theTVDB

[tannebil]

TheTVDB had a scheduled outage today and it showed a couple of issues.

1) VAP goes non-responsive until the lookup hits the time-out. Is there any way to keep the GUI responsive while the query is pending?

2) If theTVDB is unavailable, I'd prefer that VAP waits on processing new files until it can get a response. Perhaps a command line option something like "-waitTVDB"? theTVDB doesn't have many outages but my Comcast connection can be a bit flaky.

[dlflannery]

OK Exe VAP070T1 attached for test:

If VAP fails to get data from theTVDB.com one time, it stops trying to connect. Every five minutes thereafter (or when it needs to, whichever is longer) it re-tries. Thus you will suffer one GUI freeze for the timeout every five minutes at the worst. Once it connects again, the process resets.

There is a new checkbox, "Stop monitoring if theTVDB is down", located on the "Other" tab of Advanced Configuration, which will default to checked the first time you startup this version and will be tracked in the XML file thereafter. If this is checked, files that are detected when theTVDB is down will remain in the 'TRANSFERRING" status, until the connection is restored (and VAP processing is active). Otherwise, detected files will be processed with whatever metadata can be obtained without using theTVDB. (In any case, VAP retries the connection at 5 minute intervals, if its processing is active and a file remains in the TRANSFERRING status.)

There are some log messages for this activity, including one every time a failed connection is detected (which can appear only after the time out).

To test this you have to simulate theTVDB.com being down, which I did by using a bad URL string in my code. To make it easy for you to do the same thing, I've brought part of the URL out as a config item in the XML file as follows:

<TvdbWebSite>theTVDB.com</TvdbWebSite>

The above is of course the correct string. For testing just sub something like "XtheTVDB.com". Also, if this item isn't in the XML file, VAP will use the default (correct) string. If you test by disconnecting the Internet cable on my machine the failure is immediate (unsuitable for testing). Unfortunately the delay using a bad URL is only about 3 secs.

[msmart]

Speaking of theTVDB requests..... I've got an interesting one for you.

In addition to our TiVo, we have a DirecTV DVR and every now and then because of conflicts, we record a show on the DirecTV DVR that we want downloaded to the PC. So what we do is set up manual recording of a show on the TiVo then play the show on the DirecTV DVR. What we end up with is the desired show on the TiVo but with the wrong name. I know I can do a manual rename and MetaX update afterwards but...

Here's the request part, could there be a XML file that I edit, before downloading the show with TiVo Desktop, that would read the "input file" and do a theTVDB lookup and VRD Save As using the "output file"?

Example:

Input Show Title - "Episode Name" :: Output Show Title - "Episode Name"

I don't know how widespread the interest would be for this feature but I do this several times a month.

[dlflannery]

Speaking of theTVDB requests..... I've got an interesting one for you.

In addition to our TiVo, we have a DirecTV DVR and every now and then because of conflicts, we record a show on the DirecTV DVR that we want downloaded to the PC. So what we do is set up manual recording of a show on the TiVo then play the show on the DirecTV DVR. What we end up with is the desired show on the TiVo but with the wrong name. I know I can do a manual rename and MetaX update afterwards but...

Here's the request part, could there be a XML file that I edit, before downloading the show with TiVo Desktop, that would read the "input file" and do a theTVDB lookup and VRD Save As using the "output file"?

Example:

Input Show Title - "Episode Name" :: Output Show Title - "Episode Name"

I don't know how widespread the interest would be for this feature but I do this several times a month.

I suspect I don't understand your problem.
How about a specific example of the input name and desired output name?
I would guess the TiVo file you get this way has very little, if any, metadata. Can you run pyTiVoMetaGen on one, or generate the pyTivo metadata file from VAP so we can see what metadata might be there?

[msmart]

Ok, here's an example, an episode of Firefly (from 2002-2003), season 1 episode 11, Serenity was recorded on the DirecTV DVR. To get it on the TiVo, my wife started recording The Dan Patrick Show on the TiVo then started playing the Firefly episode on the DirecTV DVR as what ever you see on the TV is what the TiVo records. She extends the ending time of the show in the TiVo to be sure to get the entire show as it plays on the DirecTV DVR.

The filename is "The Dan Patrick Show (Recorded on Mar 28, 2011, 101)" and the metadata is

description : Host Dan Patrick's daily nationally syndicated sports talk radio program. Includes interviews and discussions with the biggest stars in sports and entertainment. Exclusively on The 101 Network, only on DIRECTV.
isEpisode : true
seriesTitle : The Dan Patrick Show
title : The Dan Patrick Show
originalAirDate : 2011-03-28T00:00:00Z
episodeTitle : 
seriesId : SH01173031
time : 2011-03-28T13:00:00Z
episodeNumber : 521
displayMajorNumber : 0
callsign : 101
tvRating : x4
vProgramGenre : Variety
vSeriesGenre : Variety
vSeriesGenre : Interests
vSeriesGenre : Daytime

I want it to become "Firefly 0111 Serenity" with the metadata found on theTVDB.com http://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=episode&...d=297999&lid=7

Another example is "Deadliest Warrior - ''Apache vs. Gladiator'' (Recorded Mar 27, 2011, SPIKETV)" and has metadata of

description : The stealthy Apache versus the gladiator, combatant of ancient Rome.
isEpisode : true
seriesTitle : Deadliest Warrior
title : Deadliest Warrior
originalAirDate : 2009-04-07T00:00:00Z
episodeTitle : Apache vs. Gladiator
seriesId : SH01136477
time : 2011-03-28T05:42:00Z
episodeNumber : 101
displayMajorNumber : 0
callsign : SPIKETV
showingBits : 393730
tvRating : x5
vProgramGenre : Documentary
vProgramGenre : History
vProgramGenre : War
vSeriesGenre : Documentary
vSeriesGenre : History
vSeriesGenre : War
vSeriesGenre : Interests
vSeriesGenre : Documentary

.... but is actually Hawthorne - Afterglow : http://www.thetvdb.com/?tab=episode&...=2447741&lid=7 which should output as "Hawthorne 0204 Afterglow"

The file name and metadata on the TiVo show is irrelevant because it was just used to get the "real" show off of the DirecTV DVR.

I have no problem changing the file name after VAP processes it and updating the metadata with MetaX, I just thought I would throw the request out there.

Did that help you understand what I'm doing?

[dlflannery]

OK.... Now I understand. Here is an idea for doing this with VAP:

TiVoDecode the .tivo to a .mpg. Rename the .mpg file to include series title and either episode name or air date. Then set up an input filename metadata parsing template to get those items, which will be used in a theTVDB.com search. (If you input the .tivo to VAP it will pick up all that incorrect metadata.)

[msmart]

Good idea, I'll give it a try and let you know.

[msmart]

It worked. I changed the filename to "HawthoRNe - Afterglow.mpeg" and theTVDB lookup succeeded.

(I added a .mpeg entry to the meta data parsing template file because TiVo Decode saves files with the .mpeg extension)

Thanks.

[tannebil]

I have not had a chance to test the theTVDB behavior yet but I have noticed a couple of oddities in VAPpostprocess.

1. vaplog.txt disappears and posts to the VAP log as soon as Drax completes rather than when the command file ends processing. I never noticed that happening before but I can't swear I ever had occasion to look for it before. I was debugging some cleanup code that runs after Drax so I had added a pause command after Drax and noticed that vaplog.txt had disappeared.

2. Foreign characters in a title got scrambled in being passed to Atomic Parsley. I noticed it when doing an episode of "30 Rock" named "¡Qué Sorpresa!". It was correct in the apo file but the two foreign characters are mangled when "set /p options=<"%~3%~1.apo" executes. I suspect it's something to do with character sets.

Neither are huge problems for me but thought you might want to know about them.

[dlflannery]

Which version of VAP?

Different handling of the characters in the AP description tag was put in VAP070T1. I noticed the same problem you did. Apparently AP only handles ASCII characters (possibly an intrinsic limitation of command-line strings?), not Unicode or UTF-8. So I forced a conversion to ASCII which replaces any non-ASCII character with '?'. The apo file will look OK with the non-ASCII characters in most editors (including Notepad) because they handle Unicode or UTF-8 character sets. The '&#191;' is in the "Extended ASCII set" which covers 0-255 values but I tried feeding that into AP and it didn't handle it.
I had a character in a TiVo program description that looked like the single quote (') but it actually had a Unicode value up in the thousands, and there are an unknown number of such characters. Not worth the trouble to hunt them all down and translate them into a similar ASCII character. EDIT: The AP docs say it is Unicode compliant so the problem is somewhere in the process of writing to the .apo file and reading from that into the batch file, I suppose.

As for the postprocess log messages, VAP waits until the script (command window) terminates before it reads VAPlog.txt and logs the messages. I ran a test with just a pause statement bracketed by echo statements to VAPlog.txt. It worked as expected: at the pause, the VAPlog.txt file was present and had the first message in it and then both messages appeared in the VAP log after the script ended. Note that VAP deletes VAPlog.txt as soon as it has read it.