vidImport utility support

[ecorbin]

carpeVideo, first Thanks for writing this. I appreciate it and it has already been quite useful. I have some questions/issues with its use, though.

• The utility appears to be case sensitive, but I'm thinking it should not be. I ran it first on my default directory, but entered it as e:\pvr rather than E:\PVR and it re-imported everything. Had to do a little bit of SQL to get rid of the duplicates. Re-running it with the correct case solved the problem.
  
• It seems to do a IMDB lookup on a number of files that are definitely in the DB, in addition to the ones which are not. Is this intentional? For example, after running it once, if I do a new GB-PVR export of records and then re-run the utility again immediately, it seems that it shouldn't look up anything, since everything is in the DB, but it still takes a while and does many IMDB lookups. I'm not sure how it is choosing which files to look up but it is not all files.
  
• I can't seem to get the no import switch to work. I entered the command line as vidimport E:\PVR import=off and it created the output file and named it import=off. I then tried vidimport E:\PVR videos.xml import=off and got the import file right, but it still imported. I also tried import:off. I imagine I just don't know how to enter that correctly.
  

Thanks again for this great utility and I look forward to your response.

[carpeVideo]

ecorbin - missed this post last week. I'll take a look next week as this week I am traveling,

CV

[carpeVideo]

Posted a new file to the wiki should fix all but the extra IMDB lookups.

[CLorox]

Any chance of adding support to read the meta-data that Media Center includes? I believe this is stored inside the dvr-ms container and it would simplify my hybrid GBPVR/VMC setup without resorting to imdb.

[Mark5]

This is such a great utility - I use it a lot - thank you.

Would there be any chance to increase the number of file types is supports? I have a number of files in mov format that PVRX2 plays just fine, but I cannot use vidimport to import them as they are not recognised.

Thanks again....

Mark

[carpeVideo]

CLorox

Any chance of adding support to read the meta-data that Media Center includes? I believe this is stored inside the dvr-ms container and it would simplify my hybrid GBPVR/VMC setup without resorting to imdb.

I have attached a version that reads dvr-ms metadata (I think) I don't have any dvr-ms files. If you could record a 10 second file with MCE I will be able to test it further. Based on you screen shot it populates the title and description. I saw no subtitle to work with.

Mark5
Would there be any chance to increase the number of file types is supports? I have a number of files in mov format that PVRX2 plays just fine, but I cannot use vidimport to import them as they are not recognised.

The attached version should also import .mov files let me know if there are other extensions needed.

CV

[Mark5]

The attached version should also import .mov files let me know if there are other extensions needed.

Thanks CV - works a treat...had to do a manual import on the dump file in the PVRX2 config panel to get them into the Recordings pane (which I don't remember having to do before) - but that may have been me

Thanks again

[Braklet]

Used MpegImport for a long time as shorthand, to avoid tricky manual gbpvr.db3 edits. However, it gets a little tiresome having to manually cull repeats from the resulting XML file before importing. So, I am trying out vidImport.

I have successfully generated XML output with vidImport.exe, but I haven't figured out how to teach it to avoid repeats. Every XML file it generates contains entries that I know already exist in gbpvr.db3.

I have tried running vidImport.exe while it it located in the GB-PVR install directory as well as a separate location. My video storage drive is separate from the GB-PVR install drive.

It looks promising, though. Any ideas?

[carpeVideo]

It should by default read the existing xml backup from GBPVR and check to see if the filename that you are importing exists in that backup if so it should skip the repeat.

It will likely create repeat entries for files that were recorded on the same day since the gbpvr backup of the file is made nightly.

Also if the filepath/filename is different due to recording on one machine and running vidimport on another that would create repeats.

If you find behavior other than this I could try to understand why it is not working.

I suppose, I could also read the database directly to get the existing recording list but it's not high on my list of to do's since it only would really fix issues with same day recordings.

CV

[Braklet]

It should by default read the existing xml backup from GBPVR and check to see if the filename that you are importing exists in that backup if so it should skip the repeat.

If you find behavior other than this I could try to understand why it is not working.

I'm executing vidImport.exe from a batch file containing the following:

"<changing location, see below>\vidImport.exe" %1 import=off

The Wiki tells me that xmlin= defaults to (GBPVR install dir)\recordings-dump.xml.

How does vidImport.exe know where GB-PVR is installed? (BTW, my GB-PVR install directory is the standard C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr.)

From a separate video store drive, I attempted to run the batch file while vidImport.exe was located in a directory separate from GB-PVR, and again while located in my GB-PVR install directory. Both times the resulting videos.xml output contained files known to exist in recordings-dump.xml.

I believe this is due to my own misunderstanding and am trying to figure out the right way to invoke vidImport so that it functions as described in the Wiki. vidImport's main benefit for me is duplicate avoidance.

Thanks!