TVScout 0.6

TVScout 0.6 is now released!

Release Notes

Features

• Language selection support
• Definable text to use instead of "Season" (ie, "Säsong" is swedish for season, can change the value to suit your preferred language)
• Separate logic from GUI program so the logic is in a separate DLL
• Process Root directory
• Better logging:
  • more detailed
  • colour coded
  • indenting for easy reading

Bugfixes

• Moved away from arrays to Lists to avoid unfortunate 200-episode limit
• Overwriting series/season poster fixes
• Now processes *M*A*S*H* (and other interesting characters in TV shows) correctly (thanks dlavey!)

TVScoutBase.dll
TVScoutBase.DLL is a .NET library, and is what does all the processing for TVScout. The application you see just makes use of it, its just a GUI frontend. I’ve finally separated all the logic into the dll, see the CodePlex release page for an example of how to use it to interact with the TVDB API

TVScout 0.5D

TVScout has come a long way since I launched it, and last night I updated it (to v0.5D) to migrate to the new theTVDB API, as they turned off the old one, breaking all previous versions of TVScout (and Sam’s ruby tvscraper)

New Features (from 0.4)

• If it exists, uses series.xml to avoid needing user input/uses that info to speed up the process.
• Renames subtitle files (srt, idx and sub are the only formats supported – are there others?)
• metadata folders hidden
• Move files in the root directory of a show (ie, "\RedDwarf\S01E01.avi") to a season folder (ie, "\RedDwarf\Season 1\S01E01.avi") so it can be processed normally!(optional)
• Huge GUI changes!
• Separated Series, Season, and Folder ‘get poster’ options into three checkboxes

Bug Fixes

• Strips HTML returned from theTVdb preventing files being renamed
• Should no longer rename files when not checked

Oh, and it’s open source too, hosted on CodePlex :)

TVScout 0.1 – TV Metadata for VideoBrowser

Update: this project is now hosted on CodePlex

I use Salami’s Movie Organizer for metadata for movies, but for TV I wasn’t entirely happy with the ruby script, because I’m not a huge fan of CLI, and it didn’t get “posters” for seasons/shows.

So, rather than complaining about it, I created TVScout (I…shouldn’t be allowed to name things, first name was VideoBrowserTVMetaData). It requires .NET 3.0, I figure since VB is for Vista, that really shouldn’t be a problem. Like the ruby script, this makes use of TheTVDb for metadata.

TV Scout v0.1

Features

• Fetches “poster art” (where available) for seasons and for series
• Renames files, gets metadata, etc, just like the ruby script.
• Handles S00E00 and 00×00 (and S0E0, 0×0 and anything in between)

Limitations/Known bugs/problems

• always updates metadata (for series.xml)
• always fetches posters
• always renames files (if they match)
• can’t set custom file structure filters
• Files must be in a season folder. ie, “Battlestar Galacatica (2003)\Season 1\s01e01.avi”
• Unlike the ruby scrapper fetches all the metadata for a show first. This means if you’re only processing one or two episodes, it’ll be “slower” (30seconds?) depending on your connection. For more than that, it should use less web calls.

To Do

• I want to get a popup/prompt which will do a basic search, then ask what show you’re talking about, so that the folder names don’t’ have to exactly match theTVDB’s. Ie, For the “remake” of Battlestar Galactica, the folder has to be “Battlestar Galactica (2003)”.
• Parse files not in a season folder so that they put inside one (/create season folder), then processed properly
• Make the options usable
• Process “root” directories (ie C:\TV\) instead of just specific shows (ie, C:\TV\Battlestar Galactica (2003))
• Make source code available via CodePlex – just a time/can-be-botheredness thing. I’ll do it when I get the popup working

Instructions

1. Run TVScout, and browse to a folder of a particular TV show, ie “C:\Red Dwarf”
2. Put each seasons files into their own folder, ie “C:\Red Dwarf\Season 1″
3. Assuming the filenames contain “s01e01″ or “01×01″ (for episode 1, season 1), when you “Fetch Metadata”, TVScout will get metadata, as well as any available images for each episode, season and finally overall series.
4. Fire up Windows Media Center with Video Browser installed, and your show should have metadata associated with it!

Disclaimer
Use this at your own risk. While it works pretty well for me so far, but I won’t be held responsible for loss of data, hair, or anything else you may lose in a result of downloading or running this app.

Download (save to HDD first, then run, don’t just run from IE, that will most likely crash) Visit codeplex for the updated downloads