Read the metadata tags from video container files and import into database / library?

jmarshall Wrote:Closed source most likely. In either case, we have the code already as per my post above, it's "just" a matter of hooking things up.

This would be awesome! When I started using XBMC, the first thing I've looked was Music library menu to see if I can scan music videos into the Music library, never thought about they would belong to the Video library.

Was just looking for this answer. Now I know that *.m4v files and the mata data tags are not supported in XBMC. So sad, too bad.

Maybe a developer will put this in someday. Wondering if we could have some kind of work around that processes all my *.m4v files and pulls the cover art, to create a *.tbn file for everything. That could work, but need a tool to do this.

Quick comment - I renamed a .m4v file (that had metadata tags) to .m4a and placed it in the music library path, then updated the library.

This path is on a NAS connected through an SMB share. The scan choked as soon as it got to the file (1.6GB) and hung there for a long time. I have no direct evidence, but I got the impression that it was perhaps scanning through the entire file for tags over 100Mb Ethernet, and the xbmc.bin was sitting at 100%+ CPU in top.

In the end I killed it, and relocated the same file locally, and rescanned - this time it scanned it in almost instantly - certainly faster than it could have scanned the entire 1.6GB file even though local.

Not sure how to interpret this, but the result was that it did add some(/most/all?) of the meta data to the library. Hopefully this helps.

Col.

Meta-tagging support would be a huge boon towards bringing XBMC one step closer to supplanting the included software with AppleTV. I have a large number of foreign and "B" movies that XBMC may never correctly identify because they don't exist in the scraper databases (not to mention the irritation of manually having to change names or intervene to get to correctly "guess" the movie even when they are present). All of this would be avoided if XBMC would simply first read the existing meta-data for my movies (400+, all with tags and artwork).

In fact, I think MKV should start officially supporting tagging as well. Imagine going back to the days of MP3s without tags.... That's what movies are mostly like today. Small variations, special editions, etc. often suffer from incorrect labeling even when the movie itself is correctly identified and when you're encoding your own movies (like people should be doing), trying to guess the correct name in the database for such things is a PITA (might as well just use a tagger and let it do it).

I realize the lack of interest has probably been related to how few ATV setups the developers have, but with ATV2 taking off with a low price point, hopefully some of those things will start to change (although if you never had a M4V setup, you probably never would anyway), but tags are so much nicer than having to look things up all the time (and if you don't have an Internet connection, it still works). If MKV started officially supporting tags, it would really take off, I'm sure.

Totally agreed ... I have more than 900 movies all encoded by me and all having full tagging including coverarts ... I would love that XBMC supports them ...
In the meantime, does anybody knows where I can find the xbmc library format ? I may just try and write a stupid wrapper for softwares like mp4info or mediainfo to read automatically tags from m4v and add them to xbmc

VonMagnum Wrote:In fact, I think MKV should start officially supporting tagging as well. Imagine going back to the days of MP3s without tags.... That's what movies are mostly like today. Small variations, special editions, etc. often suffer from incorrect labeling even when the movie itself is correctly identified and when you're encoding your own movies (like people should be doing), trying to guess the correct name in the database for such things is a PITA (might as well just use a tagger and let it do it).

Actually, MKV does support tagging. See, for example, this.

I'm definitely adding this to my list of "things I need to work on once I teach myself to program more than simple little PyQt GUIs". And further, if anyone out there was interested and actually does know how to program, I may not have much skill but I've got plenty of time on my hands, so I'd throw as much time and effort into it as possible.

...of course, right around the time of the feature freeze is entirely the wrong time for me to be dredging this up again I suppose, heh.

EDIT: For future reference, here's the URL of Matroska's tag spec sheet: http://matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/index.html

This thread has been an interesting read. I think it makes sense when a movie collection is more than 500 or so files to have the metadata information stored in the file. I find it kind of annoying when I have to make a change to my XBMC database (or delete it entirely) and then do a complete rescan of all my files. I know .nfo's are supposed to address this issue, but I hate the idea of having two files per movie (I'm a bit of a minimalist in that respect). At one point I was toying with the idea of putting the IMDB and TMDB number in the filename itself to make scanning easier, but have never gotten around to writing it. With the popularity of .mp4 in iDevices and .mkv formats, having the ability to even manually read the metadata from a file and save it to the database would be useful to minimalists like me. If someone decided to implement it, I would love to help out with testing/debugging/planning such a feature. I can do some programming too, but I feel I might be a little lost working on such a large project.

Well, sadly, despite the fact that the meta tag reader for music files already can read the movie tags if renamed to audio files and so it would seem that it would have taken minimal effort to add meta tag data support to XBMC (including one reply in this thread that implied it was simply too close to Dharma's release data to fit it in), over a year and full version later, XBMC still appears to have zero tag support for movies (M4V or MKV) in Eden. It was the ONLY feature (other than getting weather to work again) that I was hoping to see. I've pretty much given up at this point on replacing the ATV interface with just an XBMC one (e.g. CrystalHD + Linux + XBMC). I need tag reading support to even consider it and obviously that's not an important feature to any of the devs and I'm no programmer.

Hi, I was looking for information about video tagging, and I stumbled upon this topic.

I was wondering if since then, XBMC has included some sort of MP4 or Matroska tag-awareness. It would be very useful if XBMC fetched all media info from metadata tags, instead of guessing by filenames. Has progress been made in this area ?

Also, I wanted to know if there is an app like MusicBrainz Picard for the purpose of automatically tagging video files. Can someone clarify this situation for me ?

Thanks in advance !

None and there appears to be zero developer interest at this point.

Two years later and no sign of support despite the fact the music tagger can read the tags already (if you rename to test it), indicating it would need minimal work to get it working and still no interest. I've given up on it and XBMC in general at this point as a full replacement for AppleTV. I only find it useful to run AVI/MKV files that I don't want to convert due to potential loss of quality.

(2013-03-03 23:42)hellpe Wrote:  Hi, I was looking for information about video tagging, and I stumbled upon this topic.

I was wondering if since then, XBMC has included some sort of MP4 or Matroska tag-awareness. It would be very useful if XBMC fetched all media info from metadata tags, instead of guessing by filenames. Has progress been made in this area ?

Also, I wanted to know if there is an app like MusicBrainz Picard for the purpose of automatically tagging video files. Can someone clarify this situation for me ?

Thanks in advance !