KMTTG Tivo transfers not pulling metadata

I use KMTTG to transfer recordings from my Tivo and process them with MCEBuddy.
I have profile selections (e.g. encoding quality) based on what channel (call sign) the recording came from, e.g. HD channels get a different quality setting than the SD channels because the SD channels are already a lower quality to start with. Broadcasters are really milking that bandwidth for their side-channels.

In the MP2/AC3 file that gets pulled across with closed captioning, they only have : “showName”, “seasonNumber”, and “episodeNumber” attributes. The rest of the metadata, KMTTG writes out to a companion .TXT file.

The final output from MCEBuddy only appears to pull and add “SEASON”, and “EPISODE” entries (adding to the original 3 in the file). It does not pull any of the other information from the companion .TXT file into the processed file, nor does it use any of the information in applying the profile.

Meaning it processes under my “last resort” profile, not my “SDTV” profile, and none of the extra metadata extracted by KMTTG in the companion TXT file is incorporated into the final output.

Can MCEBuddy be improved to look for and include the companion metadata file before it applies the profile logic (to use that metadata in the profile conditions) and then to merge in the metadata with the processing?

In the alternative, are there settings in my KMTTG to merge in that metadata? I am sure it can, but that would require KMTTG to do the transcoding, and I don’t want to do that, as I want MCEBuddy to do it, and give MCEBuddy the raw MPEG2 file and the metadata, keeping KMTTG just to transfer the recordings off the TIVO.

I’ve got an example below.

title : My Greek Table With Diane Kochilas
seriesTitle : My Greek Table With Diane Kochilas
description : Diane discovers the history of her historic neighborhood in the heart of central Athens with the city's most renowned urban chronicler, and cooks up a delicious Spiced Roasted Chicken with Toasted Orzo Pilaf, Kale Caesar with Greek yogurt, and a Crispy Phyllo Ice Cream Sundae with Honey, Nuts and Halva. 
time : 2023-03-13T03:00:00Z
isEpisode : true
iso_duration : PT30M
originalAirDate : 2022-10-08T00:00:00Z
episodeTitle : Diane Discovers Athens
isEpisodic : true
showingBits : 515
tvRating : x3
episodeNumber : 307
displayMajorNumber : 9-4
callsign : KETCDT4
seriesId : SH0377963521
programId : EP0377963521-0465063736
vHost : Kochilas|Diane

As an aside, my profiles key off of that “callsign” matching “*DT4” (ends with “DT4”) to know that is an SD channel.

Mcebuddy extracts the metadata from the kmttg tivo companion TXT files. All of the metadata you mentioned is supported and processed by MCEBuddy. Will need your log file to see what’s going on

Quick question: Remind me what settings (and where) I need to adjust, and what level of logging?
I think I turned all of those off (or down to only “Error”) a very long time ago to eliminate that workload once things were working smoothly. Did I mention that things have been working smoothly with MCEBuddy for a very long time? :slight_smile:

I’m using Handbrake (which I think uses FFMPeg under the hood) , Comskip (which appears to have an embedded FFMPeg statically linked into it), and have HW NVenc enabled. Also, recently nVidia has added NVdec (decoding) and there are options to FFMPeg to turn it on, separate from using the existing NVenc (encoding) options in the various CLIs being called under the hood of MCEBuddy.