Last minute Juke setup woes :)

[DayOff]

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Trying to setup a new DB for music videos...took a couple artists and moved them into a test directory...

c:\test\artist\artist-title
c:\test\artist2\artist2-title
..and so on...files are a mix of mp4, mpeg...

When I go to generate a database, I select 'video' and c:\test as the folder to look at...but what I get is nothing for artist or album, or if I tell it to use filename if no tag, I end up getting 'test' and 'various artists'.  Not quite sure why it's choosing 'various artists' or considering it a compilation...nor why it would consider 'test' anything, as that's just the base folder that I'm telling it to look in.  My variable is set to %1\%2\%3 as default, and tried going %1\%2-%3 and some other variations...  

So right now I have two artists in two folders, with all the filenames and tags cleaned up with MediaMonkey, but still it's not happy with me...anyone know what I might be missing?  Any tips are appreciated...I have 13k videos, so I'd rather not be creating folders for every single video out there..i'm already ticked that i had to create separate artists folders instead of single alphabet letters to help break up the list of artists...it's making my streaming WDTVLive go into convulsions, paging through 4500 artists alphabetically

Pete

[Barcrest]

It can't read the tags from those types of files hence the need for the non mp3 tagger. This will then enable e-touch to read in the tag files you have created. It can pull the tags from the filename so it's not as much work as it sounds.

[DayOff]

I think for me that's probably the way to go...I cleaned up all the tags with MediaMonkey but it doesn't seem to pick up quite right.. Question though - is there a way to get the non mp3 tag creator to search subfolders?  Right now it seems to work but with every artist in a different folder, i have to go into each one individually before it detects files in order to create the tags...

[Barcrest]

Not at the moment no, I really should add an option for it to use the video database and create tags. Do you think this would be useful?

[DayOff]

Heh...not sure...if I can't get my videos into the database correctly, it wouldn't really help to have it there...I'm sort of needing the subdirectory search so I can get tags created so I can then build my database...

Is there any way to run this commandline?

I think this is going to work in the end, but my only suggestion would be for some added flexibility in the file path structure for the database...I'm burning a lot of time using tools to move stuff in and out of directories and such...and in the end going to have 3x the number of files to get around the tagging issues... I'm adding my files into mediamonkey ok, so I know my files aren't as screwed up as they were when I started, which is a good sign...but it's not really getting me further along with freebox, just allowing me to run more manual scripts against things...

Pete

[DayOff]

Ok, just got done manually moving 13k files to root directories so I could run them through the tagger...which created the tag files with artist and song title, then moved them all back to subdirectories broken down by alphabetic letter/artist, so now it looks like (for example):

\A\ABBA\Song1.mpg
\A\ABBA\Song1.mpg.tag
\A\ABBA\Song1.mpg.jpg
\A\ABBA\Song2.mpg
\A\ABBA\Song2.mpg.tag
\A\ABBA\Song2.mpg.jpg
\A\A-Ha\Song1.mpg.....etc

..etc...

However now when I create the library, it uses the first picture and first video name and put's that on the main page... (so you would see ABBA, below it thumbnail of that vid, with Song1 on the bottom.  Opening it shows the whole list of songs, which is good, but I don't get any of the jpgs that go along with them...

Can you think of any other adjustments to smooth this out a bit?  I guess I'm ideally shooting for a list of artists so I can throw a picture in for the artist, then you click on that artist and get a list of videos with thumbnails of the videos...if I have to trick the system out to make each video a separate folder, maybe that's what I have to do...I've already given up trying to keep this thing usable with other devices...my family will be opening up jpgs and tag files and have no idea what's going on..so i'm sort of dedicating this to etouch now...heh.

[Barcrest]

If you want them to have a picture per track then each track needs to be in it's own folder. You can then set the juke to auto display play options on a single track so you don't see the track listing when a track is selected.

[DayOff]

Hunting for a program that will make this easier - ever use anything to do something like this?  I see robobasket and some scripts out there... Pete

[Hitbig]

There's a program named FiletoFolder which takes the filename, creates the folder exactly the same name and moves the file in there. That in seconds then you can tag in tag and rename asking it to show files
skipping folders.Additionally you can copy from metadata to its folder the jpeg in minutes. That seems easy. Is that what you want for singles???

[Barcrest]

There's a program named FiletoFolder which takes the filename, creates the folder exactly the same name and moves the file in there. That in seconds then you can tag in tag and rename asking it to show files
skipping folders.Additionally you can copy from metadata to its folder the jpeg in minutes. That seems easy. Is that what you want for singles???

This pretty much is what you need to do, don't forget to set E-touch to jump straight to the play options for a single track.

[DayOff]

Finally getting back to this....sorry for the delay

So i'm looking at moving 15,000 files out of sorted subfolders and into a single directory so I can run the non mp3 tagger (it doesn't do recursive directory file changes, so everything must be in a single folder)...then run a separate utility to generate the jpg from the video and dump it to a file in this directory as well (with .jpg tag added after filename.  This leaves me with 45,000 files...

Then move all the tag files out of the directory and put someplace else...so I can run the file2folder tool against the leftover video/jpg files to create a folder from the filename of just the video files , get it to move the 2 files that is associated with that video into subfolders without accidentally combining videos with duplicate names, yet different video types (so video.avi and video.mpg don't both end up in a folder called 'video'),...(I think this is a hangup point for me right here)...file2folder will not separate them out fully...and will error out on the tag files if they're left together, since it's already created a folder based on the filename...

Then, take each of the tag files and move them back into each individual folder, making sure to combine them where necessary... and then I end up with the jukebox having 40 entries for a particular artist (not sorting based on artist, then tracks from that artist?

Gosh, is everyone really doing this with larger collections?  I know I'm pretty OCD with organizing my stuff, but it seems like it's a bit too involved..  I'd be curious if anyone else with a large collection of videos has found a good way to automate their cleanup a bit more, and retailed a fairly simple file structure underneath.  Creating a folder, tag file, and jpg for every single file so I can end up it working, but not being ideal of a sorting mech in the jukebox doesn't seem quite ideal...

Pete

[Barcrest]

I just do it manually. This is because most of my videos are in a folder by artist as opposed to having their own folders, so i can generate the tags for all the videos by artist.

What util are you running to generate the jpg's from the videos?

[DayOff]

I thought it was suggested I couldn't put videos in folders by artists, because then it expects the next folder down to be albums or something like that? 

I'm using Media Monkey for the jpg's..

Just being really honest here, I tried a competing product last night that I located, and was able to get the whole library in with like 4 clicks of the software... basically enter the root of the media folder, tell it to use my artist-title and ignore the suffix, then tell the art finder to use the artist-title.jpg that it finds to match up with the file, and I was done...  I know you have a lot of great features, but that to me seems to be frosting on the cake...so new features are always nice to see in these areas, but I think probably a lot of people out there hit the complexity of having to arrange their music library just right to conform with a fairly rigid sorting structure, and don't get real far.  Maybe if you have a hundred videos it's not a big deal to change it all around, but this application I tried last night, I could have changed it around 50 different ways based on variables, folder vs filename, pulling info from tags vs no tags, pulling art from the tags vs various graphic types (jpg/bmp/etc...calling it folder.jpg vs filename.jpg or whatever...) It's a real big deal for someone like me, just trying to get the thing running... take it with a grain of salt, but as someone who has donated for the Freebox cause, that's my only feature request    

I know there's a separate competing product that also makes it very simple to get going - it uses a flakey old queue interface utilizing windows media player classic in the background, which was the major hangup on that thing (and I admit, i was unusal since I had varied encoding of  my video collectinon...but don't think that's real unusual when it comes to video...  Just some thoughts...

[Norman Marshall]

I thought it was suggested I couldn't put videos in folders by artists,

You can