2009-07-11, 00:37
Great, thank you for answering so quickly!
Have you any notion on how you intend to proceed?
Have you any notion on how you intend to proceed?
2009-07-11, 19:55
I'll speak with my developer on this. I'd like to include "extrathumbs" (from the Aeon skin) as one of the "helper" files.
2009-07-12, 14:28
This project seems pretty interesting. I was/am developing a download manager / handler / mangler utility. It was inspired by me starting to use Torrent Episode Downloader to handle my TV shows rather than manually downloading or recording off the air. TED is really effective at getting shows torrented in, but I found that they were piling up in the Downloads folder big-time. My util is actually written in PHP, and does a variety of things you guys may not have considered. Here's how it works in brief:
-First thing it does is connect to the WebUI of uTorrent (my torrent program) and remove any torrents with the "finished" status, ignoring torrents which are seeding and unfinished. uTorrent has no built-in way of auto-removing finished torrents, period, so I have them auto-stop. You need to remove the torrents or you'll have file access issues when you go to work on the files
-Next the script looks through "Finished Downloads" folder for any files with the user-defined "Video" file extensions.
-Now we have a list of "videos" in the downloads folder. Each item in the list is compared against three different Regular Expressions, which together appear to handle all the "scene" release TV show naming formats.
-If our RegExs get a hit we can make a safe bet this is a TV show, so further processing is done to filename using the same RegEx patterns
-Once the RegEx processing is complete, we have a pretty good idea of what the show's name is, plus the Season & Episode numbers or the airdate
-Either way the script then connects to TheTVDB and pulls information relevant to the episode
-If it is a "Daily" show where an Airdate is provided rather than Season & Episode numbers, we fetch the missing Season & Ep numbers (XBMC must have them for the library to work properly)
-At this point the script checks to see if we were successful in pulling the info about the show. If we DO have all the info we need to perform a rename, the episode is renamed and moved according to a user-defined template. The episode file is now in place where XBMC can find it and add it to the library.
-Some cleanup is done to remove any junk files like extra TXT or NFO files and any remaining empty folders are also deleted
-A bunch of info about the file is also dumped into a SQL database. I have been mostly using this dbase as a source of debugging info, since I record both the original filename and what the script did with it. This is a spare-time passion-project kind of thing so I haven't done a lot about it yet.
-One thing I have developed is an RSS feed generator, which basically just gives you a feed containing info about the stuff you have been downloading. I plan on changing this to a simple, static RSS/XML file which is dynamically re-written once each time the script is run.
What I think is relevant for you guys is: If your project can do what you have outlined here, you have basically all the machinery you need to build an automated download handler. Its basically just a subset of your overall intended functionality, with hardly any new things added. I've had a test setup running here and another one over at my girlfriend's. She's helped act as a great source of test data, to see where logic problems exist, and also where my RegEx's needed fixing up, and overall I feel good about it. However, its a freaking PHP script, so running it in an automatic capacity is not really very ideal. Overall I think some of the "killer app" features are:
-Being able to have a fully automated end-to-end system, with TED feeding the torrents to uTorrent, which then triggers the manager, which in turn gets the files ready for XBMC, with effectively zero user interaction. You just come home and your shows are ready and waiting.
-Generating either/or an HTML report or an RSS feed of the manager's day-to-day activities. RSS is what I was planning on using since you can stick lots of nice data into it, its dirt simple, and easy for users to make use of.
-Being able to easily rename daily aired shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show so that you can have these in XBMC's super-nice library.
-First thing it does is connect to the WebUI of uTorrent (my torrent program) and remove any torrents with the "finished" status, ignoring torrents which are seeding and unfinished. uTorrent has no built-in way of auto-removing finished torrents, period, so I have them auto-stop. You need to remove the torrents or you'll have file access issues when you go to work on the files
-Next the script looks through "Finished Downloads" folder for any files with the user-defined "Video" file extensions.
-Now we have a list of "videos" in the downloads folder. Each item in the list is compared against three different Regular Expressions, which together appear to handle all the "scene" release TV show naming formats.
-If our RegExs get a hit we can make a safe bet this is a TV show, so further processing is done to filename using the same RegEx patterns
-Once the RegEx processing is complete, we have a pretty good idea of what the show's name is, plus the Season & Episode numbers or the airdate
-Either way the script then connects to TheTVDB and pulls information relevant to the episode
-If it is a "Daily" show where an Airdate is provided rather than Season & Episode numbers, we fetch the missing Season & Ep numbers (XBMC must have them for the library to work properly)
-At this point the script checks to see if we were successful in pulling the info about the show. If we DO have all the info we need to perform a rename, the episode is renamed and moved according to a user-defined template. The episode file is now in place where XBMC can find it and add it to the library.
-Some cleanup is done to remove any junk files like extra TXT or NFO files and any remaining empty folders are also deleted
-A bunch of info about the file is also dumped into a SQL database. I have been mostly using this dbase as a source of debugging info, since I record both the original filename and what the script did with it. This is a spare-time passion-project kind of thing so I haven't done a lot about it yet.
-One thing I have developed is an RSS feed generator, which basically just gives you a feed containing info about the stuff you have been downloading. I plan on changing this to a simple, static RSS/XML file which is dynamically re-written once each time the script is run.
What I think is relevant for you guys is: If your project can do what you have outlined here, you have basically all the machinery you need to build an automated download handler. Its basically just a subset of your overall intended functionality, with hardly any new things added. I've had a test setup running here and another one over at my girlfriend's. She's helped act as a great source of test data, to see where logic problems exist, and also where my RegEx's needed fixing up, and overall I feel good about it. However, its a freaking PHP script, so running it in an automatic capacity is not really very ideal. Overall I think some of the "killer app" features are:
-Being able to have a fully automated end-to-end system, with TED feeding the torrents to uTorrent, which then triggers the manager, which in turn gets the files ready for XBMC, with effectively zero user interaction. You just come home and your shows are ready and waiting.
-Generating either/or an HTML report or an RSS feed of the manager's day-to-day activities. RSS is what I was planning on using since you can stick lots of nice data into it, its dirt simple, and easy for users to make use of.
-Being able to easily rename daily aired shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show so that you can have these in XBMC's super-nice library.
2009-07-12, 15:20
Thanks for the great information, SleepyP. Your script definitely does some cool stuff. Integrating those features would certainly increase the scope of our project, but you are correct that it could utilize the existing functionality of the program.
2010-11-25, 14:23
Did this project effort result in a working program? Where can we down load it?
joseph
joseph
2010-12-05, 18:24
Unfortunately no, we never completed a working product. I've toyed with the idea of building one out of Python, but haven't had the time.
