[AnalogKid]

I've seen a few folks discussing Media Flags recently, so I thought I'd document what I know so far, and maybe it's of help to others:

Things you need to know:

1) AEON can show Media Flags for the Source, Resolution, Studio, Audio, Subtitles and Parental Rating portions of a Movie

2) The 'Source' of a movie CANNOT be determined from the video file itself, for this reason AEON will parse the FILENAME for a relevant string (see list below).
To my mind this could be improved by ALSO parsing the <Studio> tag in the NFO file (since a user could PUT the info in there)

3) The Resolution, Studio, Audio and Subtitle portions of a Movie are read from the <Studio> tag of the NFO file for a movie.
This is a kludge to overcome the limitation of tags in NFO files. I personally would have preferred the invention of new explicit tags, but that's just me

4) The recommended formatting of the <Studio> tag is:
<studio>studio name / resolution / video codec / audio format / number of channels / language / subtitle language1/ subtitle language2... </studio>
Here's a real world example
<studio>Lionsgate / SDp / WMV3 / WMA2 / 2ch / Sub /</studio>

5) AEON is not as smart as you'd think and actually pays NO heed to the recommended formatting!
The way AEON finds the Resolution, Studio and Audio portions on a movie is by simple String searching within the <Studio> tag. This is not even EXACT matching, it's substring matching, so whilst AEON looks for 'Fox', it will find 'Fox' in '20th Century Fox' and 'Twentieth Century Fox' etc.

6) AEON will deduce the Audio format of a movie by looking at BOTH the Audio Format and the Number Of Channels
This means that:
AC-3, 6ch = DD5.1
AC-3, 8ch = DD7.1
DTS, 6ch = DTS5.1
DTS, 8ch = DTS7.1
2ch = DOLBY (this is technically an incorrect assumption, but that's the way it works today)


7) Below is a list of the substrings that AEON is looking for. Remember they are SUBSTRINGS, so there's room for error.


[Source] (Remember, this CANNOT be deduced from the movie file, therefore it has to be explicity defined in the filename. If you're using Video_TS folders from DVD Rips, then I think you're screwed with the source tag (but the other tags should work fine))
bluray
sddvd
hddvd
hdtv


[Studio Name]
Fox
Universal
FilmFour or Channel Four
Disney or Pixar
Gaumont
Artists
New Line
Dimension
Touchstone
Hollywood
Carolco
Revolution
LucasFilm
Screen Gems
Warner
TriStar
Castle Rock
Studio Canal
Paramount
Dreamworks
Columbia
Mayer
Sony
Artisan
Lionsgate
Miramax


[Resolution]
SD
480i
480p
576i
576p
720i
720p
1080i
1080p


[Video Codec]
This isn't used by AEON


[Audio Format]
dts
ac-3
mp3
MPEG Audio


[Channels]
mono
2ch
5ch
7ch


[Language]
This isn't used by AEON


[Subtitle Language]
sub


8) There are a number of great folks who have extended the number of supported studios, and provided addition artwork (icons) for those studios. For the moment, these aren't part of the AEON release, but 'extensions' to it. They do not harm your existing AEON installation, they just add to it so that your slightly eccentric movie collection from strange studios are supported too!
If you find that you've got a movie from a studio that those guys haven't yet covered... you can can either ask them to add that new studio, or you could consider getting out a little more often.

9) To avoid having to manually edit your NFO files for hundreds of movies, there are some tools that can automate this for you.
Most of them work by reading your movie files to extract detailed codec information and figuring out the resolution and sound format etc, then inserting this information into your NFO file for the movie. Try this tool: http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=48138