[Steve Gillam]

Background: I have a set of mp4's for Commonwealth Games from which I'm extracting coverage of events (eg. Gymnastics, Men's Individual All Around Final - my 7yr old son could do with some motivation). An event may involve one or more segments spanning one or more sources. This is easily solved at the 'file level' via edl's (with matching file a symlink to original) as sub episodes with a top level manually created .nfo/.tbn.

Issues: Create an entry in the library for each 'event'

I currently have:
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.1] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).edl
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.1] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).mp4
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.2] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).edl
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.2] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).mp4
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.3] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).edl
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.3] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).mp4
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.4] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).edl
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.4] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).mp4
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.5] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).edl
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02.5] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).mp4
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).nfo
Series\Commonwealth Games\Season 2014\Commonwealth Games [2014x02] Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final).tbn
but get no resulting entry.

If I rename 02.1's as 02's then all is fine, except it does not satisfy my SubEpisode useCase (obviously only getting the set of clips from the 'first' (symlinked) source file).

Anyone any ideas? (The whole realm of stacking/sub's for TVShow Library seems a little 'confused' within XBMC (sorry - Kodi)).

[Steve Gillam]

Following further investigation, creating a .nfo and .tbn for every sub-part results in a library entry for each sub-part but omitting sub-part number and is the 'correct' behavior for sub-part use-case.

It would appear my use-case is more related to 'stacking' than it is to 'sub-part's. I was avoiding this as I know that stacking, whilst very well supported for movies, seems to be discouraged for TV Show Episodes (to the point of having been 'turned off' with an apparent reluctance to 'turn back on'). After digging around, the current push for this feature is via http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=181562 so have made an entry and subscribed there - would be grateful for others visiting here and desiring this feature to make a contribution there.

[Steve Gillam]

A common, but understandable, response to such is to re-render the source into it's separate 'event' streams.

The artifacts above are script generated from a definition file co-located (but not necessarily) with the source broadcast (I suffix such definitions with '.vtm' for 'Virtual Media') along the lines of:

Code:

Show:  Commonwealth Games
  Plot:  Coverage of various Commonwealth Games
  Genre: Sport
  Premiered: 1930-08-16
  OutDir: clean/Video/Series
  JPG: CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4 0:34.000
  Season: 2014
    JPG: CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4 0:36.008
    Episode: 02 Gymnastics, Men's Ind. All Around (Final)
      Aired: 2014-07-30
      JPG: CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4 0:06.020
      # NOTE: Currently XBMC doesn't support flattening episodes but does have a multi-part convention, suffix .n (1-9) or .a (a-i) (cf. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Naming_video_files/TV_shows)
      # <source> [<in> [<out>]]
      #   {<in> [<out>]}...
      CG20140730_D07_1200-1300_C01.mp4 56:45
      CG20140730_D07_1300-1345_C02.mp4  0:30
      CG20140730_D07_1345-1500_C01.mp4  2:30
      CG20140730_D07_1500-1800_C01.mp4  0:00 2:03:45
      CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4 56:30 1:03:30
    Episode: 03 Gymnastics, Women's Ind. All Around (Final)
      Aired: 2014-07-30
      JPG: CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4 0:08.013
      CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C01.mp4  2:12
      CG20140730_D07_1900-2200_C03.mp4
      1:19:15 1:39:30
      1:45:00 2:10:45
      CG20140730_D07_2200-2230_C02.mp4  0:00

The resulting .edl's, and associated items, are virtually instantaneous (as opposed to re-renders), self documenting, adjustable, extendable (ie. initially focus on 'important threads' but can take through to completion), non-destructive and non-duplicating (of the source).

The concept is also reusable across all such mutli-event/multi-channel broadcasts (e.g summer/winter olympics, commonwealth games, other such sporting 'meets', probably others).

Pertinent to the thread's question, .edl's can only cover a single source so where a thread spans sources (Men's Final spans 5, Women's 3) we need to use sub-parts which would be nice to be able to optionally 'stack' and play through in the library.