I'm fairly new to channels dvr and loving the idea of using my pre-recorded content in the library, virtual channels, and library collections. I have a fairly large collection of anime episodes and movies, and find the existing metadata sources to be very hit-or-miss. Is there currently any capability to extend the metadata scraping systems to pull show or episode data from other sources? Or has anyone written any tools to inject metadata information into the channels dvr database?
I'm willing to roll up my sleeves here and write something, but wanted to see if anyone has already gone down this path before. I looked around the different forums and didn't see any topics along this line.
Devs have said there are a future plans of adding other source(s) for TV shows, but there is no timetable. Movies already has two choices, so be sure to toggle between both. Also be sure to try a lot of variations of the name, both English and Japanese phonetic. Usually sticking to one word and browsing through the giant list will help. Another thing to do is go to Zap2It.com and search for the show there. It uses the same Gracenote database as Channels but sometimes the search can be better. If you find it in there, follow these directions:
But anyway, we have been told that it is a lot more complicated to pull off adding metadata for TV shows than Movies. There are also issues to contend with right now with recordings because if you record off a Custom source like Pluto it will not match up to a recording of the same program on an OTA/TVE station. This is all symptoms of the same problem of how metadata is currently stored, so injecting something into the system seems out the realm of possible right now.
However, you can already manually edit Metadata. I know it is tedious and long, and I have literally sat there copying and pasting from TMDB. But once it is done, it is done!
Between the methods above, I only had to manually edit a handful of obscure series and movies, so it wasn't too bad.
I appreciate the detailed reply. Unfortunately, the ones I'm dealing with do not appear to be in Gracenote, so the zap2it search comes up empty, even after trying all title variations and various words in the title. I still would like to use or create a mechanism to insert information directly into the channels library db. Not only am I thinking about anime I'm also thinking about user-generated content, such as archived Youtube videos, where the metadata will never be in Gracenote.
You can manually edit the metadata. You may be able to automate this if you look at the RESTful calls used by the browser when modifying them. However, please note that server API access is unsupported.
That is exactly what the "Videos" section of Local Content is for.
