# Metadata For TiVo Desktop and pyTivo



## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

title : <movie title>
seriesTitle : Movies
episodeTitle : <movie title> (<year>)
time : 2014-05-21T00:00:00Z
seriesId : SH00900001
description : <.....varies.....>
isEpisode : true
originalAirDate : 2012-06-08T00:00:00Z
isEpisodic : true

I used this format last May to upload 73 recordings to a "Movies" folder, 13 to a "Home Movies" folder and 8 to an "RR Movies" folder. I only altered the title, episodeTitle and the last digit of the seriesId (1, 2 or 3). Unfortunately, now that I want to add some new recordings, they no longer go into the "Movies" folder on the Roamio Pro. They all go into a folder with the title up the first recording that gets uploaded. For example, if I first upload "Battleship", it shows up in the My Shows list as "Movies". When I begin to upload "The Natural", the folder name changes to "Battleship". Then, within that folder is a recording of "Battleship" as well as "The Natural".

I tried changing a few things and my changes didn't help. I did upload the movies individually using their titles, so I can watch them just fine. My original plan was to separate them into groups, like Movies A-C, D-F, etc. I tried altering the date/time to see if I could force them into a sequence, like TV episodes However, no amount of tweaking the date or time seemed to do what I wanted, probably because they all have different titles. So, I then took care to upload the original recordings in alpha sequence. If these new ones had gone into the existing folder, they would be out of sequence, so my question now is what can I do to even get these into a new folder, say "Movies 2"?

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: I changed "Movies" to "Movies2" and the end of the seriesId from "01" to "10". I now have 2 recordings in the Movies2 folder. So, the metadata structure I've been using still works, just not for adding new recordings to the original Movies folder. Not sure why.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

If you enable the 3 pane view on the Roamio there is a Movies filter. Couldn't you just flag the uploads as movies and then use that to filter them?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Dan203 said:


> If you enable the 3 pane view on the Roamio there is a Movies filter. Couldn't you just flag the uploads as movies and then use that to filter them?


I'm not sure how to flag something as a Movie (or anything else for that matter), but the 2 movies I uploaded without putting them into the same folder don't show up in the Movies filter. As you can probably tell I'm not all that familiar with metadata. However, your comment spurred me to do some further checking and I finally found where I got the sample I've been using (pyTivo Wiki Metadata page). From what I've been able to gather there, I should have used MV to identify them as movies and I'm trying that now. So far the one I'm uploading is still filtering as a TV Show, so I'm going to take out the episode stuff and see if that works. The goal was to not have a long list, but I think the filter might work better and let me sort them. I'll post back after I try a few things. Thanks.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I'm not sure how to flag something as a Movie (or anything else for that matter), but the 2 movies I uploaded without putting them into the same folder don't show up in the Movies filter. As you can probably tell I'm not all that familiar with metadata. However, your comment spurred me to do some further checking and I finally found where I got the sample I've been using (pyTivo Wiki Metadata page). From what I've been able to gather there, I should have used MV to identify them as movies and I'm trying that now. So far the one I'm uploading is still filtering as a TV Show, so I'm going to take out the episode stuff and see if that works. The goal was to not have a long list, but I think the filter might work better and let me sort them. I'll post back after I try a few things. Thanks.


Were these pushes or pulls?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Were these pushes or pulls?


I'm using the TiVo to "pull" them from the videos folder on my laptop. I have since edited the metadata file to more accurately mirror the example on the Wiki page and not try to put them in a "Movies" folder on the TiVo like I have been. I changed the seriesId to "MV000001" too, but the file I transferred still shows up under the TV Shows filter and not the Movie filter. Here's the metadata (without the description, etc.) I'm going to try again in the morning when the TiVo is not busy recording.

title : Jersey Boys
seriesTitle : Jersey Boys (2014)
episodeTitle :
movieYear : 2014
isEpisode : false
seriesId : MV000001
time : 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I'm using the TiVo to "pull" them from the videos folder on my laptop. I have since edited the metadata file to more accurately mirror the example on the Wiki page and not try to put them in a "Movies" folder on the TiVo like I have been. I changed the seriesId to "MV000001" too, but the file I transferred still shows up under the TV Shows filter and not the Movie filter. Here's the metadata (without the description, etc.) I'm going to try again in the morning when the TiVo is not busy recording.
> 
> title : Jersey Boys
> seriesTitle : Jersey Boys (2014)
> ...


You want both title and seriesTitle to be the name of the group you want it to be in. episodeTitle should be the name of the movie. Take out movieYear and replace it with originalAirDate.

What I do is put all of the movies I want in the same group in the same folder on my PC. Then I put a default.txt file in the folder with the common information.

For example, I have a folder named "Harry Potter Movies" in one of my shares. In that folder, I have a default.txt file that contains:



Spoiler





```
title :  Harry Potter Movies
seriesTitle : Harry Potter Movies
isEpisode : true  
seriesId : HP01234567 
time : OAD
starRating : x6 
vProgramGenre : Children & Family Movies 
vProgramGenre : Sci-Fi & Fantasy 
vProgramGenre : Movies based on children's books 
vProgramGenre : Family Features 
vProgramGenre : Fantasy 
vProgramGenre : Family Sci-Fi & Fantasy
```




The metadata file for the first movie is:



Spoiler





```
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Philosophers's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. IMDB: 7.2/10
episodeNumber : 1
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Family
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vSeriesGenre : Adventure
vSeriesGenre : Family
vSeriesGenre : Fantasy
vDirector : Chris Columbus|
vWriter : J.K. Rowling|
vWriter : Steve Kloves|
vActor : Richard Harris|
vActor : Maggie Smith|
vActor : Robbie Coltrane|
vActor : Saunders Triplets|
vActor : Daniel Radcliffe|
vActor : Fiona Shaw|
vActor : Harry Melling|
vActor : Richard Griffiths|
vActor : Derek Deadman|
vActor : Ian Hart|
vActor : Ben Borowiecki|
vActor : Warwick Davis|
vActor : Verne Troyer|
vActor : John Hurt|
vActor : Richard Bremmer|
vActor : Geraldine Somerville|
vActor : Harry Taylor|
vActor : Julie Walters|
vActor : Bonnie Wright|
vActor : Chris Rankin|
vActor : James Phelps|
vActor : Oliver Phelps|
vActor : Rupert Grint|
vActor : Jean Southern|
vActor : Emma Watson|
vActor : Matthew Lewis|
vActor : Tom Felton|
vActor : Jamie Waylett|
vActor : Josh Herdman|
vActor : Devon Murray|
vActor : Alfie Enoch|
vActor : Leslie Phillips|
vActor : Eleanor Columbus|
vActor : John Cleese|
vActor : Terence Bayler|
vActor : Simon Fisher-Becker|
vActor : Nina Young|
vActor : David Bradley|
vActor : Alan Rickman|
vActor : ZoÃ« Wanamaker|
vActor : Luke Youngblood|
vActor : Sean Biggerstaff|
vActor : Elizabeth Spriggs|
vActor : Danielle Tabor|
vActor : Leilah Sutherland|
vActor : Emily Dale|
vActor : David Holmes|
vActor : Will Theakston|
vActor : Scot Fearn|
vActor : Adrian Rawlins|
vActor : Ray Fearon|
vActor : David Brett|
vActor : Paul Marc Davis|
vActor : David William James Elliott|
vActor : Holly-Ann Filtness|
vActor : Derek Hough|
vActor : Julianne Hough|
vActor : Will Howes|
vActor : Kieri Kennedy|
vActor : Oliver Lavery-Farag|
vActor : Cath Peakin|
vActor : Amy Puglia|
vActor : Nicholas Read|
vActor : Richard Reid|
vActor : Bianca Sowerby|
vActor : Bernadette Jane Vanderkar|
image : Harry Potter  and the Philosophers's Stone.avi.jpg
```




edit: I realize this is addressing your original desire to group them rather than having them identified as movies.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> You want both title and seriesTitle to be the name of the group you want it to be in. episodeTitle should be the name of the movie. Take out movieYear and replace it with originalAirDate.
> 
> What I do is put all of the movies I want in the same group in the same folder on my PC. Then I put a default.txt file in the folder with the common information.
> 
> ...


That's quite alright, James, I'm open to doing it either way and actually prefer the original. I didn't realize I could use a default.txt file for all the files in a given folder. My concern though is the sequence of the files within the group. When you view the Harry Potter group on the TiVo, what sequence are the files in? Does the episodeNumber have any impact? Or does the originalAirDate? Or is it simply the order in which they are uploaded?

Right now the 73 files in my Movies group are in alpha sequence, but only because I took pains to upload them that way. Since I also have the HP series, I will experiment with them by moving them to their own Share folder on the PC and creating the default.txt, etc. I don't want to place all the other movies to different folders though, so I'd like to come up with a way to view them alphabetically within the Movies group regardless of when they are uploaded.

The example I tried this morning uploaded fine, but still isn't picked up by the Movies filter, it is still considered a TV Show, so my changes didn't work. I'm going to make the new Share folder now and see how that works. I'll let you know.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

As far as sequencing goes, that's why I set the OAD to 12:00:00 of the release date and set "time" to OAD. Since I have my sort options set to "date", this results in the oldest one being at the bottom of the group, just like a series group.

Just so we're clear, the files do not have to be in their own share just in their own folder.

When pyTivo is processing a metadata file, it first uses the default.txt file in the same folder. If there isn't one, it uses the "closest" one within both the path to the file and within the share.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

I have all my movies grouped together in one folder.

TV Series grouped by SeriesId. My movies all have the seriesId : Movies

Here is the metadata txt file for the movie Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

```
title : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
movieYear : 2002
description : In this sequel to the smash hit Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry ignores warnings not to return to school -- that is, if he values his life -- to investigate with Ron and Hermione a mysterious series of attacks.
isEpisode : false
seriesId : Movies
starRating : x6
mpaaRating : P2
vProgramGenre : Children & Family
vProgramGenre : Family Sci-Fi & Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Book Characters
vProgramGenre : Blockbusters
vProgramGenre : Ages 8-10
vProgramGenre : Ages 11-12
vPrimaryGenre : Sci-Fi & Fantasy
vDirector : Columbus|Chris
vActor : Radcliffe|Daniel
vActor : Grint|Rupert
vActor : Watson|Emma
vActor : Branagh|Kenneth
vActor : Cleese|John
vActor : Coltrane|Robbie
vActor : Davis|Warwick
vActor : Griffiths|Richard
vActor : Harris|Richard
vActor : Isaacs|Jason
vActor : Rickman|Alan
vActor : Shaw|Fiona
vActor : Smith|Maggie
vActor : Walters|Julie
vActor : Henderson|Shirley
vActor : Margolyes|Miriam
vActor : Williams|Mark
vActor : Jones|Toby
vActor : Wright|Bonnie
vActor : Felton|Tom
callsign : Thornoli's
image : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 2002.mp4.jpg
```
My metadata files are generated by metagenerator and this one is an example.

Also, on the tivo, the movies normally sort in the order they are uploaded because I have my default sort set to date. I can resort by name on the fly while viewing the listing if needed.

By setting isEpisode : true in your example you are asking for trouble with tivo's currently broken episide metadata lookup, set it to false for movies.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Thank you both for your examples, they've really helped. I'm still working on this, but I found that what I want to do doesn't seem possible and what I thought happened with series recordings is not what happens. Somehow I was under the impression that I could display the 73 movie titles in the "Movies" group with Groups set to On and also display those same titles in the "My Shows" list with Groups set to Off. For some reason, I never noticed that the ones I originally uploaded all display as "Movies" when I set Groups to Off and the same thing happens with TiVo series recordings.

All is not lost though. I found that the My Shows filters do work with recordings made by the TiVo; the TV Shows filter displays just the TV show recordings and the Movie filter displays just the movie recordings. I haven't found a way to force the Movie filter to include uploaded movies with recorded movies. However, that's okay. Since uploaded movies aren't recognized by the filters, I can simply use the TV Show filter to view recorded TV shows, the Movie filter to view recorded movies and the All filter to view everything, including the uploaded movies.

I still haven't been able to figure out how to get the new uploads in the current Movies group, so I think I'll eventually upload all my movies again without grouping them and use the filters to control the display. That way I'll be able to sort them in alpha sequence without any problems and not have to worry when I upload a new movie. I'll just begin with the 2 new movies I have and see how it works out. Thanks for the help.


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## cherry ghost (Sep 13, 2005)

To get an uploaded movie to show in the Movie filter, I believe you need the correct programId and the movie has to be in the guide.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I still haven't been able to figure out how to get the new uploads in the current Movies group, so I think I'll eventually upload all my movies again without grouping them and use the filters to control the display. That way I'll be able to sort them in alpha sequence without any problems and not have to worry when I upload a new movie. I'll just begin with the 2 new movies I have and see how it works out. Thanks for the help.


You will not be able to transfer movies and get them to appear in the old folder. This is because when you transferred them, you told the tivo they were episodes of the series 'movies'. Tivo has changed how they handle episodes of series in preperation for the new OnePass functionality. Its also currently broken. If you had told your tivo they were NOT part of a series, you could have continued to add movies to that same folder, exactly as I am doing.

At the moment I have to pull all tv episodes, not push because of tivo's broken metadata lookup engine. It is promised for fix in the Feb update. Movies still push fine as the tivo is still using the metadata sent, not looking up its own.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

cherry ghost said:


> To get an uploaded movie to show in the Movie filter, I believe you need the correct programId and the movie has to be in the guide.


I suspect you're right about the programId and I'm sure recording from the guide sets all the right parameters. However, I think one should be able to reproduce the necessary parameters for the metadata txt file and I haven't given up on that just yet.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> You will not be able to transfer movies and get them to appear in the old folder. This is because when you transferred them, you told the tivo they were episodes of the series 'movies'. Tivo has changed how they handle episodes of series in preperation for the new OnePass functionality. Its also currently broken. If you had told your tivo they were NOT part of a series, you could have continued to add movies to that same folder, exactly as I am doing.


I tried your file (Example 2 below), but since I already have a group named "Movies", I changed the seriesId to "Movies2" and it didn't work. All I got were the individual files in the My Shows list, no "Movies2" group. I was able to upload new files to a "Movies2" group yesterday, but only using my original metadata file (Example 3). The one thing I didn't try was the movie example in the Wiki, but that's because it doesn't appear to try grouping files. I got my file from a friend and it seems to be a combination of both TV series and movie examples. I'm going to try it with "isEpisode : false".

FWIW, here are the metadata files I've tried, along with some observations.
- *Example *1 appears to be the most correct when it comes to the data loaded and displayed. I don't know why the word "separator" appears, maybe it's looking for the starRating parameter even though I never saw where that gets displayed. 
- *Example 2* misses most data, but that could simply because I'm doing something wrong and it's not working right. I do not know what "x6" and "P2" are since they are not among the accepted values in the Wiki and some references in the Wiki say any parameters following some errors will be ignored.
- *Example 3* also misses the data, but puts the uploads in the Group.

Example 1 (lpwcomp)
title : Battleship
movieYear : 2012
description : ..............................
isEpisode : false
mpaaRating : R

Viewing MY SHOWS list
- Title Battleship
- not in a group
- description in the right margin
Viewing INFO
- the word "separator" appears after the MPAA rating
- list of actors, writers, directors, etc.

Example 2 (jcthorne)
title : Battleship
movieYear : 2012
description : ..............................
isEpisode : false
seriesId : Movies
starRating : x6
mpaaRating : P2

Viewing MY SHOWS list
- Title Battleship
- not in a group
- no description in the right margin
Viewing INFO
- nothing after MPAA rating
- no list of actors, writers, directors, etc.

Example 3 (mine)
title : Battleship
seriesTitle : Movies
episodeTitle : Battleship (2012)
time : 2014-05-21T00:00:00Z
seriesId : SH00900001
isEpisode : true
originalAirDate : 2012-06-08T00:00:00Z
isEpisodic : true
description : ..............................
starRating : 2.5
mpaaRating : R

Viewing MY SHOWS list with Groups Off
- Title Movies
Viewing MY SHOWS list with Groups On
- Title Battleship (2012) within group Movies
Viewing INFO
- nothing after MPAA rating
- no list of actors, writers, directors, etc.
Cant add new movies to existing group Movies
Can add them to new group Movies2 by changing seriesTtitle and seriesId


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Another thing you didn't try was the way I have things setup where both title _*and*_ seriesTitle are set to the desired group name.

There is also a potential problem with what you have. The seriesId you are using is possibly already in use by TMS. They have been 7 significant digits for quite a while now. For example, the seriesId for "Legends" is SH01737387.

Do this: Transfer one of the recordings in your old "Movies" group from your TiVo to your PC with the "Save metadata to .txt" option checked. Then post the .txt file that is created.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Another thing you didn't try was the way I have things setup where both title _*and*_ seriesTitle are set to the desired group name.
> 
> There is also a potential problem with what you have. The seriesId you are using is possibly already in use by TMS. They have been 7 significant digits for quite a while now. For example, the seriesId for "Legends" is SH01737387.


Sorry, I did try that and I just tried it again from scratch. I've included the exact files I used for both movies I'm using to test. As you can see, I:
- corrected the episodeTitle from "Philosopher's" to "Sorcerer's".
- changed the episodeNumber to 1 & 2 respectively.
- used MetaGenerator to pull slightly different data from The Movie DB vs the IMDB data you used. Don't see how that makes a difference.
- also added a "Harry Potter Movies" share in pyTivo to make it easier to find the 2 test movies and not have to wade through all 75.

FWIW, I'm doing this from the TiVo with only pyTivo running on my laptop. I do not yet know how to transfer a file from the Tivo to the laptop and save the metadata. However, I played around with kmttg some just now and was able to get the metadata for a recording of the TV show "Stalker". I tried on others, but everything except it and the 2 test files are copy-protected, so it wouldn't work with those. I can understand why ripped movies would be copy-protected, but have no idea why my home movies are. I then tried to "push" the 2 test files with kmttg and get a connection timeout error. I've never been able to get kmttg to work with localhost:9032.

Anyway, when I view the My Shows list on the TiVo:
- I see the "Harry Potter Movies" share folder.
- It contains 2 entries, both titled "Harry Potter Movies".
- I select one, see it's Chambers and begin the transfer.
- It shows up in the My Shows list as "Harry Potter Movies".
- I select the other one, see it's Stone and begin the transfer.
- It tells me it has been added to the To Do list and will transfer after the other one finishes.
- When the 1st finishes and the 2nd begins, I see 2 entries for "Harry Potter Movies" (already know it's not working)
- and that's what I end up with, they simply don't group and I can't figure out why.

Metadata in default.txt file:


Spoiler





```
title :  Harry Potter Movies
seriesTitle : Harry Potter Movies
isEpisode : true  
seriesId : HP01234567 
time : OAD
starRating : x6 
vProgramGenre : Children & Family Movies 
vProgramGenre : Sci-Fi & Fantasy 
vProgramGenre : Movies based on children's books 
vProgramGenre : Family Features 
vProgramGenre : Fantasy 
vProgramGenre : Family Sci-Fi & Fantasy
```




Metadata file for the first movie:



Spoiler





```
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : Harry Potter has lived under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house his whole life. But on his 11th birthday, he learns he's a powerful wizard -- with a place waiting for him at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As he learns to harness his newfound powers with the help of the school's kindly headmaster, Harry uncovers the truth about his parents' deaths -- and about the villain who's to blame.
episodeNumber : 1
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family
vDirector : Columbus|Chris
vWriter : Kloves|Steve
vActor : Radcliffe|Daniel
vActor : Grint|Rupert
vActor : Watson|Emma
vActor : Harris|Richard
vActor : Smith|Maggie
vActor : Coltrane|Robbie
vActor : Triplets|Saunders
vActor : Shaw|Fiona
vActor : Melling|Harry
vActor : Griffiths|Richard
vActor : Deadman|Derek
vActor : Hart|Ian
vActor : Borowiecki|Ben
vActor : Somerville|Geraldine
vActor : Troyer|Verne
vActor : Hurt|John
vActor : Wright|Bonnie
vActor : Rankin|Chris
vActor : Felton|Tom
vActor : Walters|Julie
vActor : Lewis|Matthew
vActor : Rickman|Alan
vActor : Wanamaker|Zo
vActor : Mayall|Rik
vActor : Phillips|Leslie
image : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.mp4.jpg
```




Metadata file for the second movie:



Spoiler





```
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 
originalAirDate : 2002-11-15T12:00:00Z
description : Everyone's favorite novice wizard, Harry Potter, continues his high-flying adventures at Hogwarts. This time around, Harry ignores warnings not to return to school - that is, if he values his life - to investigate a mysterious series of attacks with Ron and Hermione.
episodeNumber : 2
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family
vDirector : Columbus|Chris
vWriter : Kloves|Steve
vActor : Radcliffe|Daniel
vActor : Grint|Rupert
vActor : Watson|Emma
vActor : Branagh|Kenneth
vActor : Harris|Richard
vActor : Rickman|Alan
vActor : Coltrane|Robbie
vActor : Smith|Maggie
vActor : Bleasdale|Heather
vActor : Biggerstaff|Sean
vActor : Bradley|David
vActor : Clifford|Veronica
vActor : Cleese|John
vActor : Columbus|Eleanor
vActor : Coulson|Christian
vActor : Davis|Warwick
vActor : Dale|Emily
vActor : Douglas|Rochelle
vActor : Griffiths|Richard
vActor : Walters|Julie
vActor : Lewis|Matthew
vActor : Felton|Tom
vActor : Phillips|Leslie
vActor : Isaacs|Jason
vActor : Norton|Jim
vActor : Henderson|Shirley
vActor : Margolyes|Miriam
image : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.mp4.jpg
```




Metadata file for downloaded TV show:



Spoiler





```
title : Stalker
seriesTitle : Stalker
description : When the Mayor is victimized by a stalker, the team must ascertain if he is being targeted by an angry constituent or someone from his past. 
time : 2015-01-15T04:00:00Z
isEpisode : true
iso_duration : PT1H
originalAirDate : 2015-01-14T00:00:00Z
episodeTitle : Secrets and Lies
isEpisodic : true
showingBits : 397315
tvRating : x5
episodeNumber : 112
displayMajorNumber : 1005
callsign : KPHODT
seriesId : SH01922358
programId : EP019223580012
vActor : Q|Maggie
```


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

On the lack of grouping. I may have given you some bad data. That seriesID used to work but it is not the one I used in my recent test. Try changing it to SH90001118. Using that, here's what I see (colors are off due to what I had to do to reduce the size):









As to changing the title from "Philosopher's" to "Sorcerer's", you can use whatever you want, but it is _*not*_ a correction. "Philosopher's' is the original title and the one I prefer. 

On a side note, I wish to heck that TiVo would add at least a 2-digit year to the displayed record date.

The last thing reminds of something I haven't mentioned. You cannot have a record time that is earlier than 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as that results in a negative value and makes the TiVo very unhappy.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> You will not be able to transfer movies and get them to appear in the old folder. This is because when you transferred them, you told the tivo they were episodes of the series 'movies'. Tivo has changed how they handle episodes of series in preperation for the new OnePass functionality. Its also currently broken. If you had told your tivo they were NOT part of a series, you could have continued to add movies to that same folder, exactly as I am doing.


I got that I can't use the original "Movies" group from last year and gave up trying to get new movies into that group yesterday. Thanks.



> At the moment I have to pull all tv episodes, not push because of tivo's broken metadata lookup engine. It is promised for fix in the Feb update. Movies still push fine as the tivo is still using the metadata sent, not looking up its own.


I made some headway alittle while ago. I took a chance and added the "Harry Potter Movies" folder on my laptop to Tivo Desktop Plus and selected Auto-transfer. The 2 files in there got "pushed" to the Tivo, but for some reason both ended up with the same title (Sorcerer's Stone) in the "Harry Potter Movies" group on the Tivo even though there are separate metadata files in the folder with different episodeTitle entries. The only real difference is the episodeNumber entry, so I changed them both to "1" and am trying again. At least I know it's able to pull TV Shows that aren't copy-protected and auto-transfer/push movies.

One thing I noticed in kmttg is that my list of Tivo includes the Roamio (Family Room) and the Mini (Master Bedroom). There is also a Family Room (2) listed and I don't know what that is. When I refresh the contents of each, I get a list of Tivo recordings for Family Room and nothing for Master Bedroom or Family Room (2). When I try to "pull" a file from Family Room, I get the connection error I mentioned in another post. Since Tivo Desktop Plus seems to work to both pull and push files, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with kmttg or why the files I upload are copy-protected and can't be downloaded again.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I made some headway alittle while ago. I took a chance and added the "Harry Potter Movies" folder on my laptop to Tivo Desktop Plus and selected Auto-transfer. The 2 files in there got "pushed" to the Tivo, but for some reason both ended up with the same title (Sorcerer's Stone) in the "Harry Potter Movies" group on the Tivo even though there are separate metadata files in the folder with different episodeTitle entries. The only real difference is the episodeNumber entry, so I changed them both to "1" and am trying again. At least I know it's able to pull TV Shows that aren't copy-protected and auto-transfer/push movies.


There's a bug in how TiVo currently handles pushes.



DoubleDAZ said:


> One thing I noticed in kmttg is that my list of Tivo includes the Roamio (Family Room) and the Mini (Master Bedroom). There is also a Family Room (2) listed and I don't know what that is. When I refresh the contents of each, I get a list of Tivo recordings for Family Room and nothing for Master Bedroom or Family Room (2). When I try to "pull" a file from Family Room, I get the connection error I mentioned in another post. Since Tivo Desktop Plus seems to work to both pull and push files, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with kmttg or why the files I upload are copy-protected and can't be downloaded again.


One of the "Family Room" TiVos is probably the embedded stream. My suggestion would be to change the network settings of the TIVo so the "actual" TiVo is using a fixed IP address, change kmttg to explicitly define it and uncheck the "Look for TiVos on network" box.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> On the lack of grouping. I may have given you some bad data. That seriesID used to work but it is not the one I used in my recent test. Try changing it to SH90001118. Using that, here's what I see (colors are off due to what I had to do to reduce the size):
> 
> As to changing the title from "Philosopher's" to "Sorcerer's", you can use whatever you want, but it is _*not*_ a correction. "Philosopher's' is the original title and the one I prefer.
> 
> ...


Since the "push" using Tivo Desktop Plus didn't work, I tried the new seriesId and *it is working now. Finally!!!*

But won't that still potentially conflict with TMS or does the 9 avoid that? FWIW, I tried MV90001118 and it works too, though both show up as TV Shows with the filters.

There is also still the "separator" tag. Looking through the INFO, there's a "Categories" field that has the word "separator" in it and the Wiki doesn't explain what this field is.

Looking at kmttg, the new files are no longer flagged as copy-protected, but the titles include "(EP001)" so I might try leaving the episodeNumber parameter out.

When I get done with my shower, I'll work on some more files and also see if the new seriesId works when I have Tivo Desktop Plus auto-transfer.

I didn't know that about the original title, interesting.

I also wish they'd use a year and I'll make a note of the 1970 oddity.

Thanks for hanging in there with me. It looks like most of my problem was the seriesId, but either way, I learned a few things.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> You want both title and seriesTitle to be the name of the group you want it to be in. episodeTitle should be the name of the movie.


Okay, now that I have it working, I just had to see if what I thought about the title parameter was correct or not. So, I moved the title parameter out of the default txt file and placed it in each of the movie txt files. I then changed its entry to match the episodeTitle. What this does is display the correct movie title in the share folder on the Tivo, so I can now see a "real" list of movies and which movies I'm selecting for transfer. What I have now is:

default txt file
- seriesTitle : Movies
- seriesId : MV90001119"

1st movie txt file
- title : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
- episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

2nd movie txt file
- title : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

On the Tivo, My Shows now has a "new" Movies" group with 2 movies in it displaying the correct titles and they are not longer copy-protected like everything else I uploaded last year.

Tomorrow I'm going to try a unique seriesTitle entry, something like DD03091947, to see if it works and how the filters process it. I'm also going to remove the episodeNumber parameter and try to figure out which parameter, maybe the mpaaRating entry, is the Categories field. Looking at some of my current recordings, that seems to be the case. If all that works as planned, I'll be pretty happy, though I still wish Tivo would display the title and the episodeTitle when using the Name sort option as well as add the year.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> There's a bug in how TiVo currently handles pushes.


Maybe that's it. I'll still try the latest files tomorrow and then give up for now.



> One of the "Family Room" TiVos is probably the embedded stream. My suggestion would be to change the network settings of the TIVo so the "actual" TiVo is using a fixed IP address, change kmttg to explicitly define it and uncheck the "Look for TiVos on network" box.


That's it. I thought I had read that somewhere. I may make those changes when I upgrade my modem and router to 1-gigabit and DOCSIS-3.0 in March.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Okay, now that I have it working, I just had to see if what I thought about the title parameter was correct or not. So, I moved the title parameter out of the default txt file and placed it in each of the movie txt files. I then changed its entry to match the episodeTitle. What this does is display the correct movie title in the share folder on the Tivo, so I can now see a "real" list of movies and which movies I'm selecting for transfer. What I have now is:
> 
> default txt file
> - seriesTitle : Movies
> ...


Even with "title" left as "Movies", you would see the exact same thing when viewing a subfolder within an existing share rather than a separate share.



DoubleDAZ said:


> On the Tivo, My Shows now has a "new" Movies" group with 2 movies in it displaying the correct titles and they are not longer copy-protected like everything else I uploaded last year.


If the ones you transferred last year are copy protected, then that means they were pushed rather than pulled. Pushed recordings are always copy protected. Until recently, pushed recordings never grouped with pulled ones and even today it doesn't always work. I'm not sure it ever works for a made up seriesId. The thing is that, until the Premiere, pushing was the only way to get recordings to group on a made up seriesId.



DoubleDAZ said:


> Tomorrow I'm going to try a unique seriesTitle entry, something like DD03091947, to see if it works and how the filters process it. I'm also going to remove the episodeNumber parameter and try to figure out which parameter, maybe the mpaaRating entry, is the Categories field. Looking at some of my current recordings, that seems to be the case. If all that works as planned, I'll be pretty happy, though I still wish Tivo would display the title and the episodeTitle when using the Name sort option as well as add the year.


The Categories field is controlled by the vProgramGenre entries. In order for it to show up on the TiVo, it has to be one that the TiVo recognizes. That's in the SDUI. The ability for pyTivo to set it for the HDUI broke years ago, if it ever worked at all. The fact that it shows "Separator" is a bug in the HDUI which is unlikely ever to be fixed.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> That's it. I thought I had read that somewhere. I may make those changes when I upgrade my modem and router to 1-gigabit and DOCSIS-3.0 in March.


No need to wait. The changes are made on the TiVo, not in the router. Before someone objects to this statement, let me say that I am perfectly aware that some people do it by assigning a specific IP address to a specific MAC address via the router but it is not necessary to do it that way.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I suspect you're right about the programId and I'm sure recording from the guide sets all the right parameters. However, I think one should be able to reproduce the necessary parameters for the metadata txt file and I haven't given up on that just yet.


Metagenerator will provide the programId if it exists.


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## cherry ghost (Sep 13, 2005)

jcthorne said:


> Metagenerator will provide the programId if it exists.


For movies also? I see the check box under "TV Search", but not "Movie Search."


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> Metagenerator will provide the programId if it exists.





cherry ghost said:


> For movies also? I see the check box under "TV Search", but not "Movie Search."


No. Only for TV series.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Even with "title" left as "Movies", you would see the exact same thing when viewing a subfolder within an existing share rather than a separate share.


I'm probably not expressing myself correctly, so I've started over this morning, here's the scenario:
Tivo Desktop Plus running (no pyTivo, no kmttg)
2 movies in folder "Harry Potter Movies"
default txt
title : Movies
seriesTitle : Movies
seriesId : SH90001118
movie1 txt file
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
movie2 txt file
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Observations
Added "Harry Potter Movies" folder to Desktop using auto-transfer mode.
Movie1 started to upload
My Shows added entry "Harry Potter Movies"
Right margin shows Sorcerer's Stone
Selecting the entry just shows "Transferred by Tivo"
INFO shows the same, no description, actors, etc.
When Movie2 starts to upload, the group "Harry Potter Movies" is created. Since the title & seriesTitle entries are both "Movies", I don't know why the group name is not "Movies".
The title for both movies is the same, "Sorcerer's Stone", and I'll assume both are errors in Desktop.

The next test scenario is:
Tivo Desktop Plus running (no pyTivo, no kmttg)
2 movies in folder "Harry Potter Movies"
default txt
title : Movies (---deleted---)
seriesTitle : Movies
seriesId : SH90001118
vProgramGenre entries (---deleted---)
movie1 txt file
title : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (---added---)
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
movie2 txt file
title : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (---added---)
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Observations:
I still get the "Harry Potter Movies" entry, so I assume I'll get the same group name. I suspect I'll also get a duplicate title, but I'm curious, so I'll let the first upload finish to see what happens when the second upload starts. If nothing else, I'll have something to check when the February fixes arrive.

EDIT: Same group name and duplicate title, so that's it for now with Desktop.

Side note: It bugs me that Desktop doesn't provide any transfer status, I have to check My Shows. I displays status for transfers from the Tivo to the laptop.



> If the ones you transferred last year are copy protected, then that means they were pushed rather than pulled. Pushed recordings are always copy protected. Until recently, pushed recordings never grouped with pulled ones and even today it doesn't always work. I'm not sure it ever works for a made up seriesId. The thing is that, until the Premiere, pushing was the only way to get recordings to group on a made up seriesId.


I believe they were pushed, but to be honest, I don't remember what I did. Like now, I tried so many things to get something to work, that's why I'm documenting these tests this time. I think I used kmttg because until the other day, I could not get Desktop to do anything, not even share music or photos. Then I started Desktop while pyTivo was running and the Music/Photos entries showed up on the TiVo in Music & Photos and Movies in My Shows. Right now, with pyTivo not running, none of those show up, but Desktop is transferring the 2 movies.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand all this. I get that pyTivo set the Share folders yesterday and that made them show up on the Tivo. What I don't get is why Desktop doesn't do the same thing. Documentation seems to indicate it should, but all I see right now with only Desktop running is the "Harry Potter Movies" entry for the movie being transferred and the "Now Playing on DavesLaptop" entry.

As soon as the 2nd Desktop test finishes, I'm going to start pyTivo and kmttg to test various change to the entries in the default and movie txt files using the Tivo to pull files from the laptop.



> The Categories field is controlled by the vProgramGenre entries. In order for it to show up on the TiVo, it has to be one that the TiVo recognizes. That's in the SDUI. The ability for pyTivo to set it for the HDUI broke years ago, if it ever worked at all. The fact that it shows "Separator" is a bug in the HDUI which is unlikely ever to be fixed.


All the movies I uploaded last year with the Example 3 entries I posted display "TV-NR" instead of "separator" while "separator" appears for the ones I tried yesterday. Unfortunately, none of them display the actor list, but then they also don't show the Categories entry I mentioned. What's weird is that I have a mixture of starRating, mpaaRating, vProgramGenre entries for them, so I don't know why the "TV-NR". One of the combinations I'll try today is leaving the starRating and mpaaRating entries out.

I did want to ask a bit about the vProgramGenre entries. You have some in the default txt file and others in the movie txt files. I get the desire to have them be the same for all Harry Potter movies, but I assume I could delete those entries from the default txt file in my main movies folder and just use the ones in the movie txt files without messing up anything. The main use for the default txt file is to avoid duplicating the same entries in each movie file. Correct?


----------



## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

TTBOMK, TiVo Desktop doesn't use .txt metadata -- a format we invented for pyTivo.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I still get the "Harry Potter Movies" entry, so I assume I'll get the same group name. I suspect I'll also get a duplicate title, but I'm curious, so I'll let the first upload finish to see what happens when the second upload starts. If nothing else, I'll have something to check when the February fixes arrive.


Any transfer initiated from the PC is going to be a Push.



DoubleDAZ said:


> Side note: It bugs me that Desktop doesn't provide any transfer status, I have to check My Shows. I displays status for transfers from the Tivo to the laptop.


You don't get status from pyTivo either if the file is in a compatible format., just "Start" and "Done".


DoubleDAZ said:


> believe they were pushed, but to be honest, I don't remember what I did. Like now, I tried so many things to get something to work, that's why I'm documenting these tests this time. I think I used kmttg because until the other day, I could not get Desktop to do anything, not even share music or photos. Then I started Desktop while pyTivo was running and the Music/Photos entries showed up on the TiVo in Music & Photos and Movies in My Shows. Right now, with pyTivo not running, none of those show up, but Desktop is transferring the 2 movies.


I've no idea what caused that.



DoubleDAZ said:


> I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand all this. I get that pyTivo set the Share folders yesterday and that made them show up on the Tivo. What I don't get is why Desktop doesn't do the same thing. Documentation seems to indicate it should, but all I see right now with only Desktop running is the "Harry Potter Movies" entry for the movie being transferred and the "Now Playing on DavesLaptop" entry.


The "Now Playing on DavesLaptop" entry is the TD equivalent of a pyTivo share. If you select it, what you should see are the recordings in whatever folder you have configured TD to use for "MY TiVo Recordings".



DoubleDAZ said:


> As soon as the 2nd Desktop test finishes, I'm going to start pyTivo and kmttg to test various change to the entries in the default and movie txt files using the Tivo to pull files from the laptop.


You could pull them via TD but it does not support .txt file metadata. Only that which is embedded in .tivo files and possibly .mp4. I am really only familiar with the free version and haven't actively used even that for many years.



DoubleDAZ said:


> All the movies I uploaded last year with the Example 3 entries I posted display "TV-NR" instead of "separator" while "separator" appears for the ones I tried yesterday. Unfortunately, none of them display the actor list, but then they also don't show the Categories entry I mentioned. What's weird is that I have a mixture of starRating, mpaaRating, vProgramGenre entries for them, so I don't know why the "TV-NR". One of the combinations I'll try today is leaving the starRating and mpaaRating entries out.


Push doesn't give you you as much of the metadata.

Just so we're clear, are you seeing "TV-NR" under "Categories" on the "Details" screen?



DoubleDAZ said:


> I did want to ask a bit about the vProgramGenre entries. You have some in the default txt file and others in the movie txt files. I get the desire to have them be the same for all Harry Potter movies, but I assume I could delete those entries from the default txt file in my main movies folder and just use the ones in the movie txt files without messing up anything. The main use for the default txt file is to avoid duplicating the same entries in each movie file. Correct?


Correct. The duplication is simply left over from my testing.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

wmcbrine said:


> TTBOMK, TiVo Desktop doesn't use .txt metadata -- a format we invented for pyTivo.


Thanks, that makes a lot of sense now.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Any transfer initiated from the PC is going to be a Push.


Never can keep that straight, but I'll try to remember it from the point of view of the PC.



> You don't get status from pyTivo either if the file is in a compatible format., just "Start" and "Done".


Sorry, but for me pyTivo displays lines showing frame, fps, q=, size, time and bitrate in it's command window. Perhaps I'm using an older version?



> I've no idea what caused that.


It's always been that way. I've never been able to see the Desktop "share" folders on the Tivo until I start pyTivo and that's why I've always thought I needed to run pyTivo in conjunction with Desktop. Desktop shows me a list of published music and the folders for my published photos, but the shares don't show up on the Tivo. If I add a folder of videos and don't select auto-transfer, nothing happens and there is no share folder on the Tivo. However, it will show me My Shows and let me select a recording to transfer. It queues the recording, eventually adds it to the Now Playing List where I get a notice saying the transfer has been interrupted and it will keep trying, even though I didn't do anything. Like I've said, it will auto-transfer (push) with the errors that causes and it sees the My Shows list, but will not pull or add the Share folders to the Tivo.



> The "Now Playing on DavesLaptop" entry is the TD equivalent of a pyTivo share. If you select it, what you should see are the recordings in whatever folder you have configured TD to use for "MY TiVo Recordings".


I figured that.



> You could pull them via TD but it does not support .txt file metadata. Only that which is embedded in .tivo files and possibly .mp4. I am really only familiar with the free version and haven't actively used even that for many years.


I maybe could it I could get TD to work properly (see above comments).



> Push doesn't give you you as much of the metadata.


I remember reading that somewhere.



> Just so we're clear, are you seeing "TV-NR" under "Categories" on the "Details" screen?


No, I saw "separator" on the main screen under the description and under Categories on the Details screen. When I saw "TV-NR" under the description on the ones I uploaded last year, I made a bad assumption that the fields were related. However, I'm looking at a recording display now for a cooking show my wife records. It has "TV-G, Cooking, Reality, First Aired: 1/18/15" right below the description. When I press INFO, I see the "Cooking, Reality" under Categories on the Details screen and the "TV-G" under Rating, etc., so the "TV-NR" was probably because the mpaaRating entries were not processed correctly.



> Correct. The duplication is simply left over from my testing.


Thanks.


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## spherular (Jan 16, 2014)

So is there any prospect that this 'separator' issue will ever get resolved? Shows pulled for family viewing are not being categorized under 'kids' as a result. I've tried setting vProgramGenre and vSeriesGenre without any success. Thanks in advance


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Since Desktop tests resulted in an incorrectly named group and duplicate movie titles, these tests apply to pyTivo only. For the sake of brevity, I've edited the description and excluded vDirector, vWriter, vActor, etc., entries. I created a separate Share folder (Harry Potter Movies) containing the 2 test movies (Chamber of Secrets and Sorcerer's Stone). This makes it easier to find the movies in Tivo/My Shows. NOTE: I did choose to delete the vProgramGenre entries from the default txt file and use the ones in each movie txt file.

EDIT: As you'll see, I was fairly successful with my 4th scenario, so I've hidden the others for you to view if you want.

Test Scenario 1:


Spoiler





```
default txt file entries
title : movies
seriesTitle : Movies
isEpisode : true  
seriesId : SH90001118
time : OAD

movie1 txt file entries
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

movie2 txt file entries
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 
originalAirDate : 2002-11-15T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

Observations:
My Shows/Harry Potter Movies contains 2 entries, both titled &#8220;Movies&#8221;.
My Shows/Movies (parent folder/share) contains 75 entries with these 2 both titled &#8220;Movies&#8221; but in sequence with the other Harry Potter movies in the parent folder.
Because of the duplicate title, I have to select each show to see which one is which.
Transfer of 1st movie creates entry titled &#8220;Movies&#8221;.
Transfer of 2nd movie creates group &#8220;Harry Potter Movies&#8221;, not &#8220;Movies&#8221;. (I assume that&#8217;s because there is already a &#8220;Movies&#8221; group with a different seriesId.)
Both movies have the correct title and date.
Did it twice reversing order of transfer to see how Sort was affected, sequence was unchanged using Date or Name, movie1 was always first.
Changed the Day for movie1 to 14, did not affect sort.
Changed it back to 16 and changed Year to 2003, did not affect sort, but now movie2 was first.
```




Test Scenario 2:


Spoiler





```
default txt file entries
title : movies (---deleted---)
seriesTitle : Movies
isEpisode : true  
seriesId : SH90001118
time : OAD

movie1 txt file entries
title : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

movie2 txt file entries
title : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
originalAirDate : 2002-11-15T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

Observations:
My Shows/Harry Potter Movies contains 2 entries, both correctly titled with the name of the movie so I can see what I&#8217;m selecting to transfer.
My Shows/Movies (parent folder/share) contains 75 entries with these 2 both now correctly titled and in sequence with the other Harry Potter movies in the parent folder.
Because of the correct titles, I no longer have to select each show to see which one is which.
Transfer of 1st movie creates entry with the correct movie title.
Transfer of 2nd movie still creates group &#8220;Harry Potter Movies&#8221;, not &#8220;Movies&#8221;.
Both movies have the correct title and date though.
Did it twice reversing order of transfer to see how Sort was affected, sequencing was unchanged from previous test scenario.
Didn&#8217;t see any point in changing Day/Year again.
```




Test Scenario 3:


Spoiler





```
default txt file entries
seriesTitle : Movies2
isEpisode : true  
seriesId : SH90001119
time : OAD
 
movie1 txt file entries
title : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Sorcerers's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

movie2 txt file entries
title : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
originalAirDate : 2002-11-15T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Family

movie3 txt file entries
title : Battleship
episodeTitle : Battleship
originalAirDate : 2012-05-18T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
mpaaRating : R
vProgramGenre : Action
vProgramGenre : Adventure
vProgramGenre : Science Fiction
vProgramGenre : Thriller

Observations:
Once again, My Shows contains the 3 entries with the correct titles.
Uploaded movie1, then movie3 and finally movie2.
Sequence within the group was Name regardless of sort setting, but its hard to tell because the MM/DD result in the same sequence.
Transfer of 1st movie creates entry with the correct movie title.
Transfer of 2nd movie still created group &#8220;Harry Potter Movies&#8221;, not &#8220;Movies2&#8221;, so I changed the seriesId to SH90001119 and tried again.
Makes me wonder if the Tivo keeps track of the seriesTitle and seriesId entries that have been used.
This time the transfer of 2nd movie created a group with the title of movie1, not at all what I expected, so I&#8217;ll have try something else.
All 3 movies have the correct title and date though.
With groups Off, movies retain their correct titles, which is exactly what I was originally after.
With Sort Name, they fall in name sequence.
With Sort Date, they fall to the bottom of the list and are in name or date sequence based on the MM/DD.
Based on the fact that Battleship (2012-05-18) comes before Chamber (2002-11-15) and Stone (2001-11-16), I think Tivo is using the current year and not the year in the metadata file.
Changing isEpisode entry in default txt to &#8220;false&#8221; has no effect, neither does deleting it altogether.
The description and mpaaRating entries display correctly, but not the genre, actors, directors, etc.
```




Test Scenario 4

I can't believe I didn't think of this until now. What if the seriesId is being ignored altogether and the Tivo is using either the share folder name or the first movie title for the group name? Turns out it appears to be the latter. To avoid any impact from my other testing files, I did the following:

Created a new "My Movies" folder on my laptop.
Copied 5 movies and the associated jpg/txt files to it.
Edited the pyTivo config file to add a new "My Movies" share.

default txt file entries
seriesTitle : My Movies
isEpisode : true
seriesId : SH80000119
time : OAD

Renamed one movie and jpg/txt files to "Movies" and edited its txt file.

movie5 txt file entries
title : Movies
episodeTitle : Movies
originalAirDate : 2012-06-08T00:00:00Z
description : --------------------
episodeNumber : 1
starRating : 3.5
mpaaRating : PG-13
vProgramGenre : Sci-Fi & Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Sci-Fi Adventure
vProgramGenre : Action Sci-Fi & Fantasy
vProgramGenre : Blockbusters

Observations:
My Shows/My Movies contains 5 entries, all correctly titled with the name of the movie so I can see what I'm selecting to transfer.
My Shows/Movies (parent folder/share) contains 78 entries with these 5 now correctly titled and in sequence with the other movies in the parent folder.
Because of the correct titles, I no longer have to select each show to see which one is which.
Transfer of movie title "Movies" creates entry with that title.
Transfer of 2nd movie now creates group "Movies", separate from the one I created last year, and other movies get put into the group with correct titles.
With groups Off, movies retain their correct titles, which is exactly what I was originally after.
With Sort Name, they fall in name sequence.
With Sort Date, they fall date sequence based on the MM/DD.
Added new movie "2012" dated 6/7 to "My Movies" folder on laptop, selected it on Tivo and it transferred to group "Movies".
Unfortunately, it gets sequenced in with other movie dated 6/7 and not in name sequence.
Tomorrow I will try with duplicating OAD in all 6 files to see how/if that affects the sequencing, goal is to be able to sort by Name with groups On or Off.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

spherular said:


> So is there any prospect that this 'separator' issue will ever get resolved? Shows pulled for family viewing are not being categorized under 'kids' as a result. I've tried setting vProgramGenre and vSeriesGenre without any success. Thanks in advance


As you see in my previous post, I've been busy testing other things and didn't get to mess with genre, etc. So far though, none of the "v" entries seem to have been recognized in any of my tests. I assume you've got some movies, etc., that you want to be able to designate as Kids and get the Kids filter to recognize them as such. Unfortunately, all the Kids recordings I currently have are all copy-protected, so I can't download them or their metadata files to see how they are designated. I have one on PBS set to record tomorrow morning, so I'll see if I can see something then.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

spherular said:


> So is there any prospect that this 'separator' issue will ever get resolved? Shows pulled for family viewing are not being categorized under 'kids' as a result. I've tried setting vProgramGenre and vSeriesGenre without any success. Thanks in advance


As with most of the information displayed in the HDUI, categories appears to be gotten from the net based on the programId.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Downloaded a Kids recording and took a look at the metadata. I tried using it by just changing the filename to match a movie. As many of you probably already know, test uploads keyed off the seriesId and programId. While I was able to get the movie to filter as a Kids program, it had the wrong title, description and other data. Even changing the episodeTitle (and description, etc.) didn't help, it still keyed off internet data. When I deleted the seriesId, the upload was added to my existing group, but then the filter no longer recognized it as a Kids program. When I deleted the programId, then the other entries were finally recognized, but that didn't help with the original goal.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

You'll have to choose - arbitrary grouping or correct info. The two are mutually exclusive.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Well, I think I've had some more success today. After finding a way to create the desired group name "Movies" and add/delete files to it yesterday/today, I think I've come up with a way to force the added files into Name sequence regardless of the sequence in which they are uploaded. Be forewarned, this is definitely a KLUDGE, but so far it seems to be working. I'm still refining it, but I'm using a variation of OAD date/time. Since the "time" entry in the default txt file is set to "OAD", I'm using a variation of originalAirDate 2015-01-01T12-00-00Z.

Some things I noticed during my previous tests:
- The sort name option doesn't seem to apply to items within a group, they appear to stay in date sequence.
- In my original Movies group, I used the same date/time 2014-05-21T00-00-00Z and ended up with 2 dates, 05/21 and 05/22.
- Earlier today I used 2015-01-01T00-00-00Z and ended up with 12/31. I changed it to 2015-01-01T12-00-00Z, uploaded it again and got 1/1. I just changed it back now and got 12/31 again plus it moved to the bottom of the list based in the new MM/DD. I changed it back yet again and got 1/1 in the correct sequence.
- I changed it to 2015-05-01T12-00-00Z, got 5/1 and it moved to the top of the list.
- I changed it to 2015-01-01T12-25-00Z and got 1/1 with a time of 5:25 AM.
- All this leads me to believe the time zone relative to Z (GMT) time affects the date/time that Tivo assigns to uploads.

At any rate, the movie was "Battleship" and the 25 in the minutes field equates to "B" in the alphabet. An "A" would be 26 and a "C" would be 24, etc. As you might have guessed, right now I'm experimenting with using the minute field to differentiate movies by the first letter in their titles and the seconds to deal with up to 60 movies beginning with that letter. Therefore 1/26 equates to a movie beginning with "A", 1/25 to a "B", etc. When they are viewed in the group, 1/26 is followed by 1/25, 1/24, etc. This is because the oldest episode is at the bottom and the newest at the top in a series group.

When it came to the 8 Harry Potter movies I have, I went to the seconds field and again assigned values in reverse order; 09 for the 1st movie in the series, 08 for the 2nd, etc. Unfortunately, I have 3 more movies whose title begins with "H", so I need to come up with a better method.

Because of the 12/31 and 1/1 problem I mentioned, I can't use the hour field. And because the month field is limited to 00-12, I also can't use that field. So, I'm going to see if I can use the day, minute and seconds fields. The day field would then become the A-Z in reverse order. I'd then assign 00-59 based on the 2nd word in the title, the first in the Harry Potter series would become 2015-01-19T12-11-09.

Be advised that this has become just an exercise to see what I can do. Since I only have 75 movies to deal with, I may just separate them into A-B-C, D-E-F, etc., groups and not worry about the name sequence. Plus, all but 2 of the movies are already in the old "Movies" group in sequence. I can even get fancier by uploading clips titled "-A-", "-B-", to serve as separators.

The problem with my old "Movies" group is that I listened to someone who said the title and seriesTitle to "Movies" had to be the same, so now when I turn groups off, all 73 movies show up as "Movies" in the My Shows list. The new ones display the proper title with groups On or Off and I can simply sort them by name with groups Off. It still helps if they're in name sequence with groups On too, but it's no longer as important. The main thing is that I can upload my movies to a specific group (in name sequence if I want to take the time) and get that real name to appear with groups On or Off.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> You'll have to choose - arbitrary grouping or correct info. The two are mutually exclusive.


Sorry, the filters thing wasn't my problem, it was spherular's, but since I've now figured out how to create the group names I want, I can actually create a "Kids" group for my uploads and accomplish the same thing that the filters would have. 

I don't care about the director, writer, actor, etc., so I'm not going to fiddle with that stuff, at least not until I see the February release (which I've already signed up for).


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## spherular (Jan 16, 2014)

Apologies for hijacking this thread. I have numerous kid shows that I've grouped together into a very long file that I'd like categorized under kids. I guess it just can't be done as there is no original program I'd to assign to this compilation.

If anyone does get vprogramgenre to work it would useful to know how.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ,

The problem is you have no understanding of how the recording time field works. It is Zulu time AKA UTC. That's what the "Z" at the end means, IOW Greenwich Mean Time. On the TiVo, it is stored as a Unix Timestamp which is the number of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. When displayed on the TiVo, it is converted to local time. That's why 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z displays as 12/31. The TiVo does not display the year (2014) but since the sort is on the full timestamp, not the mm/yy, it will still sort properly.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Sorry, the filters thing wasn't my problem, it was spherular's, but since I've now figured out how to create the group names I want, I can actually create a "Kids" group for my uploads and accomplish the same thing that the filters would have.
> 
> I don't care about the director, writer, actor, etc., so I'm not going to fiddle with that stuff, at least not until I see the February release (which I've already signed up for).


That post was a general one, not aimed at any particular person.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

spherular said:


> Apologies for hijacking this thread. I have numerous kid shows that I've grouped together into a very long file that I'd like categorized under kids. I guess it just can't be done as there is no original program I'd to assign to this compilation.
> 
> If anyone does get vprogramgenre to work it would useful to know how.


No need to apologize, it's all related and you never know what question or comment is going to trigger an idea. 

I don't know if it's a matter of getting them to work, I don't think any of the "v" entries are being recognized, they haven't been for any of the files I've uploaded. I even used the metadata file from the Kids program I downloaded and none of the changes I made to the "v" entries were recognized.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> The problem is you have no understanding of how the recording time field works. It is Zulu time AKA UTC. That's what the "Z" at the end means, IOW Greenwich Mean Time. On the TiVo, it is stored as a Unix Timestamp which is the number of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. When displayed on the TiVo, it is converted to local time. That's why 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z displays as 12/31. The TiVo does not display the year (2014) but since the sort is on the full timestamp, not the mm/yy, it will still sort properly.


Excuse me? I thought I said that, except the UNIX storage part. I know what the Z means, I even said "Z (GMT)" in my post.

Anyway, the point is:
- I'm able to create a group name by editing the seriesTitle/seriesId entries in the default txt file and uploading a movie/clip with that name before I add more movies to the group.
- I don't have to set the title and seriesTitle to the group name like you said I had to in post #6. I set the seriesTitle/seriesId to the group name/ID in the default txt file and the title/episodeTitle to the movie name in the movie txt file.
- I'm able to view the correct movie titles in the share folder on the Tivo based on the title entry.
- I'm able to view the correct movie titles in the group with groups On.
- I'm able to view the correct movie titles in the My Shows list with groups Off and they sort by name or date.
- I'm able to force newly added movies into the group in the right place sequenced by name simply by fiddling with the time entry.

At any rate, I'm just trying to be helpful and post the results of my testing. I've got what I want, so it's been a worthwhile exercise for me.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Sorry, your statement where you said that there was a 12/31 "problem" threw me off.

If you're still willing to listen to me and you haven't settled on using your current setup, I would suggest using year as your first character sort. This gives you the maximum amount of room for properly ordered entries within the set of movies that begin any particular character. Also, you're going to need more than 31 "positions" so you can handle movies whose titles begin with a numeral or special character. Using year gives you 365 (366 for a leap year) for entries within a "set". When creating your initial entries, you should leave as much "time" as possible between successive entries to make it as easy as possible to add new entries between them if necessary.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Sorry, your statement where you said that there was a 12/31 "problem" threw me off.
> 
> If you're still willing to listen to me and you haven't settled on using your current setup, I would suggest using year as your first character sort. This gives you the maximum amount of room for properly ordered entries within the set of movies that begin any particular character. Also, you're going to need more than 31 "positions" so you can handle movies whose titles begin with a numeral or special character. Using year gives you 365 (366 for a leap year) for entries within a "set". When creating your initial entries, you should leave as much "time" as possible between successive entries to make it as easy as possible to add new entries between them if necessary.


Of course I'm still willing to listen to you, I'm always open to suggestions. I just thought you were being a bit snarky (?) and couldn't quite figure out why. I got 12/31 when the hour was "00" and 1/1 when the hour was "12" and assumed it's because Arizona is GMT-7, but it could be because the 1970 reference time is also "00" or even a combination of the two. I hadn't yet played with the minute/second fields at that point, so they were both "00".

I planned on grouping all the numeric titles as "27" to make them first and just ignoring any leading special characters. Bear in mind that I only have 75 movie files at the moment and I don't plan on obtaining that many more. Most movies I have now will probably get deleted once we view them. I realize I could just upload them individually with their release date as the OAD and they'd all be "old", so they'd fall at the bottom of the My Shows list in date sequence. I'd just prefer to have them grouped to keep the My Shows list relatively short with just the TV series recordings.

When you suggest using the year, do you mean something like 1996 for "A", 1995 for "B" and so on? Or did I completely miss what you have in mind? I didn't want to use the month field because that's limited to 12 and I was keying in on A-Z being 26-1. I totally get your suggestion to leave time between entries for additions, that's what I was trying to explain with the Harry Potter examples, though I probably should have used 29, 28, etc., to leave room on both sides for other movies starting with "H".


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Of course I'm still willing to listen to you, I'm always open to suggestions. I just thought you were being a bit snarky (?) and couldn't quite figure out why. I got 12/31 when the hour was "00" and 1/1 when the hour was "12" and assumed it's because Arizona is GMT-7, but it could be because the 1970 reference time is also "00" or even a combination of the two. I hadn't yet played with the minute/second fields at that point, so they were both "00".


Your first thought was the correct one. If the TiVo displayed the year part of the record time, it would have been "2014" or at least "14".



DoubleDAZ said:


> I planned on grouping all the numeric titles as "27" to make them first and just ignoring any leading special characters. Bear in mind that I only have 75 movie files at the moment and I don't plan on obtaining that many more. Most movies I have now will probably get deleted once we view them. I realize I could just upload them individually with their release date as the OAD and they'd all be "old", so they'd fall at the bottom of the My Shows list in date sequence. I'd just prefer to have them grouped to keep the My Shows list relatively short with just the TV series recordings.


I'm actually not clear as to why you want to transfer all of them to the TiVo. Why not just leave them on the PC and transfer one when you want to watch it?

Note: I am not saying that is the "right" way or even the "best" way, but it does avoid cluttering up the TiVo.



DoubleDAZ said:


> When you suggest using the year, do you mean something like 1996 for "A", 1995 for "B" and so on? Or did I completely miss what you have in mind? I didn't want to use the month field because that's limited to 12 and I was keying in on A-Z being 26-1. I totally get your suggestion to leave time between entries for additions, that's what I was trying to explain with the Harry Potter examples, though I probably should have used 29, 28, etc., to leave room on both sides for other movies starting with "H".


Yes, that's what I meant by using year as your top level. As far as avoiding using the month - don't think about the individual pieces. Think about it as one big number.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Did a little test on the hour field this morning and got into messing with the year and title/episodeTitle entries too. 

Scenario:
- Base OAD Template 2015-01-01T00-27-00Z ("27" denotes movie title beginning with a number).
- Local Arizona time between 6:00-7:00 am.
- Movie 2012 used for all test uploads, but I changed the title/episodeTitle entries so I could keep things straight.

Observations:
- Setting hour to 00-06 results in MM/DD of 12/31.
- Setting hours to 07-12 results in MM/DD of 1/1.
- Changing day to 02 results in 1/1 and 1/2 respectively. Similar with 03, etc.
- Changing year to 2014 or 2016 results in the upload being sorted correctly; date sequence in group with groups ON and name/date in My Shows with groups OFF.

However:
- Changing year to before 1970 results in 12/31 regardless of hour.
- Changing day to 02 results in 12/30, 03 results in 12/29, etc.
- Changing year to before 1970 results in date sort problems. Notice movies with dates before 1970 get sorted in the middle.

```
2012 1/1     (2016:01:01T00:00:00Z)
2012 1/1     (2015:01:01T00:00:00Z)
2012 1/1     (2014:01:01T12:27:00Z)
2012 12/31 (2014:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/31 (1943:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/31 (1945:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/30 (1945:01:02T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/29 (1945:01:03T00:27:00Z)
2012 1/1     (1960:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/31 (1980:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 1/1     (1971:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 1/1     (1970:01:01T00:27:00Z)
2012 12/31 (1970:01:01T00:00:00Z)
```
- Changed title and episodeTitle by adding a different year to each.
- - Noticed that title displayed in group with groups ON comes from episodeTitle entry, as expected.
- - Noticed that title displayed in MY Shows with groups OFF comes from title entry, also as expected.

Conclusions:
- Arizona time GMT-7 affects the MM/DD, so as long as I set the hour to 07-12, I'll get the correct MM/DD for my purposes (using 12 should work just fine).
- Tivo appears to handle future years properly.
- Tivo doesn't appear to handle years before 1970 properly.
- Still, I can use year, day, minute and seconds fields for my sorting scheme as long as I avoid years before 1970.
- Since Tivo recognizes future years, I can use something like 2001-20XX for the first character of the title.

Not sure what I'm going to do yet, but it's been an interesting exercise to learn more about how the Tivo and pyTivo work.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Did a little test on the hour field this morning and got into messing with the year and title/episodeTitle entries too.
> 
> Scenario:
> - Base OAD Template 2015-01-01T00-27-00Z ("27" denotes movie title beginning with a number).
> ...


That's better than it used to do with a date prior to 1970, which is cause the TiVo to reboot. BTW, I already said not to use record times prior to 1970-01-01T00:00:00 The reason it causes a problem is the record time is stored on the TiVo as a Unix a timestamp which the number of seconds since the "Epoch" - 1970-01-01T00:00:00



DoubleDAZ said:


> - Changed title and episodeTitle by adding a different year to each.
> - - Noticed that title displayed in group with groups ON comes from episodeTitle entry, as expected.
> - - Noticed that title displayed in MY Shows with groups OFF comes from title entry, also as expected.[
> 
> ...


Why do you care what the displayed mm/dd is? Just ignore it. It's totally meaningless in the context of what you are doing.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> I'm actually not clear as to why you want to transfer all of them to the TiVo. Why not just leave them on the PC and transfer one when you want to watch it?
> 
> Note: I am not saying that is the "right" way or even the "best" way, but it does avoid cluttering up the TiVo.


To be honest, when I purchased the 3Tb Roamio Pro, it simply started as a way to have favorite and unwatched movies available for viewing on our family room and bedroom TVs without having to think about which one we wanted to watch, then wait for it to upload, etc. They'd also be available for streaming to our tablets here or when we're traveling.

Once I got the movies uploaded, I didn't like how they showed the correct title in the group, but not in the My Shows list because I set the title and seriesTitle to the same group name, "Movies". So, it became an exercise to see if I could fix that and I did. That right there solved the biggest problem, being able to sort them by name in My Shows.

I could have stopped there, but I still wasn't happy that I had to manually upload them in sequence in the group and didn't know how to "add" new movies in the right order. That got me to this point and I came up with this convoluted scheme that I don't know if I'll use or not. I've learned a lot though about metadata and how the Tivo and pyTivo use it and knowledge is always a good thing.



> Yes, that's what I meant by using year as your top level. As far as avoiding using the month - don't think about the individual pieces. Think about it as one big number.


Well, I have to think about the month because only 01-12 are allowed and that limits its usefulness. The same with the day where only 01-31 are allowed. And given what my tests this morning showed, I need to avoid using a year before 1970. But the suggest to use the year is good because it does allow enough options for alpha, numeric and special characters (though I'd still probably ignore those).

I still don't understand why the "v" entries are being ignored when I use the Tivo to pull from the PC. I get that the Tivo uses data from the web for recognized seriesId entries, but why not take what's in the metadata txt file for others?

Also, in the Wiki it says one can create a .meta folder and place all the txt files in it, but Windows 8.1 won't let me. I had to resort to mkdir in a command prompt, but it seems to work. Talk about old school.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> That's better than it used to do with a date prior to 1970, which is cause the TiVo to reboot. BTW, I already said not to use record times prior to 1970-01-01T00:00:00 The reason it causes a problem is the record time is stored on the TiVo as a Unix a timestamp which the number of seconds since the "Epoch" - 1970-01-01T00:00:00


Yeah, I got that, but with the default txt file set to use OAD, I wanted to see what happened if I used the original released date as the OAD. However, since MetaGenerator doesn't add an OAD entry, I have to add it myself, so that didn't turn out to be a problem. After you suggested using the year, I wanted to know what years to avoid. I got the 1970 reference, but didn't know what the problems were and was simply curious.



> Why do you care what the displayed mm/dd is? Just ignore it. It's totally meaningless in the context of what you are doing.


Again, just curiosity and I like things neat. Since the month/day are limited to 01-12 and 01-31, I won't be using them and I just prefer to have everything display the same MM/DD. An advantage to that is they will all be grouped together in the My Shows list when sorted in date sequence. Call me crazy, I just like things organized.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> To be honest, when I purchased the 3Tb Roamio Pro, it simply started as a way to have favorite and unwatched movies available for viewing on our family room and bedroom TVs without having to think about which one we wanted to watch, then wait for it to upload, etc. They'd also be available for streaming to our tablets here or when we're traveling.


Having them available for streaming makes sense and is another reason to pull them rather than push as you cannot OOH stream copy protected recordings. A lot of people, myself included, simply cannot afford to dedicate that much TiVo space despite the fact that, not including either my 2TB THD or my (don't remember how big) Series 2, I have a total of 5.5TB available.

Waiting for it to "upload" is not really an issue as things are generally transferred faster than real time, at least for me and on a pull, you can always start watching as soon as the transfer starts, which is immediate as you don't have to wait for the request to go through the TiVo mind server.

Most of my stuff is h.264 in either mp4 or mkv container, so transfer to a Premiere or Roamio is lightning fast as it only has to be re-muxed rather than transcoded.



DoubleDAZ said:


> Well, I have to think about the month because only 01-12 are allowed and that limits its usefulness. The same with the day where only 01-31 are allowed. And given what my tests this morning showed, I need to avoid using a year before 1970. But the suggest to use the year is good because it does allow enough options for alpha, numeric and special characters (though I'd still probably ignore those).


You're still thinking of the recording time value in terms of separate fields rather than one big number whose _*displayed*_ value increments/decrements in other than a strictly decimal sequence.



DoubleDAZ said:


> I still don't understand why the "v" entries are being ignored when I use the Tivo to pull from the PC. I get that the Tivo uses data from the web for recognized seriesId entries, but why not take what's in the metadata txt file for others?


Just a function of how the data for the HDUI is generated. It also seems to be a problem in both directions. Both pyTivo and kmttg had to be modified to avoid generating metadata files with blank vSeriesGenre and vProgramGenre entries. The XML received from the TiVo had one or more blank <Element> entries for both. Although that may have more to do with the change in what genres were supported. Actually, I don't remember for sure about pyTivo, it may have already worked properly. I _*am*_ certain about kmttg.



DoubleDAZ said:


> Also, in the Wiki it says one can create a .meta folder and place all the txt files in it, but Windows 8.1 won't let me. I had to resort to mkdir in a command prompt, but it seems to work. Talk about old school.


This is a Windows Explorer limitation and has been since at least Win2K. I just checked.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Having them available for streaming makes sense and is another reason to pull them rather than push as you cannot OOH stream copy protected recordings. A lot of people, myself included, simply cannot afford to dedicate that much TiVo space despite the fact that, not including either my 2TB THD or my (don't remember how big) Series 2, I have a total of 5.5TB available.


I don't accumulate much, we watch recordings pretty much within a day or 2. I can't push right now anyway. In fact, I can't get Tivo Desktop to do an auto-transfer at the moment, even after an uninstall/install.



> Waiting for it to "upload" is not really an issue as things are generally transferred faster than real time, at least for me and on a pull, you can always start watching as soon as the transfer starts, which is immediate as you don't have to wait for the request to go through the TiVo mind server.


I knew that, but didn't think of it. Thanks for the tip. I'm still going to upload some movies, but now I might just limit it to ones I watch multiple times and some we might want to stream on a trip. I can actually connect my laptop to a motel TV via HDMI to watch, but it doesn't seem to pass audio and we have to use the laptop speakers. I works well enough though, so we'll see. Motel wifi is not noted for its speed and might not be good enough for streaming.

It's really funny. Now that I know how things work and what I can do, the priority has diminished somewhat while I decide the best route to take. 



> Most of my stuff is h.264 in either mp4 or mkv container, so transfer to a Premiere or Roamio is lightning fast as it only has to be re-muxed rather than transcoded.


All mine is mp4, so upload is faster, but far from lightning fast on my network.



> You're still thinking of the recording time value in terms of separate fields rather than one big number whose _*displayed*_ value increments/decrements in other than a strictly decimal sequence.


I know. I get what you're saying, but can't seem to envision it another way and tie it to controlling the name sequencing in a group.



> Just a function of how the data for the HDUI is generated. It also seems to be a problem in both directions. Both pyTivo and kmttg had to be modified to avoid generating metadata files with blank vSeriesGenre and vProgramGenre entries. The XML received from the TiVo had one or more blank <Element> entries for both. Although that may have more to do with the change in what genres were supported. Actually, I don't remember for sure about pyTivo, it may have already worked properly. I _*am*_ certain about kmttg.


I'll take your word for it. 



> This is a Windows Explorer limitation and has been since at least Win2K. I just checked.


I figured it was something like that. I've never needed to create a folder with a leading "." before.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Yeah, I got that, but with the default txt file set to use OAD, I wanted to see what happened if I used the original released date as the OAD. However, since MetaGenerator doesn't add an OAD entry, I have to add it myself, so that didn't turn out to be a problem. After you suggested using the year, I wanted to know what years to avoid. I got the 1970 reference, but didn't know what the problems were and was simply curious.


You could have just added an explicit "time" entry to the metadata.



DoubleDAZ said:


> Again, just curiosity and I like things neat. Since the month/day are limited to 01-12 and 01-31, I won't be using them and I just prefer to have everything display the same MM/DD.


OK, you think it has better esthetics. That's fine and sufficient justification.



DoubleDAZ said:


> An advantage to that is they will all be grouped together in the My Shows list when sorted in date sequence. Call me crazy, I just like things organized.


Huh? The sort is on the value of the recording datetime timestamp, which is an unsigned 32-bit integer, not on mmdd. Unless you have a recording "older" than the ones you download, they're all doing to be at the bottom of the list anyway.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I don't accumulate much, we watch recordings pretty much within a day or 2. I can't push right now anyway. In fact, I can't get Tivo Desktop to do an auto-transfer at the moment, even after an uninstall/install.


pyTivo has a push capability but I recommend you not do pushes due to the previously mentioned OOH streaming problem.



DoubleDAZ said:


> I knew that, but didn't think of it. Thanks for the tip. I'm still going to upload some movies, but now I might just limit it to ones I watch multiple times and some we might want to stream on a trip. I can actually connect my laptop to a motel TV via HDMI to watch, but it doesn't seem to pass audio and we have to use the laptop speakers. I works well enough though, so we'll see. Motel wifi is not noted for its speed and might not be good enough for streaming.


Did you change the Windows settings so it is using HDMI for audio?



DoubleDAZ said:


> It's really funny. Now that I know how things work and what I can do, the priority has diminished somewhat while I decide the best route to take.


I'm sort of two minds myself. If I keep or reset them so they are movies and set the programId to the correct value, I get full information on the TiVo, including a graphic. OTOH, it's sorta neat having movies in the same series in their own group. OTGH, I rarely transfer more than one movie at a time and delete it as soon as finish watching.



DoubleDAZ said:


> All mine is mp4, so upload is faster, but far from lightning fast on my network.


Do this - After making sure that you are running up to date versions of both pyTivo and ffmpeg, add

ts=on

to the Global Server section of pytivo.conf. Then restart pyTivo and download one of your movies. Hopefully, you will see a dramatic speedup.



DoubleDAZ said:


> I know. I get what you're saying, but can't seem to envision it another way and tie it to controlling the name sequencing in a group.


Having been a computer analyst/programmer for 41+ years, its easy for me to think of datetimes in that sequence as just one big number. Plus I know how it is actually stored internally.



DoubleDAZ said:


> I'll take your word for it.





DoubleDAZ said:


> I figured it was something like that. I've never needed to create a folder with a leading "." before.


Never actually used the .meta folder myself. I prefer keeping the video and the metadata file together.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> You could have just added an explicit "time" entry to the metadata.


Yeah, just still thinking about things. If I do that though, there isn't much left in the default.txt file. 



> Huh? The sort is on the value of the recording datetime timestamp, which is an unsigned 32-bit integer, not on mmdd. Unless you have a recording "older" than the ones you download, they're all doing to be at the bottom of the list anyway.


Well, it just looks funny to have some 1/1 and others 12/31. Of course, only I would know. 

BTW. I deleted my uploads/group and when I started uploading again I ran into problems, so there is still more testing I need to do.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> pyTivo has a push capability but I recommend you not do pushes due to the previously mentioned OOH streaming problem.


Yeah, I got that.



> Did you change the Windows settings so it is using HDMI for audio?


Didn't think about it, but I will now in the future. 



> I'm sort of two minds myself. If I keep or reset them so they are movies and set the programId to the correct value, I get full information on the TiVo, including a graphic. OTOH, it's sorta neat having movies in the same series in their own group. OTGH, I rarely transfer more than one movie at a time and delete it as soon as finish watching.


Since I've run into troubles trying to redo things to make sure stuff works that way it has been, I might just end up loading them one at a time or just a few not in a group.



> Do this - After making sure that you are running up to date versions of both pyTivo and ffmpeg, add
> 
> ts=on
> 
> to the Global Server section of pytivo.conf. Then restart pyTivo and download one of your movies. Hopefully, you will see a dramatic speedup.


ts=on is already there, but I probably do need to update the files. I'm not saying it's slow, I guess it depends on your definition of "lightning". Most movie are around 1Gb, but one is almost 5Gb.



> Never actually used the .meta folder myself. I prefer keeping the video and the metadata file together.


I doubt I will either because that makes it more difficult to know if I've got all the txt file. It was just a test to see if it worked.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> ts=on is already there, but I probably do need to update the files. I'm not saying it's slow, I guess it depends on your definition of "lightning". Most movie are around 1Gb, but one is almost 5Gb.


I guess it's a relative thing. Compared to how long transfers of MP4 and MKV used to take when they had to be transcoded, it is lightning fast. I am always astounded when I can actually see the progress bar moving. I just ran a test and it took <3.5 minutes to transfer a 2h4m, 1080P movie from my computer to my Roamio Basic. So @ 35X real time.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> I guess it's a relative thing. Compared to how long transfers of MP4 and MKV used to take when they had to be transcoded, it is lightning fast. I am always astounded when I can actually see the progress bar moving. I just ran a test and it took <3.5 minutes to transfer a 2h4m, 1080P movie from my computer to my Roamio Basic. So @ 35X real time.


Well then, I guess it is "lightning" fast, that's about how long mine take too.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

lpwcomp said:


> Having them available for streaming makes sense and is another reason to pull them rather than push as you cannot OOH stream copy protected recordings.


What is "OOH"?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lrhorer said:


> What is "OOH"?


I believe he means Out of Home network.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I believe he means Out of Home network.


Correct.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Most movie are around 1Gb, but one is almost 5Gb.


That's small. Of the more than 1500 movies on my server, only a literal handful are less than 2G. I have a few hundred TV series episodes, and they mostly run around 2.5G, except for the 30 mnute shows, that run around 1.7G - 2G. Most of the movies are between 8G and 25G, and that only because I have converted them from MPEG II to h.264. Prior to that, they almost all were over 10G and some were over 35G.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lrhorer said:


> That's small. Of the more than 1500 movies on my server, only a literal handful are less than 2G. I have a few hundred TV series episodes, and they mostly run around 2.5G, except for the 30 mnute shows, that run around 1.7G - 2G. Most of the movies are between 8G and 25G, and that only because I have converted them from MPEG II to h.264. Prior to that, they almost all were over 10G and some were over 35G.


Mine are ripped from DVDs and converted to run on my old Toshiba tablet. I suppose it depends on the program used. None are Blue-Ray versions.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

I didn't get to do more testing today, but it's on the To Do list. Does the Tivo "remember" title/seriesId or check the Recently Deleted list?


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Mine are ripped from DVDs and converted to run on my old Toshiba tablet. I suppose it depends on the program used. None are Blue-Ray versions.


Oh. Yeah, I have a few DVD rips - 197 to be exact, but they are all ripped to native DVD format, not recoded. Since the native format cannot be retained when recoding, I leave them. The vast majority of videos on the server were recorded from the CATV system. I have 132 BluRay rips, and about a dozen videos I have authored myself, but the rest were all broadcast.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I didn't get to do more testing today, but it's on the To Do list. Does the Tivo "remember" title/seriesId or check the Recently Deleted list?


Seems to remember and even permanently deleting things doesn't change that. No idea how long it takes for things to "go away".


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## springnet (Jan 4, 2003)

I have a TiVo HD XL and am using kmttg and I can get my "now playing lists" for all 5 of my tivos with no sweat. But I haven't been able to get my todo lists no matter what I try. Can someone give me some clues as to how to get the to do lists. Is my tivo version supported for this function?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Went through the "Recently Deleted" group and deleted the movies I've been testing with. After doing so, I was once again able to force the group name I wanted and upload my movies to it. That makes me believe the Tivo "remembers", though it's only a problem for what I'm try to do. Now I'm going to assign my alpha codes and since I don't have a lot of movies to upload, I'll probably stick with using the minutes/seconds fields for my scheme. Hopefully I won't run into anymore problems.

FWIW, I use MetaGenerator to grab the initial metadata file from TheMovieDB and then edit it to add 2 entries/delete 1. The example below has the description edited and "v" entries omitted for brevity. I could probably delete the "v" entries altogether, but I'll keep them for reference and it'll save some editing time.

Downloaded metadata:
title : American Sniper
movieYear : 2014
description : --------------------
isEpisode : false

Edited metadata:
title : American Sniper
movieYear : 2014
episodeTitle : American Sniper
originalAirDate : 2015-01-01T12:00:00Z
description : --------------------

Thanks again for the help, information and suggestions.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

One clarification: Metagenerator doesn't "grab the initial metadata file from TheMovieDB". It *creates* a metadata file using information acquired from the source you selected, in your case TheMovieDB.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Good point, James. Just used the wrong term.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Well, things didn't go well today and I've been too distracted to troubleshoot. Right now I'm just loading up a few movies individually and I'll see how that goes during our trip next month before I go any further.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

My understanding is that your goal here is to be able to push movies into a group of your own naming on your tivo. Then to be able to add movies to that group going forward with consistent behavior.

I am going to lay out a step by step process that WORKS. I use it everyday. I tried above to give some basic info but obviously it was insufficient to allow you to duplicate and you went in yet another direction that did not work.

Again, this works. Its a known workflow.

First you need to create a new folder (group) on your tivo.

Select a small video and rename it with the name you want your folder to have. In my case the movies folder is called Movies at Thornolis, the video file is named Movies at Thornolis.mp4

Create a metadata file with the same name as above. For this example the file is called Movies at Thornolis.mp4.txt

It contains only a few lines, (Note that the title must be the same as the video file name for this to work, the seriesId does not matter but needs to be new and unknown to the tivo):

title : Movies at Thornolis
movieYear : 2012
description : This Description does not matter but it needs to be here
isEpisode : false
seriesId : Movies
starRating : x6
mpaaRating : P2


Push that small folder naming video to the tivo.

Configure Metagenerator to create txt files for your movies with the data to group them on your tivo. In Metagenerator, open the movie search tab and click Edit Custom Tags. A box will open. In that box, add two lines (seriesId MUST match what you used above for the group creation video, callsign can be anything you want but needs to be there for consistent results. It does appear on the tivo info screens for the vids):

seriesId : Movies
callsign : Thornoli's


Now, prepare a movie file to push. Each movie needs to have a moviename.mp4.txt type metadata text file. Let metagenerator create it. Remove any default.txt files.

The metagenerator created txt file will have the data for your movie along with the two lines above. It will also correctly set isEpisode : False.

Push this movie file. It will group with the first small video you sent using a folder name you gave. 

All future movies you push using the metagenerator generated txt files will also group with the first two. Do not delete the folder creation video from the tivo.

Also note that if you pull a movie, it will not group with the pushed ones. All of this only works with pytivo. Tivo Desktop does not use the metadata.txt files.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

James,

I can feel your frustration and I'm frustrated as well. However, I am not being stubborn. The ONLY reason I have gone "in yet another direction" is because I cannot "PUSH" files from my laptop to the Tivo; not with pyTivo, not with kmttg, not with Tivo Desktop Plus. Desktop auto-transfer mode did work once, but I cannot get it to work again. I have tried everything I could find and posted my problems here last year. I tried everything that was suggested and nothing worked. I still get the following error when I open my browser and enter "http://localhost:9032/".



> The remote device or resource won't accept the connection. The device or resource (localhost) is not set up to accept connections on port "9032".
> 
> Contact your network administrator. The computer or device you are trying to reach is available, but it doesn't support what you're trying to do. This might be a configuration issue or a limitation of the device.


I finally gave up and followed some instructions I was given by a friend to get the movies uploaded to a group last year. When I got the 2 new movies, I found the process wouldn't add them to the same group and that started this conversation.

I don't know if there is something I didn't set properly on the Tivo or if there is something not set properly on my laptop/network. I am more than willing to do it your way, but thought I mentioned earlier that I couldn't push, perhaps I didn't. At any rate, unless there is an easy fix for my "push" problem, I'll try to get push working again in March after I upgrade my modem/router. I'm currently using an older DOCSIS 2.0 modem and Linksys WRT-110 router. Now that Cox here has upgraded, I'll be upgrading to a DOCSIS 3.0 modem and dual-band gigabit router.

Admittedly, I thought the example you posted earlier was for uploading individual movies, not grouping them, and I may not have looked hard enough because you mentioned "push". So, if your example doesn't work with the Tivo "pulling" from the laptop, then I'll simply have to wait, though I've got nothing to lose by trying and that's what Ill do today.

One thing in your post that caught my attention was the note not to delete the video file used to create the group. I've been deleting that file and maybe that has contributed to my current problems.

Again, thanks for hanging in there and continuing to help. I've never had this much trouble with anything computer-related. I've been dealing with computers since 1982, operating/programming on mainframes, etc., but this has been a real challenge and it's probably something simple I'm just not seeing.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> James,
> 
> I can feel your frustration and I'm frustrated as well. However, I am not being stubborn. The ONLY reason I have gone "in yet another direction" is because I cannot "PUSH" files from my laptop to the Tivo; not with pyTivo, not with kmttg, not with Tivo Desktop Plus. Desktop auto-transfer mode did work once, but I cannot get it to work again. I have tried everything I could find and posted my problems here last year. I tried everything that was suggested and nothing worked. I still get the following error when I open my browser and enter "http://localhost:9032/".
> 
> ...


Frustrated with my inability or lack of time to communicate, not with you.

If you are pulling from your laptop via pytivo, then everything I posted above will work, as long as everything is done using pull instead of push. Just don't mix them.

Again, none of this works with Tivo Desktop as it does not use metadata files.

All that said, you have network/windows problems if you cannot access pytivo on your own local machine. IE see it from a browser on the same machine its running on. Both pytivo and the browser need to be running with admin privileges and there should be no firewall on the local machine.

The router/modem has nothing to do with local access on the machine. If you wish to pursue proper setup of pytivo, I suggest posting in the pytivo thread with some specifics on your setup.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Sorry, James, but nothing works and I even downloaded the latest versions of pyTivo/ffmpeg and I'm using Python 2.7.6. As you can see, I only made minor changes to your examples, but no matter what I change the title and seriesId to, both upload as individual files not in the "Movies at Daves" group. I just don't know what else to try or what else to check. I uploaded the 2 new movies yesterday and we watched one last night, the other today, so at least waiting to watch them is out of the way.

Movie file named "Movies at Daves.mp4"
Image file named "Movies at Daves.mp4.jpg"
Metadata file named "Movies at Daves.mp4.txt"
Metadata txt file contains:

title : Movies at Daves
movieYear : 2012
description : This Description does not matter but it needs to be here
isEpisode : false
seriesId : Test1
starRating : x6
mpaaRating : P2

Movie file named "Glenn Miller Story.mp4"
Image file named "Glenn Miller Story.mp4.jpg"
Metadata file named "Glenn Miller Story.txt"
Metadata txt file contains:

title : Glenn Miller Story
movieYear : 1954
description : The great Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson star in this vibrant tribute to one of America's legendary bandleaders, charting Miller's rise from obscurity and poverty to fame and wealth in the early 1940's.
isEpisode : false
seriesId : Test1
starRating : x6
mpaaRating : P2
vProgramGenre : Drama
vProgramGenre : Music
vDirector : Mann|Anthony
vActor : Stewart|James (Note: Other actors omitted)
callsign : Dave
image : Glenn Miller Story.mp4.jpg


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

You might want to try using a seriesId of the form "SH9nnnnnnn".


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> You might want to try using a seriesId of the form "SH9nnnnnnn".


I did that before I posted and still had no luck. Unless something comes to mind, I'm going to take a break until we get back from Florida in March. I can't imagine why it works for you and doesn't work for me, but thanks for the help, I've still learned a lot.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

Two things come to mind.

First is Glenn Miller Story.txt needs to be Glenn Miller Story.mp4.txt

Next is lwcomp is right, for pulls, seriesId needs to be valid so they fit in the tivo's database. Pushes create their own seriesId by the mind server during transfer but using a consistent one works to group.

For Pulls the seriesId must be a valid one, or at least one that is not currently in the tivo master database. I used this one in the past before pushes worked for mp4 files:

seriesId : SH01081219
title : At the Movies

So the suggestion is to again pull the small video with that name and metadata, then use this as metadata for your next couple movies and hopefully they will group.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> Two things come to mind.
> 
> First is Glenn Miller Story.txt needs to be Glenn Miller Story.mp4.txt


Sorry, it is, just a typo on my part.



> Next is lwcomp is right, for pulls, seriesId needs to be valid so they fit in the tivo's database. Pushes create their own seriesId by the mind server during transfer but using a consistent one works to group.


Since it works for you and not for me, I had a feeling there might be something different about "pull" vs "push" and hopefully this is it.



> For Pulls the seriesId must be a valid one, or at least one that is not currently in the tivo master database. I used this one in the past before pushes worked for mp4 files:
> 
> seriesId : SH01081219
> title : At the Movies
> ...


I'll try that seriesId. The one I tried was something like SH90009999.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I still get the following error when I open my browser and enter "http://localhost:9032/".


There are only a few possibilities I can think of:

1. pyTivo isn't actually running. This should be easy to check.

2. pyTivo is running, but it's attached to a different port. This would only happen if you explicitly told it to use that other port, so you'd probably know if this was the case. But, check your pyTivo.conf file.

3. Your PC's firewall is blocking the connection.

4. Your PC isn't correctly resolving "localhost". Try http://127.0.0.1:9032/ instead.

OR

5. pyTivo is bound to a specific network interface, and not its default of all interfaces. In this case, you should still be able to connect to it at http://your_ip_here:9032/ , where your_ip_here is the relevant interface. But again, this is something that would have to be specified in pyTivo.conf.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

One other thing I noticed is that you don't have a "seriesTitle" and you have two different "titles" for the same seriesId. What you did before that worked was when you did have a common "seriesTitle".


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

I'm happy to report that it seems to be working with a valid seriesId. I was able to put 2 movies plus the initial video in the group called "DavesMovies", and I'm uploading a 3rd now. I had previously changed the group title, so all I had to do now was change the seriesId to the "SH01081219".

However, I couldn't leave well enough alone. I didn't like the group title I was using, so I deleted the group and started over. The first attempt (where I forgot to change the seriesId) confirmed  that once the seriesId is tied to a title, the title can't be changed, the group still gets assigned the original name. So, I changed the seriesId to "SH01081220" and the title to "Our Movies". I'm happy to report that I'm uploading the movies (in reverse order so they will at least begin in Name sequence ).

Using a "valid" seriesId for "pulls" seems to be the key, though I'm still a bit uncertain as to just what "valid" means. I'll find out a bit more when I add 2 new groups; one for our "Home Movies" and the other for my "Railroad Movies". I'm going to try a test group name first just to make sure the invalid(?) seriesId "SH9nnnnnnn" doesn't work. I know it didn't work in my previous tests, but I'd kind of like to make sure that wasn't because something else was wrong at the time.

And, no, I'm not going to pursue my sequencing scheme, though I am curious. For now, I'll just have to be content with having the movies uploaded to a group and using the sort option to put them in Name sequence with groups Off when I need to.

For those interested, here are my metadata details:



Spoiler



Movie file named "Our Movies.mp4"
Image file named "Our Movies.mp4.jpg"
Metadata file named "Our Movies.mp4.txt"
Metadata txt file contains:

title : Our Movies
movieYear : 2015
description : This Description does not matter but it needs to be here
isEpisode : false
seriesId : SH01081220

Movie file named "Glenn Miller Story.mp4"
Image file named "Glenn Miller Story.mp4.jpg"
Metadata file named "Glenn Miller Story.mp4.txt"
Metadata txt file contains:

title : The Glenn Miller Story
movieYear : 1954
description : The great Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson star in this vibrant tribute to one of America's legendary bandleaders, charting Miller's rise from obscurity and poverty to fame and wealth in the early 1940's.
isEpisode : false
seriesId : SH01081220
vProgramGenre : Drama
vProgramGenre : Music
vDirector : Mann|Anthony
vActor : Stewart|James (Note: Other actors omitted)
callsign : Dave's
image : Glenn Miller Story.mp4.jpg

A couple of notes:
- When I started MetaGenerator and set it to search for Movies, I had to select "TheMovieDB" because it defaults to "Netflix" and I didn't have any luck searching Netflix. I forgot once and ended up with no metadata txt files.
-I didn't add any starRating or mpaaRating entries because they weren't added automatically by MetaGenerator and I really don't care about them. 
- I change file names to remove the leading "The", so "Auto-process Folders" didn't work for those and I had to manually search/save metadata for those.
- There were others too where the wrong metadata file was saved. I didn't find those until I opened the Share folder on the Tivo and noticed some titles just didn't seem right. I had to delete the txt file and then manually search for the right title.
- I have some subfolders that contain home videos and other non-movie videos. I plan to upload those to separate groups, so I'll have to manually create the appropriate metadata txt files.
- When I open the Share folder on the Tivo, I find the files in the subfolders are place in sequence based on the subfolder name, not the filename. For example, the Home Movie files (Home Movies 01, etc.) in the "Family Movies" subfolder are not listed with the "H"s, they are listed with the "F"s. Therefore, I find it easier to set separate Shares for the subfolders in the pyTivo.conf file.





lpwcomp said:


> One other thing I noticed is that you don't have a "seriesTitle" and you have two different "titles" for the same seriesId. What you did before that worked was when you did have a common "seriesTitle".


I started over with the examples posted in post #74 and they didn't have a seriesTitle, so I don't either and it's working just fine. Some may disagree, but this is what I've observed when it comes to the title, seriesTitle and seriesId entries:

- The group name seems to come from the title of the FIRST file uploaded for a given seriesId.
- Once a seriesId is tied to a given group name, all subsequent files uploaded with that seriesId go into the same group regardless of what's in the title entry.
- The title entry determines what gets displayed in the Tivo Share folder.
- The title entry also determines what title gets assigned to the uploaded file.
- The starRating and mpaaRating entries are not needed.
-- I could find no place where the starRating gets displayed.
-- The mpaaRating gets displayed just below the description. If you add an mpaaRating and then subsequently delete the file, delete the file from the Recently Deleted folder, delete the mpaaRating entry and then upload the file again, the mpaaRating will still get displayed. Apparently the Tivo has a memory like an elephant. 
- The first line of actor, writer and director entries are displayed below the description and the rest is displayed when INFO is pressed.
- "Separator" is still being displayed below the description either by itself or next to the mpaaRating and the Category entry with INFO contains the word "Separator".
- The files are no longer copy-protected.

Thanks again for the help I've gotten in this thread.


----------



## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

If your metagenerator has a selection for netflix for movie data, its an outdated version. Netflix closed access to the API that allowed access to the metadata. There have been other updates to metagenerator as well. I am currently using 3.55T2 but I don't think that is quite the latest.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

wmcbrine said:


> There are only a few possibilities I can think of:
> 
> 1. pyTivo isn't actually running. This should be easy to check.
> 
> ...


1. I watch pyTivo display info in the command window when I scroll through the Share folder in the Tivo and while the files are being uploaded. I assume this means pyTivo is running.

2. There is nothing in the conf file:


Spoiler



[Server]
togo_path = C:\Users\David\Downloads
tivodecode = C:\pyTivo\bin\tivodecode.exe
tivo_password = *********
tivo_mak = **********
tivo_username = *******@cox.net
ffmpeg = C:\pyTivo\bin\ffmpeg.exe
ts = on

[Movies]
path = C:\Users\David\Videos
type = video

[Music]
type = music
path = C:\Users\David\Music

[Photos]
type = photo
path = C:\Users\David\Pictures


3. I have tired everything I know to see if there is a firewall blocking things. I've turned Windows 8 Firewall off and port 9032 is set to allow for both TCP and UDP communication, though I don't know if I needed to do that. I even set a rule for pyTivo.py to allow communications. When I turn off the firewall, it tells me that both Windows and Avast firewalls are turned off. Maybe I need to reboot both the laptop and router? I'm sure I rebooted the laptop last year when I tried to get it working.

4. Tried that with no luck.

5. Nothing specified in the conf file. I've tried every IP I can think of (router, Tivo, laptop) and all I get is "This page can't be displayed" notices.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> If your metagenerator has a selection for netflix for movie data, its an outdated version. Netflix closed access to the API that allowed access to the metadata. There have been other updates to metagenerator as well. I am currently using 3.55T2 but I don't think that is quite the latest.


Thanks, I didn't know there was a newer one than 3.49, but I have it now.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I started over with the examples you posted in post #74 and you didn't have a seriesTitle, so I don't either and it's working just fine. You may disagree, but this is what I've observed when it comes to the title, seriesTitle and seriesId entries:


Post #74 wasn't me.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Post #74 wasn't me.


Oops, sorry James, you're right, but right now that's the stuff that's working for me.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Good morning,

I'm happy to further report that simply adding a "time : 2015-01-01T12-00-nn" entry and varying the seconds field does indeed let me "force" a sort sequence. I have 13 home movies (Home Movie nn) to add to an "Our Home Movies" group. I added the requisite video titled "Our Home Movies" with a new seriesId of "SH01081221" to create the group. I then manually created 13 metadata txt files with that seriesId. I added the time entry and varied the seconds field in each to correspond to the movie number in reverse order. For example, Movie 01 = 59, Movie 02 = 58, and so one. This puts Movie 01 first in the list and lets me add a total of 60 movies.

I also have 11 model railroading videos that I like to keep separate. These have various titles, so I used the minutes field to correspond to the first letter in title, again in reverse order, A = 26, B = 25, and so on. If there was only 1 movie for a letter, I entered "30" in the seconds field. If there was more than 1, I varied the seconds field on either side of the 30. This gives me some flexibility to add more videos and keep them in sequence for easier access without having to turn groups Off and change the sort sequence.

One thing I forgot to do was vary the date for each group, so they won't end up in name sequence unless I sort My Shows in name sequence. Right now the groups are scattered in with other recordings when sorted by date, but as soon as we watch/delete some older recordings, the groups will all end up at the bottom of the list out of the way.

Since I've already uploaded several movies to the "Our Movies" group, I'm not going to redo those just yet. Most of them are movies we haven't watched and will be deleted once we do watch them. I will add/edit the time entries for our favorites that I'll want to keep on the Tivo for watching again from time to time, like "It's A Wonderful Life", "Roy Orbison's Black & White Night", etc.

While this has been a frustrating experience at times, it's been worth it for me in the end. I know far more than I did about metadata files and pyTivo. I owe a debt of gratitude to James and JC for sticking with me and helping me reach my goal.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

If you are still reading this thread, I received the latest Tivo update (One Pass) last night and it "broke" my date/time sorting scheme. It adds two new group options (sort and view) and it looks like they now key on the actual date/time of the upload and not the date/time in the metadata time entry. Fortunately, I didn't upload everything since I knew the update was coming, but it's still a bummer of sorts (pardon the pun). 

Anyway, Groups now have "sort" and "view" options in various combinations:
- view/recordings has date, newest and season sort options.
- view/my episodes also has date, newest and season sort options.
- view/all episodes has just newest and season sort options.

I'm still trying to figure things out. I have 13 home movies that I did manage to upload to one group. For display purposes, Tivo appears to use the current date (MM/DD) unless there is a time entry in the metadata txt file. If there is, it appears to use the date from it. When it comes to sorting though, I'm not quite sure exactly what is happening, so I'm going to create a group of 5 test files and play with the new options. It might be as simple as omitting the time entry, but I need to see what happens when files are uploaded over multiple days.

So, stay tuned!


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

Let us know what you figure out. With the new display options we are in uncharted territory. One plus with the new update is that pushes are working again but do not group with other files, only other pushes of the same series. No option to sort by name unfortunately.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> Let us know what you figure out. With the new display options we are in uncharted territory. One plus with the new update is that pushes are working again but do not group with other files, only other pushes of the same series. No option to sort by name unfortunately.


I will, just not sure how much more time I want to devote to this unless I find something fairly quick. My plan is to duplicate a small file 5 times and just rename the movie and metadata files/entries. Of the 13 home movies I did upload, they were loaded in different sequences and they come out in Name sequence with one set of options (I think it was season/all episodes). But, they were all uploaded on the same day too, so I need to explore that more. They also had my scheme in the minutes/seconds fields, but they all began with "H", so it was just the seconds that were different.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Some observations:
- Groups On/Off option is gone, so items within a group cannot be displayed/sorted on top level menu. This leads me to believe I'm not going to be able to force a sequence other than uploading them in the desired sequence and dealing with new uploads being out of sequence.
- Tivo takes awhile to populate the group after files are uploaded, though the correct # of files in the group is updated as soon as uploading starts. I uploaded 5 movies and only 1 initially showed in the list. I kept switching view/sort options, exiting the menu, etc., and eventually all 5 moves showed up for all options. It's weird seeing 2 movies listed in one view and 5 in another, but eventually they are all the same
- Deleted files also take awhile to be removed from the list. The green ball in front of the movie title disappears as does the "delete" option, but the movie stays in the list for an undetermined length of time. Sometimes switching views gets rid of it, other times exiting the menu, gets rid of it, sometimes opening another group and then reopening the original gets rid of it. There doesn't seem to be any one thing that does it consistently.
- With or without a time entry in the metadata txt file, Tivo displays the current MM/DD.
- Same with an originalAirDate entry.

So, it appears that there is no way to affect the displayed sequence with time or originalAirDate entries in the metadata txt file. I will retain my test files until the final release of the update next month. Since I'm going on vacation on Feb 16, I may not get to test again until mid-March.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

I suspect OAD has been added to the fields that get sourced from the net based on the programId.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

So far I've found that they only sort based on date/time uploaded, either ascending or descending, that's all I've seen. I can now upload them 1-5 vs 5-1 and still get them to sort 1-5. However, new ones go to the bottom or top.

I should also mention that I love the new One Pass options; "recordings", "streaming" or "recordings & streaming".


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> So far I've found that they only sort based on date/time uploaded, either ascending or descending, that's all I've seen. I can now upload them 1-5 vs 5-1 and still get them to sort 1-5. However, new ones go to the bottom or top.
> 
> I should also mention that I love the new One Pass options; "recordings", "streaming" or "recordings & streaming".


Except 'recordings' only includes those that the tivo recorded or were pulled. Those pushed will not be listed. They are in a separate group. So the new MyShows functionality is broken for me, I have to revert to the old method of only seeing recordings I pushed and removing all others if I do not want multiple folders of the same name with episodes in each.

Pity that Tivo can figure out how to group recordings that reside on Netflix and Amazon's servers but cannot figure out how to include the recordings that reside on the local drive. Its a half baked effort.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> Except 'recordings' only includes those that the tivo recorded or were pulled. Those pushed will not be listed. They are in a separate group. So the new MyShows functionality is broken for me, I have to revert to the old method of only seeing recordings I pushed and removing all others if I do not want multiple folders of the same name with episodes in each.


I can't push, so I have no way of seeing what you are saying. I get that pulls and pushes go into separate groups (they did before the upgrade too, didn't they?), but if you push an episode into a group, are you saying it doesn't show up if you view "recordings"? Do both pulls and pushes show up along with the streaming episodes if you view "my episodes" or "all episodes"? I can see where that would be a hassle. I think you (or someone) told me earlier that I couldn't pull some movies and push others because they'd go into separate groups. Being able to turn Groups off at least allowed us to view/sort them all together. Since they broke my scheme using metadata, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my movies.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> Except 'recordings' only includes those that the tivo recorded or were pulled. Those pushed will not be listed. They are in a separate group. So the new MyShows functionality is broken for me, I have to revert to the old method of only seeing recordings I pushed and removing all others if I do not want multiple folders of the same name with episodes in each.
> 
> Pity that Tivo can figure out how to group recordings that reside on Netflix and Amazon's servers but cannot figure out how to include the recordings that reside on the local drive. Its a half baked effort.


I just pushed an episode of "Murdoch Mysteries" and it went to the same group as the one I pulled last night.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> I just pushed an episode of "Murdoch Mysteries" and it went to the same group as the one I pulled last night.


Does that mean it shows up in the list when you view "recordings"? Maybe they actually "fixed" it but only for "new" pulls/pushes.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

I found that if I can get my movies into non-series group, I can sort them in Name sequence.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

lpwcomp said:


> I just pushed an episode of "Murdoch Mysteries" and it went to the same group as the one I pulled last night.


Well that's interesting. We need to find out what is allowing this and figure out how to use it.

I have pushed episodes of several shows with metadata to the tivo and none of them grouped with pulled or recorded episodes. Perhaps there is some magic afoot with proper naming, seriesId or the way pytivo can send the metadata to match things up. Not real sure where to start as I am not even sure what translations pytivo is using with the metadata when pushing. IE which metadata field is sent for what.

In your example, what metadata was provided for push and pull, or what was missing? Did the file have embedded metadata?


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I found that if I can get my movies into non-series group, I can sort them in Name sequence.


If only we knew of a way to accomplish that. Are those non series groups wishlists? or something else?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

jcthorne said:


> If only we knew of a way to accomplish that. Are those non series groups wishlists? or something else?


Yes, they are Wish Lists. I did not know they grouped together, so I set one up for movies with a certain actor and they're all together and the sort options are Name and Date, just what I'm after. The movies were copy-protected from TCM though, so I found another on PBS that hopefully isn't, so I should be able to get the metadata with kmttg and have a peek to see if I can replicate enough metadata to get my movies into a non-series group too. I'll post the metadata file as soon as the recording finishes.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

Here's the metadata file for the movie Annie Hall (other "v" series entries deleted for brevity. Maybe someone can use this to figure out how to fool Tivo and group other movies together.

title : Annie Hall
seriesTitle : Annie Hall
description : A New York comedian recalls his lost love, a kooky singer with a style all her own. 
time : 2015-01-30T23:00:00Z
mpaaRating : P2
movieYear : 1977
isEpisode : false
iso_duration : PT1H59M58S
isEpisodic : false
showingBits : 1
starRating : x7
tvRating : x4
displayMajorNumber : 86
callsign : KTVKDT2
seriesId : MV014781
programId : MV000147810000
vActor : Allen|Woody


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> Does that mean it shows up in the list when you view "recordings"? Maybe they actually "fixed" it but only for "new" pulls/pushes.


Yes, but remember this is an actual series with a real, TMS assigned seriesId. Plus I had full metadata for both episodes.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> Well that's interesting. We need to find out what is allowing this and figure out how to use it.
> 
> I have pushed episodes of several shows with metadata to the tivo and none of them grouped with pulled or recorded episodes. Perhaps there is some magic afoot with proper naming, seriesId or the way pytivo can send the metadata to match things up. Not real sure where to start as I am not even sure what translations pytivo is using with the metadata when pushing. IE which metadata field is sent for what.
> 
> In your example, what metadata was provided for push and pull, or what was missing? Did the file have embedded metadata?


Pulled episode metadata:


Spoiler



seriesTitle : Murdoch Mysteries
title : Murdoch Mysteries
episodeTitle : The Devil Wears Whalebone
originalAirDate : 2015-01-26T23:00:00Z
time : 2015-01-26T23:00:00Z
description : Murdoch discovers that fashion is murder when a model is killed during a protest at a designer corset show.
isEpisode : true
seriesId : SH01014682
programId : EP010146820113
episodeNumber : 812
vProgramGenre : Crime
vProgramGenre : Drama
vProgramGenre : Suspense
vSeriesGenre : Crime
vSeriesGenre : Drama
vSeriesGenre : Suspense
vActor : Yannick Bisson|
vActor : Helene Joy|
vActor : Thomas Craig|
vActor : Jonny Harris|
vActor : Georgina Reilly|


Pushed episode metadata


Spoiler



seriesTitle : Murdoch Mysteries
title : Murdoch Mysteries
episodeTitle : The Devil Wears Whalebone
originalAirDate : 2015-01-26T23:00:00Z
time : 2015-01-26T23:00:00Z
description : Murdoch discovers that fashion is murder when a model is killed during a protest at a designer corset show.
isEpisode : true
seriesId : SH01014682
programId : EP010146820113
episodeNumber : 812
vProgramGenre : Crime
vProgramGenre : Drama
vProgramGenre : Suspense
vSeriesGenre : Crime
vSeriesGenre : Drama
vSeriesGenre : Suspense
vActor : Yannick Bisson|
vActor : Helene Joy|
vActor : Thomas Craig|
vActor : Jonny Harris|
vActor : Georgina Reilly|


Both episodes had full and correct HDUI data including season and episode.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

lpwcomp said:


> Pulled episode metadata:
> 
> 
> Spoiler
> ...


I've tried with 3 different series this morning and cannot get push to group with anything else. There must be some field that is getting sent with push and allowing your vid to match up and work, but I have been unable to find it.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Yes, but remember this is an actual series with a real, TMS assigned seriesId. Plus I had full metadata for both episodes.


Yes, I get that.


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## n2lovell (May 18, 2014)

See these two posts:
1)http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10339535#post10339535

Although in the event of a match it is actually overriding a fair amount of metadata.
Specifically: the description, the title, the categories (they actually aren't ever retrieved from the request), and the original airdate.

Note: the only way to get the season/episode sorting is if the content manages a match.

2) http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10365434#post10365434


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> I've tried with 3 different series this morning and cannot get push to group with anything else. There must be some field that is getting sent with push and allowing your vid to match up and work, but I have been unable to find it.


Can you post the metadata files?


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

n2lovell said:


> See these two posts:
> 1)http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10339535#post10339535
> 
> Although in the event of a match it is actually overriding a fair amount of metadata.
> ...


With this in mind, I was able to push a couple of files and get them to group by manually editing the series title and episode title to match EXACTLY, right down to the case and punctuation. Trouble is, this does not match with the data at theTVDB or itunes which are the available sources for the metadata. In my examples I had the information on the tivo for a recorded episode that I could copy from. Most of the time that is not possible.

Suppose this whole grouping for pushes will have to wait any serious effort until tivo accepts the programId with the push metadata.

Truly appreciate the information you have given us and look forward to the next update to make OnePass actually work for me.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

jcthorne said:


> With this in mind, I was able to push a couple of files and get them to group by manually editing the series title and episode title to match EXACTLY, right down to the case and punctuation. Trouble is, this does not match with the data at theTVDB or itunes which are the available sources for the metadata. In my examples I had the information on the tivo for a recorded episode that I could copy from. Most of the time that is not possible.
> 
> Suppose this whole grouping for pushes will have to wait any serious effort until tivo accepts the programId with the push metadata.
> 
> Truly appreciate the information you have given us and look forward to the next update to make OnePass actually work for me.


If theTVDB has bad data, fix it.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Using the following, I still get grouping of pulls on my Roamio running 20.4.6

default.txt



Spoiler



title : Harry Potter Movies
seriesTitle : Harry Potter Movies
isEpisode : true 
seriesId : SH90001118 
time : OAD
starRating : x6
tvRating : TV-NR


metadata for first movie:



Spoiler





```
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 
originalAirDate : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
time : 2001-11-16T12:00:00Z
description : Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. IMDB: 7.2/10
vDirector : Chris Columbus|
vWriter : J.K. Rowling|
vWriter : Steve Kloves|
vActor : Richard Harris|
vActor : Maggie Smith|
vActor : Robbie Coltrane|
vActor : Saunders Triplets|
vActor : Daniel Radcliffe|
vActor : Fiona Shaw|
vActor : Harry Melling|
vActor : Richard Griffiths|
vActor : Derek Deadman|
vActor : Ian Hart|
vActor : Ben Borowiecki|
vActor : Warwick Davis|
vActor : Verne Troyer|
vActor : John Hurt|
vActor : Richard Bremmer|
vActor : Geraldine Somerville|
vActor : Harry Taylor|
vActor : Julie Walters|
vActor : Bonnie Wright|
vActor : Chris Rankin|
vActor : James Phelps|
vActor : Oliver Phelps|
vActor : Rupert Grint|
vActor : Jean Southern|
vActor : Emma Watson|
vActor : Matthew Lewis|
vActor : Tom Felton|
vActor : Jamie Waylett|
vActor : Josh Herdman|
vActor : Devon Murray|
vActor : Alfie Enoch|
vActor : Leslie Phillips|
vActor : Eleanor Columbus|
vActor : John Cleese|
vActor : Terence Bayler|
vActor : Simon Fisher-Becker|
vActor : Nina Young|
vActor : David Bradley|
vActor : Alan Rickman|
vActor : ZoÃ« Wanamaker|
vActor : Luke Youngblood|
vActor : Sean Biggerstaff|
vActor : Elizabeth Spriggs|
vActor : Danielle Tabor|
vActor : Leilah Sutherland|
vActor : Emily Dale|
vActor : David Holmes|
vActor : Will Theakston|
vActor : Scot Fearn|
vActor : Adrian Rawlins|
vActor : Ray Fearon|
vActor : David Brett|
vActor : Paul Marc Davis|
vActor : David William James Elliott|
vActor : Holly-Ann Filtness|
vActor : Derek Hough|
vActor : Julianne Hough|
vActor : Will Howes|
vActor : Kieri Kennedy|
vActor : Oliver Lavery-Farag|
vActor : Cath Peakin|
vActor : Amy Puglia|
vActor : Nicholas Read|
vActor : Richard Reid|
vActor : Bianca Sowerby|
vActor : Bernadette Jane Vanderkar|
```



metadata for second movie:



Spoiler





```
episodeTitle : Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
originalAirDate : 2002-11-15T12:00:00Z
description : Everyone's favorite novice wizard, Harry Potter, continues his high-flying adventures at Hogwarts in this sequel to the smash hit Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, based on the best-selling books by J.K. Rowling. This time around, Harry ignores warnings not to return to school -- that is, if he values his life -- to investigate with Ron and Hermione a mysterious series of attacks.
vDirector : Chris Columbus|
vWriter : J.K. Rowling|
vWriter : Steve Kloves|
vActor : Daniel Radcliffe|
vActor : Rupert Grint|
vActor : Emma Watson|
vActor : Martin Bayfield|
vActor : Heather Bleasdale|
vActor : Sean Biggerstaff|
vActor : David Bradley|
vActor : Kenneth Branagh|
vActor : Veronica Clifford|
vActor : John Cleese|
vActor : Robbie Coltrane|
vActor : Eleanor Columbus|
vActor : Christian Coulson|
vActor : Warwick Davis|
vActor : Emily Dale|
vActor : Rochelle Douglas|
vActor : Richard Griffiths|
vActor : Julie Walters|
vActor : Matthew Lewis|
vActor : Alan Rickman|
vActor : Richard Harris|
vActor : Tom Felton|
```


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Using the following, I still get grouping of pulls on my Roamio running 20.4.6


But what sequence are they in and what sorting options do you get? My guess is they are "series" and you don't get the option to sort by Name.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> But what sequence are they in and what sorting options do you get? My guess is they are "series" and you don't get the option to sort by Name.


When was there ever a "sort by Name" option within a group?


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> When was there ever a "sort by Name" option within a group?


I can't be sure about before because all I ever had were "series" recordings. However, non-series groups have (and maybe had) "name" and "date" sort options, they don't have the "newest" and "season" sort options. That's why I've been trying to find some non-copy-protected movies that I can use a Wish List to put them into a group and see what the metadata looks like. Unfortunately, Cox copy-protects almost every channel and those it doesn't don't seem to broadcast movies, sigh..... I guess I'll just upload my movies in order. At least the "date" option now sorts them in upload order and "newest" reverses that.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

DoubleDAZ said:


> I can't be sure about before because all I ever had were "series" recordings. However, non-series groups have (and maybe had) "name" and "date" sort options, they don't have the "newest" and "season" sort options. That's why I've been trying to find some non-copy-protected movies that I can use a Wish List to put them into a group and see what the metadata looks like. Unfortunately, Cox copy-protects almost every channel and those it doesn't don't seem to broadcast movies, sigh..... I guess I'll just upload my movies in order. At least the "date" option now sorts them in upload order and "newest" reverses that.


Wishlist groups are a different animal and there is no known way to create one via push or pull.

The main purpose of my post was to counter your claim that the latest release "broke" the ability to group recordings based on a fake seriesId.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

I did some testing and had some interesting results. I found a series that was currently showing an episode followed immediately by another episode. I created a Title keyword, record "Everything" ARWL. It recorded the rest of the first episode then started recording the second episode. I stopped the second recording. Looked in "My Shows" and there was only a wishlist group with 2 entries. I then explicitly started recording the second episode via the record button, let it go for a bit, stopped it and then started it again. Now I have two groups, one for the wishlist and one for the series. This is on one of my updated Roamios. If I get a chance, I will try it on my local Premiere, assuming I get the chance before it too is updated.

There is a really odd thing. The number next to the series group icon is (2), but when I actually go into the group, all 4 partial recordings are there.

It's possible that they have added something to the metadata that identifies it as having been recorded by a wishlist. If so, it will have to be found by an examination of the raw XML received from the TiVo. It won't be in the .txt file created by either pyTivo or kmttg.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> The main purpose of my post was to counter your claim that the latest release "broke" the ability to group recordings based on a fake seriesId.


Sorry, but that's not what I said. I said it broke my ability to upload them and have them group in sequence based on the time/OAD scheme I was testing. I had it working so they'd go into the group in a sequence based on the time entry where I'd vary the minutes and seconds fields to force a quasi-name sequence. I could then upload them and new movies in any sequence and have them go into the group in the sequence I wanted. It now simply sorts based on the "actual" date/time of upload regardless of what is entered in the time entry. I have no problem just uploading movies to a group using the metadata files I posted earlier.

The one change 1P did make was date now sorts oldest to newest, top to bottom. They added the "newest" option to reverse that and put the oldest at the bottom like it was before the update. So, if I upload them in name sequence, they will appear to be in name sequence when sorted by date (as long as I don't add a new upload). Before I had to upload them in reverse order to get them to appear to be in name sequence.

I only mentioned Wish Lists because that's the only group I had that wasn't a series group and someone mentioned that non-series groups have "name" and "date" sort options whereas series have "date", "newest" and "season" options. I figure the "SH" in the seriesId was how it determined "series", but changing that to "MV" like the pyTivo Wiki suggests doesn't make any difference. Someone else said just have the "year :" entry in the metadata tells Tivo it's a movie, but then they don't group. Other than Wish Lists, I don't know of any way for uploads to be grouped as anything other than "series".

Add to that is the fact that when you look at the files with KMTTG, the folders for series show up in the list of recordings, but not the folders for Wish Lists (unless I'm missing something). That makes me think Wish List groups aren't "real" groups in the same sense as series.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> I did some testing and had some interesting results. I found a series that was currently showing an episode followed immediately by another episode. I created a Title keyword, record "Everything" ARWL. It recorded the rest of the first episode then started recording the second episode. I stopped the second recording. Looked in "My Shows" and there was only a wishlist group with 2 entries. I then explicitly started recording the second episode via the record button, let it go for a bit, stopped it and then started it again. Now I have two groups, one for the wishlist and one for the series. This is on one of my updated Roamios. If I get a chance, I will try it on my local Premiere, assuming I get the chance before it too is updated.
> 
> There is a really odd thing. The number next to the series group icon is (2), but when I actually go into the group, all 4 partial recordings are there.
> 
> It's possible that they have added something to the metadata that identifies it as having been recorded by a wishlist. If so, it will have to be found by an examination of the raw XML received from the TiVo. It won't be in the .txt file created by either pyTivo or kmttg.


My Simpsons 1P (new and repeats) and WL (new only) created 2 separate groups. However, both groups have duplicate recordings in them that were not flagged as New in the guide. I haven't had time to really look at it yet.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Sorry I misinterpreted what you said. Comes from trying to do too many things at once. Based on a test I just ran, try this: Use originalAirDate instead of time, then sort the group by "Season". Unfortunately, this means that you'll have to vary the date rather than the time as OAD doesn't store the time, but you should be able to get what you want.

Since OAD doesn't have the same problem as time with dates prior to 01/01/1970, you have plenty of unique dates to choose from.


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## DoubleDAZ (May 7, 2014)

lpwcomp said:


> Sorry I misinterpreted what you said. Comes from trying to do too many things at once. Based on a test I just ran, try this: Use originalAirDate instead of time, then sort the group by "Season". Unfortunately, this means that you'll have to vary the date rather than the time as OAD doesn't store the time, but you should be able to get what you want.
> 
> Since OAD doesn't have the same problem as time with dates prior to 01/01/1970, you have plenty of unique dates to choose from.


Not to worry, I figured we just miscommunicated. And, no kidding, I'm going nuts trying to figure out what's all going on with OnePass. I got wrapped up in the single 1P vs multiple SPs.

As far as OAD, I was going to try that, but when I saw "time : OAD" being used in the default.txt file, I guess I didn't think there was a difference. Remember, this is all pretty new to me. 

I will play with the OAD and see what I can come up with. I may not get to it for a few days though because we're getting ready to leave on a trip soon and I've got quite a bit to do beforehand. Thanks for your comments.


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## worachj (Oct 14, 2006)

I&#8217;m doing a PyTiVo push of the same folder of videos to a Roamio and then to a Premiere. Everything works as expect on the push to the Roamio, a folder is created with each video uniquely and correctly named. But on the Premiere all videos get pushed with the same episodeTitle name of the very first pushed video.

Why do I get different results when pushing the exact same files to a Roamio and Premiere?

Each video has its own simple metadata file with unique episodeTitle names like the following:

episodeTitle : Movie 1 
isEpisode : false 
seriesTitle : Transfered Movies 
seriesId : SH00012345


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

worachj said:


> Im doing a PyTiVo push of the same folder of videos to a Roamio and then to a Premiere. Everything works as expect on the push to the Roamio, a folder is created with each video uniquely and correctly named. But on the Premiere all videos get pushed with the same episodeTitle name of the very first pushed video.
> 
> Why do I get different results when pushing the exact same files to a Roamio and Premiere?
> 
> ...


Have your Roamios been upgraded to the latest release?


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## worachj (Oct 14, 2006)

lpwcomp said:


> Have your Roamios been upgraded to the latest release?


Yes the Roamio has the new 20.4.6 update. I want the push to work the same way on the Premiere as the Roamio. Wouldn't think the update would have an effect on the metadata.

Why is the Premiere ignoring the episodeTitle and only using the episodeTitle of the first video pushed for the other videos?


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

worachj said:


> Yes the Roamio has the new 20.4.6 update. I want the push to work the same way on the Premiere as the Roamio. Wouldn't think the update would have an effect on the metadata.
> 
> Why is the Premiere ignoring the episodeTitle and only using the episodeTitle of the first video pushed for the other videos?


Because there is a known bug in 20.4.5c that your Premiere is running. When it updates, it will work as you intend.


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## worachj (Oct 14, 2006)

jcthorne said:


> Because there is a known bug in 20.4.5c that your Premiere is running. When it updates, it will work as you intend.


Thank you! I was trying everything to get it to work on the Premiere. Wished I started with the Roamio first, would have saved a lot of time.


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## worachj (Oct 14, 2006)

I wanted a way to use pyTiVo to push videos to a folder on my TiVo. Here's the one line command I used to generate the metadata files for each video (*.mp4) in a folder. The metadata.txt file will look something like this:

episodeTitle : Movie Name
title : Transferred Movies 
isEpisode : false 
seriesTitle : Transferred Movies 
seriesId : SH00012345

From Windows 'command prompt' window, navigate to your video folder and just paste the following one line command.

```
for %i in (*.mp4) do echo episodeTitle : %~ni > %i.txt & echo title : Transferred Movies >> %i.txt & echo isEpisode : false >> %i.txt & echo seriesTitle : Transferred Movies >> %i.txt & echo seriesId : SH00012345 >> %i.txt
```
*NOTE:* The above command was copied and modified from one of germitchell's that I found on the pyTivo Discussion Forum.


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## jcthorne (Jan 28, 2002)

You needed to ask the same question in two different threads?


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