Sorting TV Shows?

hello, i just found this site and its great. i was hoping someone here might
have a solution to a problem i have.

i download a lot of tv shows, and i keep running into organizational problems. i
am sure you all know what its like, some tv shows when you download them are in
folders, they usually all have different naming schemes, like this for example:

house.313.hdtv-lol.avi
house.s03e03.hdtv.xvid-lol.avi
house.s03e10.merry.little.christmas.hdtv.xvid-fqm.avi

it takes a long time for me to sit here and rename all the files by hand to make
them all sort out by name in explorer, also i have to go around and pull all the
avi's out of their individual folder if they have one and stick them all in the
folders i made.

does anyone know of a good program that is aimed at tv torrent people for
renaming files in a standard syntax? that is what i would really like, but also
if it can organize tv shows into their correct folders and maybe even seasons,
that would be awesome.

just something that works a lot like mp3 organizers, but for tv shows.

thanks!

the main problem you have is that this isn't like music/mp3's where there's an
established standard for tagging, based on industry wide artist/album/track
naming practices.
even then, mp3 library things are generally organised via id3 metadata, not
filename. because of the wide variety of video types and formats around
there's no metadata convention.

added to that, the whole tv releases game is run by a zillion competing groups
of `pirates` - good luck getting them to agree on anything but the most basic
conventions. herding cats would be a breeze by comparison 😉
added to *that*, once you have the irregularly named file out of a scene
release group there are few conventions about how they get packaged up as
torrents.

one *limited* way you could at least get things in the right folder is with a
torrent client that does rss and is capable of automatically assigning
categories and giving a category a specific download folder.
it won't help you with old archives of stuff, and you'd still have to rename
individual non-conformant new files, but at least they'd be in the right place.

realistically the best you can really do is pick a naming convention that
works for you, and stick with it - renaming non-conforming files as needed.
it can't seriously take you *that* long.

yes i do understand that there is not id3 tag of sorts for video files. i was
just trying to convey how it would be nice if there was a program that would act
like mp3 organizers.

the only way i could see doing this would be to read the name of the video file
and just look for keywords, like the name, numbers (since most releases seem to
be along the lines of something like '312' or 's03e12'), and have the program
distinguish it that way, it would not be 100% accurate all the time, like
oddball distros that will name the file something you don't generally see.

i already played around making a batch file (which is much to limiting) just get
get a basic sort function based on wildcards, it worked a little bit.

i am not a programmer by any means, but i do know a good amount of java. i might
just try and whip something up that will atleast sort things out to a good
extent for me. after they are sorted it shouldn't be too difficult to get
episodes renamed to a standard format. assuming all the episodes are along the
'312' 's03e12' guideline, i will dig through my shows and see if i can find some
more 'standard' naming schemes and add them in.


thanks for the help though!

it's not really what u want but try using total commander or something similar
extracting/moveing files and navigation in general is much easyer then in
explorer(i would be lost without it ,i never use explorer)
also the multi-rename tool should help
http://www.ghisler.com/ ofc u need a cracked version so search for a
torrent,should be easy to find it's a rather popular program
if u decide to try it don't forget to go to config/options and customize it just
the way u like it.

i was thinking. we got a pretty huge database here at eztv with pretty much show
information and so on, as you can see.
it might be possible to use this database in some kind of way to build a program
of yours.
we could even search for files with the same file size and identify them that
way. that however would limit it down to only shows which where released the
past year or so.
its definiatly something to think about. a tv-show organization program.

might be worth looking at the source code of utorrent's rss feed parser (the
open sourced versions from before the bittorrent merger are still floating
around), or even the rss feed scanner plugin for azureus, which is still open.

they do a pretty good job of parsing the torrent names and picking out show
name/episode number, and it potentially saves you from spending a lot of time
re-inventing the wheel.

sometimes it might be better just to build a wheen instead of studying it. and i
belive it is possible to do it even better. 🙂

ya i was wondering if there is anything to organize tv shows. just to help keep
them sorted. like have something that can parse names and diffrientiate between
s2e10 and 210 and 2x10. also any program that lets you work with some folder
organization. any thing that would help sort would be cool. also anything to
make it more automated for burning dvd's like sort it out into 4.5gb files etc.

spetz, if you would like to participating in beta testing or participate some
way in a new sorting program im writing on, please send me an email to
[email protected]