2023-12-11, 18:11
Longtime Kodi user here. I have organized my media collection pretty well, but Music Videos remain a problem. Even to tackle the problem I had to decide where to open this thread - in a video scraper section, the music section or the Music Video scraper section - since it is a hybrid genre. Well, here I am - if mods feel this would better be placed elsewhere, feel free to move.
The initial problem stems from the fact that "Music video" is a hybrid category which has not only two but three possible content types.
a) Some use it for "video clips", i.e. short videos of usually one musical piece performed by a specific artist. Those clips usualy hail from TV or a video clip platform like YouTube.
b) Others use it for "music concerts", i.e. longer videos of live music performances, by one or more artists, of several music pieces. Source may be TV, a video platform or comercial video discs like DVDs or Blu-rays.
c) Still others, me included, would also like to use it for music albums which are released on DVD-A, DVD-V and Blu-ray Audio. I have a sizeable collection of those, all ripped to ISO files. The trouble with those is that they are not recognized as music files when sources are added as type "music" to the music database PLUS they are not tag-eable to help music scrapers find the correct release. Additionally, many of those have some video content, even if it's just a looping clip of a contemplatory nature, so something more than pure audio playback is needed.
How to accomodate all of these use cases? Personally, I have tried several approaches to read them into the Kodi database, none of which were 100% successful.
So, what to do? Well, for music we already have a good music scraper based on Musicbrainz data. Their database is very comprehensive and also covers DVD-A/V and Blu-ray, including concerts.This could be used to weave together video and music. See for an example the release of Sting's concert "Bring on the Night", and note how tracks are shown as video content.
So what about video clips? Personally, I don't collect those but let me check if there are such things on Musicbrainz. Since I grew up with 80's music I'll search for some Tears for Fears clips. Bummer, nothing there. I guess Musicbrainz only indexes those media items that have a unique digital signature (hash), which in the case of video files is not that easy since they are usually fingerprinted by lenght and encoding only, potentially leading to many many duplicates.
Then there is Discogs. It's very similar to Musicbrainz in that it allow your music to be identifed by content and id's. If you have a look at the enctrance for Tears for Fears, you'll note that there is some general text about the artist, followed by 4 sections: Discography, Reviews, Videos and Lists. The Video section features an impressive 354 items at the time of writing (the band is still active). So Discogs would seem like the go-to database source for all 3 use cases. Some great Discogs scrapers exist for other software like foo_discogger which is even available on Github. Also there are lots of ratings and reviews on Discogs whereas they're pretty scarce on Musicbrainz.
Well, writing a new scraper is certainly a huge project and I know Kodi dev resources are spread thinly. Hopefully there's a dev who's into Music Videos and feels inspired and motivated by my thoughts to investigate further. That's all folks, thanks for reading!
The initial problem stems from the fact that "Music video" is a hybrid category which has not only two but three possible content types.
a) Some use it for "video clips", i.e. short videos of usually one musical piece performed by a specific artist. Those clips usualy hail from TV or a video clip platform like YouTube.
b) Others use it for "music concerts", i.e. longer videos of live music performances, by one or more artists, of several music pieces. Source may be TV, a video platform or comercial video discs like DVDs or Blu-rays.
c) Still others, me included, would also like to use it for music albums which are released on DVD-A, DVD-V and Blu-ray Audio. I have a sizeable collection of those, all ripped to ISO files. The trouble with those is that they are not recognized as music files when sources are added as type "music" to the music database PLUS they are not tag-eable to help music scrapers find the correct release. Additionally, many of those have some video content, even if it's just a looping clip of a contemplatory nature, so something more than pure audio playback is needed.
How to accomodate all of these use cases? Personally, I have tried several approaches to read them into the Kodi database, none of which were 100% successful.
- The TMDB concert mod scraper finds some of those discs and adds them. It cannot identify regular album releases. Also, it uses the broken "The Movie Database" scraper and as such is in need of an update.
- Same goes for the Music Concert Database scraper which I am guessing is just an earlier incarnation of the previously mentioned scraper.
- The AudioDB.com for Music Videos scraper doesn't fare much better, it can identify roughly 50% of my folders/ISOs.
So, what to do? Well, for music we already have a good music scraper based on Musicbrainz data. Their database is very comprehensive and also covers DVD-A/V and Blu-ray, including concerts.This could be used to weave together video and music. See for an example the release of Sting's concert "Bring on the Night", and note how tracks are shown as video content.
So what about video clips? Personally, I don't collect those but let me check if there are such things on Musicbrainz. Since I grew up with 80's music I'll search for some Tears for Fears clips. Bummer, nothing there. I guess Musicbrainz only indexes those media items that have a unique digital signature (hash), which in the case of video files is not that easy since they are usually fingerprinted by lenght and encoding only, potentially leading to many many duplicates.
Then there is Discogs. It's very similar to Musicbrainz in that it allow your music to be identifed by content and id's. If you have a look at the enctrance for Tears for Fears, you'll note that there is some general text about the artist, followed by 4 sections: Discography, Reviews, Videos and Lists. The Video section features an impressive 354 items at the time of writing (the band is still active). So Discogs would seem like the go-to database source for all 3 use cases. Some great Discogs scrapers exist for other software like foo_discogger which is even available on Github. Also there are lots of ratings and reviews on Discogs whereas they're pretty scarce on Musicbrainz.
Well, writing a new scraper is certainly a huge project and I know Kodi dev resources are spread thinly. Hopefully there's a dev who's into Music Videos and feels inspired and motivated by my thoughts to investigate further. That's all folks, thanks for reading!
