Can MCEBuddy merge in KMTTG metadata from TiVO conversions?

I transfer OTA recordings from my TiVO to my MCEBuddy server using KMTTG to decrypt and transcode to MP4 (e.g. “slow transfer”). I found the .TS (“fast transfer”) that saves .tivo files to have dropouts and not give a “clean” transfer, at least for me.

I have KMTTG extract the show’s metadata into a text file (same name as the .mp4 file, but with a .txt extension, e.g. .mp4.txt.

My question is that I would like MCEBuddy to use that text extract of the Tivo recording metadata and merge that into the final output metadata. I’m using .mkv containers, so it should be straightforward.

This is most valuable in processing PBS and PBS Create shows because they often don’t add their show or episode information into TheTVDB or IMDB.

Does MCEBuddy do this (doesn’t seem to)? Can it do this (What flags/settings)? Can it be added to look for that and merge a text metadata file into the media container? I think they would be either “.txt” extensions and possibly “.nfo” extensions (or “.xml”?).

The same for merging in .SRT subtitle files would be nice too.

It already supports many formats, see this post for details: Metadata matching, extraction, renaming from files and downloading from the Internet

If you’ve got additional format feel free to create a feature request and attach some samples of the metadata files (movies, series, news, sports, documentaries) or the specifications source if available and we can definitely look into it.

Goose, you misunderstand. I’m not looking for MCEBuddy to extract metadata from the media file (an .mp4 for Tivo). I’m looking for MCEBuddy to look for a separate file (same name as the .mp4 media file, but with a .txt extension) that contains the metadata and merge that into the media file.

KMTTG extracts the show as an MP4, but with no metadata. Because it puts the metadata into a separate text file. I’m using KMTTG just to decrypt the TiVO OTA shows I recorded.

I can’t rely on IMDB because these are typically PBS (specifically PBS CreateTV) shows that are not and never get into the big name metadata databases (IMDB, TheTVDB, etc). Mainly because American Public Media and PBS and a few others keep that in their walled garden to control streaming (via your PBS station “membership”) and allow producers to independently distribute the shows (e.g. America’s Test Kitchen, Cooking Network) through their websites.

But the show/episode details are in the guide data that the TiVO captures and puts into a nice text file. I want MCEBuddy to use that separate text file as a source of metadata before it fills in the rest of any missing metadata from the other sources. Sometimes the guide data doesn’t have much, so that would still allow defaulting from the usual places MCEBuddy uses.

Does that help explain what I’d like MCEBuddy to be doing? Apologies if it already does, but I don’t think so looking at the post-conversion media files.

Sorry, I should have been clearer while posting the link. Yes MCEBuddy does extract metadata from supporting files like .NFO, .XML in addition to extracting it from the container (MKV, MP4, TiVo etc).

If you’ve got additional format feel free to create a feature request and attach some samples of the supporting metadata files (movies, series, news, sports, documentaries) or the specifications source if available and we can definitely look into it.

Actually I do have an example, and one that has a minor problem. It’s for a 2-part movie on Comet recently. The movie title is “Earthsea”, and the description indicates part 1 and part 2. MCE Buddy treats it as a “Movie” (IMDB: tt0407384, it isn’t in TheMovieDB.). As a result, the output file for the second part matches the first and the job for part 2 is dropped.

Here’s the text files for parts 1 and 2. The show filenames were chosen by KMTTG and everything is a season/episode.
Earthsea-SE–2004-12-13-2021-01-10_1659.mpg.txt (893 Bytes)
Earthsea-SE–2004-12-14-2021-01-10_1859.mpg.txt (956 Bytes)

The SeriesID is the same, but the ProgramIDs are different.
Part 1:

seriesId : MV0356182910
programId : MV0356182910-0356906293

Part 2:

seriesId : MV0348909644
programId : MV0348909644-0349586462

My next try will be to rename Part 1 (so no output file conflict), clear MCE job history, and then re-process part 2.

We will need more samples for the various types of recording metadata (movies, series, news, sports, documentaries) so we can accurately analyze and process the metadata