Off-topic: (sorry) Is there a Beets equivalent for video?

[Jonathan Thomas]

I've searched but don't think something as cool as beets exists for video, does anyone have any advice for managing large video/movie collections (preferably via command line)?

Many thanks,

Jonathan

[Karcsi Kolbasz]

Do you mean automatically with fingerprinting? Or for renaming?

I don't think movies utilize the same tagging, so other than renaming I don't know the benefits.

[Adrian Sampson]

I don't have a great suggestion, alas, but I have always thought it would be interesting to extend beets to other kinds of media. Especially since we factored out the database component, getting started on a project like this wouldn't be all that onerous...

> On Jul 19, 2015, at 7:57 AM, Karcsi Kolbasz <kolbas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Do you mean automatically with fingerprinting? Or for renaming?
>
> I don't think movies utilize the same tagging, so other than renaming I don't know the benefits.
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "beets" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beets-users...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Jonathan Thomas]

The main benefit for me would be to standardise naming conventions, much like paths does in beets. The ability to automatically group HD movies and standard definition movies would be amazing. In the same vein, group TV shows and episodes. Then genre specific folders, even go as far as grouping all my "spider-man" movies together in a sub-group below a parent folder of "Marvel Cinematic Universe" or something like that.

I think naming conventions are important for GUI front-ends like Kodi (formerly XBMC) to recognise the video and tag it correctly, so a tool similar to beets would be invaluable. Auto cover art fetching could be another feature etc.

I'm sure that organisation of file and folder structures are just the tip of the iceberg with something like this, but that would be my main use case. The amount of manual effort I put into stuff like this is ridiculous and would be hugely offset by a tool similar to beets.

Adrian, the perfectionists amongst us...our lives will never be the same after experiencing beets! ha.

[Michael MacLeod]

There's no command line tool for managing video libraries that I'm aware of, but the web based tools Sickbeard/Sickrage/Sonarr (for TV shows) and Couchpotato (for movies) are written in python and have most of the same library functions as beets (file name standardization, metadata retrieval, etc). They also actively search for new releases to download via torrent or usenet.

Headphones (https://github.com/rembo10/headphones) is a web GUI for music that uses Beets for it's back end.

[Karcsi Kolbasz]

You can also use the bulk file rename tool if your simply trying to add data like HD or BluRay to the filename,

Otherwise, if your files are a complete mess, you can use the above mentioned tools to see if they can organize.  For TV, as long as you have some order, tools like Sonarr will rename organize the episodes per the settings you choose.  I havent had much success organizing with couchpotato, for me it was a manual process, add .year.media type to the file name.

From there, take a look at Emby/plex.  I think Emby gives a bit more control over metadata management than plex, but both can handle a lot of the heavy lifting for you from an organization perspective.  Emby can create collections for you Marvel videos and you can add to that manually as needed.

Emby is a direct add-on to kodi and imports to the native kodi DB.  Plex is a full skin on kodi or standalone, so pick the one you like better.  for me, it is emby and kodi.

[tmm...@gmail.com]

Yes, there are tools that can fulfill what you are asking for.  First, have a look at FileBot.  It has a a CLI (and a GUI), it's scriptable, and it has many useful options for renaming and sorting.  You can use these options to group your HD and SD videos.  It can even do movie sets and genres, so you can group your Spider-Man titles, or your comedies, or whatever.  To identify episodes and give them Kodi-friendly names, it can look them up on TheMovieDB, TheTVDB, AniDB, or TVRage.  It can download artwork and subtitles.  It's a Java app that's packaged for several platforms.

There are two other cross-platform (Java) apps I use for library management: tinyMediaManager and MediaElch.  They don't have the CLI power and easy renaming of FileBot, but they have more scrapers, and they're designed for browsing and managing collections, not just post-processing them.  I like them for creating NFO files and fetching artwork, which greatly increases the speed and accuracy of scanning content into a new Kodi library.  (And, of course, you don't have to re-download all that art every time.)

The first program is tinyMediaManager.  With this you can scrape your film and TV collection, either interactively or unattended.  When your collection changes, you run an update.  Once you set your directories and import your library, you can use this tool to manage your collection: change artwork, scrape new additions, edit the data from NFO files, and so on.  I think you'll appreciate how it displays the artwork for each title as you browse your collection.

Then there's MediaElch.  Although MediaElch has many of the scraping capabilities of tinyMediaManager, their UIs are quite different, and both apps have distinctive features.  For example, MediaElch can put all of your movie files into subfolders with one click.  MediaElch also has a music scraper that allows you to fetch art and generate NFO files for artists; it can collect folksonomy tags as well.  In practice, however, it doesn't fetch very much data, and there are many gaps.  It uses the Universal Music Scraper, which can scrape AllMusic, Discogs, and The Audio DB.  Every album I tested also had MusicBrainz tags.  But even with all these resources, the scraper returned very little content.  It appears to get artwork only from The Audio DB.  Even with these weaknesses, it can still be useful if you want to frontload artist data before importing your music collection into Kodi.

To its credit, MediaElch didn't modify my audio tags at all, even when I told it to fetch and write all available data.  So, it should be safe to run on a collection.  It requires your collection to be organised by artist, and it writes the NFO file (which is actually XML) and any JPEG and PNG files to the artist's directory.  I just wanna browse artists with photos, dammit!