How to use Guideplus

[fabhoff]

I am a little bit confused with the explanation for guideplus in the wiki.

Here is what I want to do: I have got hundreds of recordings in my recording list. Most of them are episodes of series. Since I do not see an archive function but my harddisk has no more space, I want to move some of the recordings to another harddisk. Therefore I want to rename the recordings of some series with the name of the episode title of each recording, so this title does not get lost (the files plugin did not work out for me).

The wiki for guidelus tells me, that it can rename recordings with the episode title. But I do not understand, how I can tell this utility which recording it shall rename. On the other hand I am forced to give it a guide file and a altered guide file as a parameter. I suppose that I might give the information, which recordings I want to have renamed in the guide file. But I have no idea, how I have to structure the guide file and put the information of recordings to be renamed in this file. Above that I am not quite sure, for what I could use the altered guide file. For the time being I do not want to run guideplus everyday for every recording.

Fabian

[carpeVideo]

Keep in mind guidePlus is first and foremost a guide enhancer so if you think of the setup with that in mind in may be easier to understand. It was originally expected to run nightly in a fully automated mode. It renames/moves recordings during a run. Since it is a guideEnhancer it runs quite differently from most renamers (which tend to rename right after a show is recorded via postProcess.bat) it has the capability of renaming recordings already recorded as well.

So it was first written to enhance the guide with the season/ep info. To do this rather than dip into theTVDB.com for every series it checks the NPVR database for all recordings, if the recording seems to be a series it gets the enhanced information and puts it in the guide (this way it is only enhancing shows that seem important to the user). Since guidePlus had the info it made sense to use it to rename files so I added that. Then I realized that it was only renaming new episodes so why not go back and rename the old episodes as well. And as long as it is renaming why not move it if requested. For reasons that I can not recall the series had to be pending for all of this to work, so I added an alternate way to point out which series should be renamed, this is by added a dummy line in the showfile with the series name to kick off the search process.

So how it chooses to rename is pretty basic - if the NPVR database has a recording listed that is considered a tv series from the guide information it wants to a) get the season/episode information from the web b) add this to the name if requested and c) archive it if requested.

So in a nutshell - it will try to rename everything that it thinks is series if told to rename.

[fabhoff]

I see guideplus is a very fine and powerful utility.

But what files do I give as a parameter for the "guide file" and the "altered gide file" and what structure must these two files have?

Fabian

[carpeVideo]

The guide file is what it typically download using XMLTV. In many cases (schedules direct) you may not see it as NPVR brings it in directly.
The altered file is any name you desire as you point NPVR to it to read in. The structure is XML .