[dragonflight]

I have a desire (shared by at least 1 other person) to be able to store the episode information in the tvshow.nfo file.

In particular I am interested in storing the "main data", i.e. video in its original format (torrent, DVD, BluRay...), without polluting it with other stuff. I am currently testing a patch which places all of the episode info in the tvshow.nfo when saving the library and can get info from either the episode.nfo file or the tvshow.nfo file. It also store all the actor thumbs in the tvshow directory.
I'm willing to "productize" the patch (and make sure it works!), but I have a couple of suggestions/questions.

I haven't figured out what to do with the episode art. My preference would be to create a directory called "Artwork" inside the tvshow directory and put all the artwork (except perhaps folder.jpg? ), with the episode thumbs as <SS>x<EE>.tbn, perhaps with an advancesetting option.

Right now the patch depends upon correctly scanning the season/episode information from the episode file. Using the tvshow.nfo file it would be possible to list the episodefilename in the NFO and specify the episode/season correctly in the NFO.

I am also considering adding a "tvshowmatching" entry in the tvshow.nfo to specify a regular expressions for that tv show (perhaps a little easier than creating and maintaining a system wide one

any comments welcome
mike

[thrak76]

I'm wondering why?

You mention "...without polluting it with other stuff.", but won't this method make tvshow.nfo very large and hard to navigate for manual edits?

The system/processes in place works pretty well now. Please don't take my reply as negative though, I'm just trying to understand the point.

[dragonflight]

Yes it will make the tvshow.nfo file very big (think JAG, or Scrubs), but in the case of a manual creation of a tv show/documentary it will be more convenient. mihara in http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=141531, thought it would be more convenient if he updated the video files with higher quality files.

As for polluting files, I have my video library (some 25TB) rarely have write access and it is all check-summed (15 years of file system crashes, finger troubles, strange memory problems...), so I would like the semi-active nfo files to be elsewhere. I have a rather large collection of torrents (all public domain of course) and they include their own "nfo" files which I would not want to overwrite.

Of course I think my proposal should be an option. If people are interested and I can add a database item, then on storing the nfo's I would have a default option, as well as an option to update the currently existing nfo.

mike

[thrak76]

OK. I understand a little better now. You're kind of coming at this from a security perspective, then? Leave the library alone, and get your metadata from a separate source. Is that right?

[dragonflight]

Truthfully I'm not sure. I started looking at XBMC specifically because it had the option to store the metadata with the video files. The video gets reorganized periodically and its important that I can do so and recover the metadata. Of course part of the issue is that I don't trust XBMC yet ( and certainly not with me screwing around with the code!), so security is an issue, and my main library is mounted readonly.
I actually have my own scraper and system of metadata files in amongst the video which I organized neatly into season and episodes and metadata files per episode and used symlinks to point to the video portions of the original data (DVD or torrent). To make that work with XBMC, there would need to be some rules to stop following symlimks at some point so that the nfos would stay with the symlinks and not the targets. Saving it in a tvshows.nfo seemed simpler. The next step might be to allow nfo files in any folder so that they could be per season or half season or whatever.
Regardless at the moment if you have a torrent of a tv show or season and it has its own nfo file per episode, that can interfere with XBMC. More specifically, XBMC can write over the original nfo's making the torrent incomplete.

The final issue is that I would eventually like the nfo files split into permanent info (plot, cast ...) only rarely updated and active information - last watched etc.

Of course the more I have to explain it the better I understand!

[Mihara]

Me, I'm looking at it from a conceptual data organization perspective. In my collection, a "TV show" is typically a single entity with these properties:

1. At least half the time by the time it's in my hands it is no longer airing and exists in a complete form. If I don't have it in a complete form, I want to know how many bits and pieces I'm missing exactly, and a singular episode is typically worthless.
   
2. Shows that have more than 50 episodes in total are quite uncommon.
   
3. Sometimes, a better set of files will become available and replace all or large chunks of them, this typically happens to a show at least once per month.
   
4. File names will typically contain extra metadata -- at least a CRC32. Names can get very long.
   
5. Most of them have a full complement of metadata in one database or another and there's really no need to store it all locally in NFO files, except really oddball cases, for which NFO files will inevitably need to be created manually. An explicit reference to a database is almost always sufficient.
   

Supposing I have a disk crash and don't know what's what, a per-episode NFO file is not much use to me without that explicit reference to a database page which describes that particular singular episode, which exported NFO files actually do not contain. (Show name and episode number can be ambiguous.) But as long as I have a tvshow.nfo referencing the database in every show's directory (and I do, since it saves the pain on reorganizing) and all the files composing the show are still together, the metadata can be unambiguously restored with no user intervention. In this case, per-episode NFO files are just more files to worry about, not helping me much. In case of a manually created NFO, per-episode NFO files are once again not very useful to me, because I probably won't be giving very complete metadata, and editing one file instead of twenty (which, due to metadata in filenames, are not very regularly named) would be simply much less hassle.

So while I can see how per-episode NFO files might be natural when exporting data, because that's the way it's kept in the library database, I really see no reason why the per-episode data shouldn't be readable from a single tvshow.nfo file. It would certainly make sense to make that an option on database export as well. And without explicit database references, per-episode nfos are much less useful for data preservation than they could be.

P.S. As a side note... Calculate and remember MD5 and CRC32 of files while playing and keeping them in the database/nfos for later would be interesting, although I can imagine that would be a royal pain to code due to stream seeking.
P.P.S. And another thing I would love is the ability to store the thumbnails and fanart inside the nfo files, so that there's no way they can get lost and metadata per show is self-contained. Say, in base64. I really doubt anyone's going to agree with me on that, though.

[MorituriMax]

Is there a good program that will let you enter the information for a tv show or an episode and then create the xml/nfo file from that?

Thanks, I was looking at the breakdown for those files and there is hardly any help for what some of the individual lines are for.