[Crissov]

I'm using a naming pattern for TV episodes that is not supported by the default regular expressions, e.g. 1.23 Title.ext for episode #23 in the 1st season. I have edited AdvancedSettings.xml accordingly. (It is a trivial change, because it just requires changing x to [x.] in the regular expression for the 1x23 pattern.) However, if I'm sharing my files with a friend, they either need to make the same edit or rename the files. One way to solve this would be changing the default regular expression and I have submitted a respective pull request on Github.

However, another solution would be available with Leia which introduces support for reading metadata stored in tags inside video files, MP4 in particular. My video files do have such tags, but on a system running Kodi 18.1 without a custom AdvancedSettings.xml they are still being ignored when their folder is added to the library or scanned again later on. I presume this is because they do not match the naming patterns.

I wish Kodi would read supported tags from any arbitrary video file in its media sources.

Is that a reasonable request? Would you consider this a bug or unexpected behavior?
I came here first instead of submitting an issue on Github, because the Howto told me to.

[jjd-uk]

Do have the tag reading turned on in Settings? as it's off by default.

[Crissov]

Yes, the setting is activated, of course. I even checked whether it had been disabled automatically for some reason, but itʼs still active.

[scott967]

I'm just guessing as I don't really do much with shows/seasons/episodes, but it sounds like the tags aren't read unless the file name first passes through the naming regex?  What does debug log show during a scan?

scott s.
.

[Crissov]

I'm just guessing as I don't really do much with shows/seasons/episodes, but it sounds like the tags aren't read unless the file name first passes through the naming regex?  What does debug log show during a scan?

scott s.
.

Yes, that seems to be the problem.
The log does not show anything besides some Unicode issues (404 when trying to retrieve from scraper) and missing ./fanart folders.

[scott967]

I'm just guessing as I don't really do much with shows/seasons/episodes, but it sounds like the tags aren't read unless the file name first passes through the naming regex?  What does debug log show during a scan?

scott s.
.

Yes, that seems to be the problem.
The log does not show anything besides some Unicode issues (404 when trying to retrieve from scraper) and missing ./fanart folders. 

I guess the way tvshows are implemented makes the filename very important to correct scanning.  I only tested mp4 tag reading with music videos, and for those the filename doesn't matter.  I agree that it would be useful to have this capability; don't know how hard it is to muck around in the code for tvshows.  I would post a feature request in that forum so it has some visibility.

scott s.
.

[Crissov]

@Karellen advises against video tags altogether in https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2871492.
I hope this is not official Kodi policy, @Montellese. For audio files, ID3 tags work very well, so why should we rely on file names or NFO files for video files?

What we need is:

• read tags from any (MP4) video file if the setting is enabled
  
• automatically determine whether a video file is a movie, a TV episode or a music video etc., e.g. by supporting iTunes' stik tag field
  
• allow users to prefer embedded tag over NFO over online scraper (or any other order)
  
• document how to store information that can be part of an NFO file inside an MP4 tag (for MKV, the NFO is stored verbatim within the file), especially IMDB, TheTVDB, TMDB IDs or URLs
  
• store metadata retrieved from scrapers inside the files if possible (and desired by the user), not just in the internal database; this could be limited to Video Library Export