On metadata in SageTV
Lately I’ve been playing with SageTV, because I’m pretty sure their STX-HD100 device might be the one to rule them all. What I’m focusing on first, though, is getting all of the metadata straightened up for my video files.
In English: I want to be able to browse through my archived TV episode files on my television and be able to see the accompanying episode titles, descriptions, and so on, on a per-episode basis. On top of that, I want the same description-type information for my archived movies, and some poster art would be nice.
It’s a little labor-intensive, but here’s what I’m doing:
Movie Metadata. For movie descriptions in Sage, it’s easiest to install the SageMC STV first. (An STV is like a theme for Sage, although it includes additional functionalities and layouts.) Once installed, when browsing to a movie, there’s now a right-click menu option to retrieve movie data from IMDB. Movie synopses: check. Posters: check.
TV Metadata. This can be a little trickier, because there are so many individual episodes, typically. I had to take a few different steps here:
Standardize file names. Using AntRenamer, I went back through and completely standardized the folder structure and file names of all of my TV episode files. The structure ended up being <Show Name>/<Season #>/s##e##.extension.
Use Roxy99’s TV.com scraper for Sage to generate .my files. This is fairly straightforward: install this small application and point it at your video directory. For each video it identifies individually, it generates a .my file in the same directory containing all of the episode’s metadata.
Use Roxy99’s .my to .properties converter. SageTV will look to a .properties file to define the metadata for a video file of the same title, so this application will take the .my files from the previous step and generate corresponding .properties files.
So far, this has been pretty successful, although some manual tweaking is necessary with things like two-part episodes, specials, and so on. I’ll post screenshots once it’s all complete!
