"Skip Reconversion" - option to search without filename extension?

General Support / Questions
#1

Setup:
I have multiple sources for some of my TV shows; including OTA (tuner), Cablecard (tuner) and online recordings. All of these recordings are converted/remux’ed by MCEBuddy and then moved to a common folder structure in the following format: (TV --> SeriesName --> Season XX --> “ShowName - SXXEYY - EpName.ext”)
Now, depending on the source, the filename extension of the converted file can be different (.mpg, .mp4, etc)

Here is the issue:
When I select “Skip Reconversion”, it checks the destination folder for a file with the same name AND extension. So, if a show has been recorded via another source and already converted (e.g. ABC.mpg), then MCEBuddy might still reconvert it (into ABC.mp4), due to file extension mismatch.

Questions/Suggestions:

  • Is there a way to get the “Skip Reconversion” feature to not match file extensions?
  • If not, is there another way I could achieve this (without changing my conversions to all have the same extension)?
  • Finally, if the above is not currently possible, may I request this as a future enhancement? Another additional “nice to have” feature could be to provide some sort of regex match for these checks, which expert users can tweak. In rare cases, the show episode names have been changed on the metadata websites, which can lead to duplicate conversions.

Thanks for the amazing software; keep up the good work!

#2

So here’s a question, how did you end up with .mpg file? I’m assuming you have multiple conversion tasks defined?

Is so then the “Skip conversion” feature of the conversion task that created the .mpg file should be able to perform this check.

A single conversion task can only create a file of a single extension defined by the profile it’s using.

#3

More details:

There are two conversion tasks:

Task #1 - Picks up .mpg files (recorded by HDHomeRun), strips out ads and outputs .mpg files

Task #2 - Picks up .mp4 files (recorded via PlayOn), strips out ads and outputs .mp4 files

Both tasks have “Skip Reconversion” enabled. However, this can still result in both tasks converting the same show/episode, such as “TVShow - S1E1 - EpName.mpg” and “TVShow - S1E1 - EpName.mp4”

I’m looking for an option where the “Skip Reconversion” feature (or a workaround) ignores the file extension, but matches the filename, to check if a file already exists before converting it again.

#4

Honestly this is quite an unusual setup, you have two recording devices and you’re trying to figure out if the same show is recorded by both the recording devices you don’t want MCEBuddy to convert it again.

No direct way I can think of beyond keep your output to .mpg or .mp4 or a common format so then skip reprocessing will check it.

They other way is like this, you can write a PreCustomCommand script that will check the destination file and look for a “match” in the other tasks destination folder (excluding the extension). If it find the file, return code -1 and have the PreCustomCommand fail it conversion before its starts. Don’t forget to set the PreCustomCommandExitCodeCheck=true

#5

Thank you, the PreCustomCommand seems to be the way to go. I’ll try it and let you know how it works out.

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