Video Plugin - Looking for Suggestions

[Kevina]

Hi All,
Well, I've finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to 1.3.11, which means that I unfortunately have to finally say goodbye to the Video Archive plugin that my family has grown to love over the last several years, since I have not been successful in getting it to run with the latest version of GBPVR (if someone can clue me in, I'm all ears). Jeff is nowhere to be found these days, so I am looking for advise.

Here's my situation: I have about 1500 recorded videos scattered across 5 drives. Most, but not all, of these have entries in the GBPVR datatbase, but may not be pointing to the correct current location. In otherwords, the database may be pointing to E:\videos\show directory\show name.mpg, but the file may be sitting in G:\videos\.... as a result of past drive failures and my having to manually copy files from one drive to another. I have tried exporting a list of these from VA in the past, but GBPVR does not want to update the path when I attempt to import the list in the config app.

My bigger concern however, is in the loss of the great interface that the VA plugin had. It allowed me to have all of my videos across multiple drives, but for them all to appear uniformely in the plugin UI. In other words, I could have 5 recordings of Flashpoint on the E:\videos drive, 15 on the G:\videos drive, 10 more on the H: drive, etc., but they would all appear in VA under the Flashpoint folder together, regardless of where the physical files were stored. This was a life saver for us.

The plugin also allowed us to sort the What's New programs either by name or date, a very nice to have. It had numerous other really nice features, but these were the most important to us.

I'm looking for a good replacement that is currently being supported under the newest version of GBPVR, but have not been able to locate one on the WIKI. Can anyone suggest one that they think might fit the bill? I thought MovieWiz might be the ticket, but it seems to list all of the the recordings individually, not by folder name. As you can imagine with 1500 recordings, that is a real pain.

I've been looking at the Videos Library plugin, but it's basically just an extension of the original Video Library module and doesn't allow me to view current recordings with my older ones all together, something VA did very nicely.

If anyone has any good suggestions, I'm all ears, as I am really in the dog house at the moment with the wife and kids. I spent all the time to do the upgrade and get things working, only to find that we've lost our most used plugin!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

[dennit]

I've been looking at the Videos Library plugin, but it's basically just an extension of the original Video Library module and doesn't allow me to view current recordings with my older ones all together, something VA did very nicely.

Here's how I deal with this: I just use the default Recordings under the GBPVR interface. I know there are lots of plugins that are more sophisticated, and it sounds like you are a candidate for one of them, but I like the default.

The trick to this method is to understand the Programme table in gbpvr.db3 file and know that all recordings having the same "name" appear grouped together under that name in the Recordings listing of the main menu in pvrx2. Within the entry for "name" they are sorted alphabetically by the "sub_title." It doesn't matter where these files are actually located.

All you have to do is:
1) If you didnt' actually record them, then add your files to the recording database (I use vidimport),
2) find all your related recordings,
3) move the name to the sub_title field,
4) then give them the same name.

I like SQLiteSpy to do this. A few simple sql queries, which you can save for later use will let you automate a lot of this. In pseudo query they look like this:

SELECT all programme entries in PROGRAMME you want to put under the same common name,
UPDATE the sub_title field to match the name field and the name field to the same common name you want

When I move recordings around, I just update the location under the field "filename" in the RECORDING_SCHEDULE table of gbpvr.db3.

in pseudo SQL, it's the same basic process as above, typically:
SELECT all recordings in RECORDING_SCHEDULE you have moved (I usually just search in the filename field for the old drive letter plus part of the name of the files I moved),
UPDATE the filename field in RECORDING_SCHEDULE for the new drive letter (which is part of the filename).

I do this sort of thing a lot, so I keep lots of little stored SQL queries. Sorry I'm not at home to post some of them.

[Kevina]

Thanks Dennit, I downloaded vidImport and imported all of the videos from my other drives so at least I can see them in the Recordings screen. I have so many recordings, however, that it seems to be a real pain navigating from the top to the bottom to find the video I want to play. In VA we could hit the first letter of the video title and the screen would jump to that letter in the directory listing, thereby saving countless page downs to get there in Recordings. I can't seem to find any shortcuts on the hauppauge remote to do this, nor can I find any reference to shortcuts in the documentation for the Recordings screen. Am I missing something, or is something similar not supported directly in Recordings?

Also, in VA I could create a subdirectory on the drive and move all related video files into it. For example, I could create a Christmas directory and then simply drop all of our Christmas related vidoes into it, and they would all magically appear listed inside a Christmas folder within the VA UI.

I know I'm asking a lot, but do you know if there is an easy way to do something similar with Recordings?

Thanks again for the help.

[pBS]

i made a little util to archive shows to other locations individually,adjusting the db automatically..
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=26775
used from the video library, i even made one to move a whole dir/series...
you can have multiple profiles setup to copy to fav destinations...
i use it to offload recordings to other drives while maintaining recording screen data as if nothing happened..
it's just a batch file that copies files and updates db,simple...but handy..

oh and if your files still have their ntfs metadata.xml attached, i have another addon that can import those individually also..

[fla]

XRecord has support for multiple video paths in the config app but I've never tried it. You could give it a try.

[dennit]

I downloaded vidImport and imported all of the videos from my other drives so at least I can see them in the Recordings screen. I have so many recordings, however, that it seems to be a real pain navigating from the top to the bottom to find the video I want to play. In VA we could hit the first letter of the video title and the screen would jump to that letter in the directory listing, thereby saving countless page downs to get there in Recordings. I can't seem to find any shortcuts on the hauppauge remote to do this, nor can I find any reference to shortcuts in the documentation for the Recordings screen. Am I missing something, or is something similar not supported directly in Recordings?

The skip button on the remote does a page down. AFAIK, there's no comparable "first letter" skip function, but you could request it as a feature. It sounds useful to me, too.

Also, in VA I could create a subdirectory on the drive and move all related video files into it. For example, I could create a Christmas directory and then simply drop all of our Christmas related vidoes into it, and they would all magically appear listed inside a Christmas folder within the VA UI.

I use a link to vidimport that sits on my desktop, then drag-drop a directory full of Christmas files onto the link. Depending on the filenames, I may then have to run an sql script to give them all the name "Christmas" and the sub_title the video name. As I said - I like the default.

[Kevina]

Thanks for all the feedback, I'll check out xrecord and see what it has to offer. Quite frankly I hadn't even considered it because I thought it had been abandoned quite some time ago, but now I see that someone has taken up the code again and is trying to make it current. I have no idea of it's capabilities, but I'll check it out.

As for the recordings screen, I'll put in a request for the shortcuts as I think that would be useful for all concerned.

I sure wish there was some way to get a hold of Jeff. I would love to get the code for VA from him to see if we could bring it back to life. It had the nicest interface by far of anything that I've looked at to date, and was so configurable that you could make it work for just about any user. Alas, just wishful thinking....

I'll checkout the archive util as well, even though that's not my primary need at the moment.

Thanks to all,
Kevin