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Home Theater & Entertainment => General Discussion => Topic started by: 50s on July 04, 2020, 07:58:41 PM

Title: File naming with IMDB movie title and tt ID
Post by: 50s on July 04, 2020, 07:58:41 PM
The following comment is more of an observation in naming movie files so that a home media player can scrape online data sources and find the correct file...

I am sorting through the movies in my collection on my computer in readiness for scraping with KODI (a free media player for PC)

I am renaming each movie file so they all have a consistent filename structure so a media player can initially scan the collection and match the file to an online movie data source (e.g. scraping the IMDB site) and thus obtain all the metadata and images for that movie to present in the media player.

The idea is generally to have the filename in a format such as movie title and year like the following so the media player scraper finds the correct movie (e.g):

Joaquín Murrieta (1965).mkv

But a strange thing is that when I search IMDB to determine the exact name of the movie (to later assist the scraper) I found three different movie titles for the same movie(!!!) but really weirdly all have the exact same URL!!!!! (see attached image - the three browsers shown are IE on PC, Chrome on PC and Chrome on mobile).

And, as I have noticed over time someone must be constantly changing (to a large or minor degree) movie title names on IMDB. I'm going to try to stick the one constant, the IMDB tt ID (found in the browser URL for that movie) and include in the filename and hope the scraper just uses that instead of the movie title (which may not be an exact match for the scraper), e.g.:

Joaquin Murrieta (1965) tt0058247.mkv

I have also converted the weird foreign character (the í in Joaquin to an 'i'), maybe the scraper wont match properly. Another reason to maybe include the tt ID.

Scrapers are supposedly pretty good figuring out what the movie is from the filename, I'd like to get it as accurate as possible so that each time I do a scape I'm not fixing up files that weren't matched which I believe can be a pain.

Anyone using the IMDB tt ID in their filenames, and does it help?



Title: Re: File naming with IMDB movie title and tt ID
Post by: okiehawker on July 04, 2020, 09:33:18 PM
I'm not that electronic file sophisticated, Steve.  You can probably tell that from me saying "electronic file sophisticated"!  Sounds cool what you are trying to do, though.  I know when I search for movie information in the two browsers I use, IMDB sometimes comes up with more than one hit for the same movie.  Okie