How do you handle TV shows in your library?

[brianlees]

These are some general questions to glean more knowledge from the collective brains on this board to see how everyone does this...which I assume will be vastly different from post to post. But, I'm curious because I always think there is a better way to do something (at least, better than what I'm doing!).

How do you handle TV shows in your iTunes library? (of note - my library is geared to display on an AppleTV.)
What do you use to tag them (MetaX, Lostify, etc)?
Do you label each episode individually with a synopsis and title? If so, where do you get the data?

I tried to do a couple searches for this, but I came up short.

Thanks

Brian

[nightstrm]

I try to make them look as close to an iTunes-purchased TV show as possible, pulling information from various sources (Wikipedia, iTunes itself, etc) and grabbing either the iTunes cover artwork, or hoping getvideoartwork.com has something that is usable.

[ccjensen]

I have a script that automatically converts non itunes files to itunes compatible h264 files, then passes that file on to another scripts which uses the directory structure and file name to pull information from thetvdb and tag the files using atomicparsley. Then again another script that runs on my laptop (my primary machine) which checks my NAS for new files each time it wakes up from sleep and finds itself on the home network.

[trelm249]

I use MediaPortal instead of Apple TV.

The TV Series plugin pulls information from thetvdb.com.

Another poster already mention the tvdb.

A great thing about it is that you can update the info if need be.

[Da Man]

The easiest solution I've found for manually doing it is as follows-

-load first episode of TV show for encoding into MetaX
-open browser window and go to TV.com and search for your show
-once you've located your show, click on the episode guide and move to episode 1
-each episode in TV.com's database has pretty much everything you need, including actor names, episode number, season number, description, etc. The beauty of it is, the episode guide has a short description that almost always fits perfectly into what AppleTV is capable of displaying, so you can just copy and paste.
-Tag the entire season
-hit go and let it drop the entire season episode by episode into iTunes (drinking your favorite cocktail while this takes place is recommended, but not required)

I have used Lostify, but have stopped using it for 2 reasons-
-You have to tag each episode and then wait for it to write and drop it into itunes (you don't have to automatically drop it into iTunes, but why not)
-I have had a problem where I am unable to modify a tag on an episode after using lostify, even through itunes. It corrupts the whole video, and all I get is audio.

There is no perfect solution, but the work is well worth it. Once you get proficient enough, you can tear through an entire season about fifteen minutes. I tagged all five seasons of Angel in about an hour.

[tlunde]

I use MythTV to gather my shows and cause recordings to happen. It leaves large MPEG-2 files on my hard drives and a SQL database of show info. I have a script that takes a MPEG-2 file as input, queries the mythtv database based on the filename, encodes using HandBrakeCLI, stuffs the metadata into the file using AtomicParsley, and then generates new entries for RSS feeds (one for the whole system and one for each named show). iTunes subscribes to these podcasts and the shows are available from my iPod Touch, my AppleTV and the OS X box that lives under my TV.

What I'm missing is a way to deal with commercial skipping on my iPod Touch. I'd love a way to tell HandBrakeCLI to insert a "chapter" marker every 30 or 60 seconds. This would enable easy commercial skipping.

An enhancement to this would allow me to take the timing data from Myth's commercial scanner and insert chapter markers at arbitrary points to skip over each batch of commercials.

Does anyone know how to stick chapter markers in arbitrary MP4 or m4v files? Thanks.

[nightstrm]

Does anyone know how to stick chapter markers in arbitrary MP4 or m4v files? Thanks.

mp4chaps (part of mp4v2 library) can do this -- it is how I insert chapters into my HDDVD/Bluray rips.

http://code.google.com/p/mp4v2/

[tlunde]

mp4chaps (part of mp4v2 library) can do this -- it is how I insert chapters into my HDDVD/Bluray rips.

Thank you!

Looking at:
http://code.google.com/p/mp4v2/source/b ... 4chaps.cpp

it looks like the e / every option will do what I need.

It looks like there's a 99 chapter limit for DVDs, so I'm getting mixed results with google on whether iTunes/ATV/iPods get bothered by >99 chapters. Does anyone have first hand experience? If not, I'll stick markers in every 30 seconds and see what happens.

[refulgentis]

I have a script that automatically converts non itunes files to itunes compatible h264 files, then passes that file on to another scripts which uses the directory structure and file name to pull information from thetvdb and tag the files using atomicparsley. Then again another script that runs on my laptop (my primary machine) which checks my NAS for new files each time it wakes up from sleep and finds itself on the home network.

can you post the filename parsing from your thetvdb script? that would be immensely useful for the one i'm working on

also, thetvdb.com is definitely the way to go. the script at the bottom of this post (http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php ... 876#p49830) will take all the files you give it as arguments, and rewrite them with info from thetvdb (requires sed, curl, and atomicparsley64, the first two i think come with OS X, the 3rd is in the MetaX package, just drop it in /usr/local/bin). Only thing I don't have working yet is actors,directors,producers, which is going to be a bear to implement and won't be in the short term.

[ccjensen]

filename parsing script (written in python): http://github.com/ccjensen/mp4tvtags/

[Northy]

I try to make them look as close to an iTunes-purchased TV show as possible, pulling information from various sources (Wikipedia, iTunes itself, etc) and grabbing either the iTunes cover artwork, or hoping getvideoartwork.com has something that is usable.

Same thing I do

[brianlees]

Wow. Thanks for all the tips. I will put some of these to good use. I was already tagging movies, but TV shows are a slightly different beast.

CCJensen - All I can say is wow....and nice!

[baggss]

I pretty much use MetaX for all the tagging. You can bulk tag the show, artwork etc and then I just use TV.com for the description and date indo. I can tag a 20 episode TV series in about 15 min and let MetaX do the rest.

I use to use Lostify but find MetaX's interface more user friendly, especially once I figured out how to bulk tag with it.