installed Serviio, and am currently having lots of fun learning it's nuances. This topic caught my attention as I fairly quickly ran into the same problem. I have roughly 1200 video recordings on my server that were recorded with GBPVR. A lot of these ended up in the 'unknown' genre bucket, and I can't seem to find a way to change that. I've read through the various threads on this topic and understand that I could create .nfo files to override the metadata tags, but somehow creating 600 individual .nfo files just doesn't sound appealing. It gets even worse when you consider that a good portion of those recordings that did have a genre are incorrect.

At first, I was looking for some way to edit the Serviio database directly, but couldn't find any info on how to do that. Then I found this thread that seemed like a likely alternative. Can you give us an update on where this stands? Or are there now any other alternatives that I could use to accomplish my goal of editing the genre information for a large number of files? Ideally I want to be able to select all of the recordings for a particular show and set the same genre for all simultaneously. Also, none of my shows were detected as a series. So I wanted to update this info at the same time. Just another reason that I wanted to modify the database directly.

Is there anyway for us to edit the database using a third party tool? Is it a SQL based database? I haven't dug into the app far enough yet to even know, but thought I would ask. Writing SQL querries and scripts would be a fairly simple task to accomplish what I want if I had write access to the database.

Any help or guidance you can provide will be very appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

P.S. Love the app btw. Since having moved on from GBPVR, this is the first program that I have found that looks to offer me access to all of my recordings. Now I just need to work out the kinks.

[zip]

Is there anyway for us to edit the database using a third party tool? Is it a SQL based database? I haven't dug into the app far enough yet to even know, but thought I would ask. Writing SQL querries and scripts would be a fairly simple task to accomplish what I want if I had write access to the database.

Yes, SQL based DB - Apache Derby.