Since I’ve now added movie support to TVScout, I’ve decided to rename it MediaScout. I’ve recently released a new beta version of it, MediaScout 0.9 Beta 2a. The new features include a "management" tab for TV and movies, as well as "auto-tron" which monitors a folder and auto-fetches TV metadata.
The full changelog and screenshots are below.
As usual, you can download it from CodePlex.
Changelog (from MediaScout 0.9 Beta 2)
- fixed language support for TVShows
Changelog (from MediaScout 0.9 Beta 1)
- Episode posters now showing properly
- Season posters now showing properly
- Movie backdrops now showing correctly
- Movie backdrops now selectable
- Fetching a movie now includes backdrops, and is threaded/will update the image fields after downloading needs indicator!
- When fetching a movie, it won’t overwrite a poster or backdrop if it already exists.
- Removes ‘:’ and ‘?’ from filenames in TV episodes so that they’re saved to disk correctly
- Now fetches/writes actors roles properly
- Fixed the positioning of the borders on movie images
- Added TV refinement dialog
- Can now edit limited movie details via movie tab. Hit save to commit changes
- Fetching movies writes more data
- Added back basic caching for TV. Still not configurable
- Added Cancel Button and its functionality for TV mode
- added ignore folder functionality back
- basic caching for movies (only on initial fetch, needs other sections to take advantage of it)
Outstanding issues or features
(stuff that’s not implemented yet)
- "Single season"
- Editing boxes for TV shows
- Version checker
- Undo
- Logging (logging & undo will likely come at the same time, since they’ll need to raise events at very similar spots)
- Separate subtitle processing
- Multiple folders for the TV and Movie management tabs
- Auto-tron for movies
- Better processing (and moving of files into season folders) for auto-tron
Changelog (From TVScout 0.8)
New Features
- Movie Metadata fetching
Using theMovieDB.org, MediaScout can help you fetch and manage metadata for movies as well
- TV Management
More fine-grained control over your TV metadata and images, allowing you to select from available posters, banners and backdrops.
- Auto-tron
Monitors a folder, fetching metadata and (optionally) renaming for you as soon as a file is dropped in!
Current limitation is it won’t move it into season folders.
ie, drop a file into C:\videos\Heroes\Season 3\
- Backdrop support
MediaBrowser now supports backdrops, so MediaScout does too!
- Episode Poster Extracting
No episode "posters"? Thats okay, providing you’ve got the codecs installed on your system, a screenshot will be captured and written to file (at 25% of the way through the episode)
Sam decided the shenanigans of the 10 page/103 post thread on TVScout was to come to an end, and has given TVScout it’s own sub forum on the VideoBrowser forums!
TVScout started off purely as a way to stop me from using/installing the Ruby command line tool, so this both fantastic and weird to see how far it’s gone.
There is also a new version of TVScout out (it has been for a week now), version 0.8
New features
- Metadata caching; caching all the data for quicker processing when updating. Cache is currently hardcoded to ‘expire’ every two weeks. vNext will include options to customise that.
- Customizable file extension list, ie support for DVR-MS/or any other file type you can think of, just by editing/appending the config file (you need to edit the TVScout.Exe.Config file using something like notepad)
- New tabbed GUI
- "Ignore" control files. Create a new file (blank text document), rename it to "ignore" (no file extension), and the folder will be ignored by TVScout (place it in the root directory of the show, ie C:\myshows\Stargate SG1\ignore. This is particularly useful for when a show has finished (Stargate SG-1 would be a good example)
As always, download from CodePlex
Version 0.9 is coming along nicely too, it will feature the logo above, as well as add a few new features like the ability to fetch movie metadata, a TVScout service (optional) to automagically handle all your metadata, and a show management utility.
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 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 :)
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
- Run TVScout, and browse to a folder of a particular TV show, ie “C:\Red Dwarf”
- Put each seasons files into their own folder, ie “C:\Red Dwarf\Season 1″
- 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.
- 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
