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Media Organization Software
Lorek
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I have recently come into possession of my father's portable media hard drive. It's basically almost 2 TB full of movies/tv shows that he's loaded from his old DVDs and Blu-rays over the years. Unfortunately for me, it is a giant unorganized mess of different files, that I imagine only my dad can make sense of. I need the help of some software to sort this out for me.
I've done some google searching for media organization software, but most of it seems to just catalog everything in a set of scanned folders and give you an interface. I was hoping to just plug this media drive into my blu-ray player and use it through the blu-ray's media interface; so something like this doesn't really help me. What I'm trying to find is some software that will actually go out and run through the media drive and at the least move the files around into a folder structure that makes some kind of sense (like genre->actor or genre->year or something). Bonus points if it can also rename the files to some common tag structure. That way, I can just go through the folder structure in the blu-ray menu and find something to watch.
I'll also take suggestions on a better way to get access to this stuff; though I don't have much to work with. I do have an AppleTV and from what I can tell, I'd have to hook up the media drive and import everything into iTunes and then the AppleTV could grab it over AirPlay?? I'm not sure how well this will work since the PC and TV are on opposite floors of the house, the WiFi might be too spotty. Also, not sure if iTunes would be able to sort the movies for me either, and this would just give me the same problem but through the AppleTV interface instead of the blu-ray interface.
Edit: Oh, while obviously free software is better, I'm not adverse to coughing up a few dollars for a cheap program that would do the above as well.
I've done some google searching for media organization software, but most of it seems to just catalog everything in a set of scanned folders and give you an interface. I was hoping to just plug this media drive into my blu-ray player and use it through the blu-ray's media interface; so something like this doesn't really help me. What I'm trying to find is some software that will actually go out and run through the media drive and at the least move the files around into a folder structure that makes some kind of sense (like genre->actor or genre->year or something). Bonus points if it can also rename the files to some common tag structure. That way, I can just go through the folder structure in the blu-ray menu and find something to watch.
I'll also take suggestions on a better way to get access to this stuff; though I don't have much to work with. I do have an AppleTV and from what I can tell, I'd have to hook up the media drive and import everything into iTunes and then the AppleTV could grab it over AirPlay?? I'm not sure how well this will work since the PC and TV are on opposite floors of the house, the WiFi might be too spotty. Also, not sure if iTunes would be able to sort the movies for me either, and this would just give me the same problem but through the AppleTV interface instead of the blu-ray interface.
Edit: Oh, while obviously free software is better, I'm not adverse to coughing up a few dollars for a cheap program that would do the above as well.
Lorek on
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If the file names are bogus or altered from the actual titles you are pretty hosed though. You'll have to go through each file one by one and manually assign the right movie/tv show.
Media center master is just a metadata organization software so it is fairly straightforward and plain looking. It basically just creates a giant list of all of your media. Emby is more of a viewing platform that also does metadata fetching, so it has a lot of bells and whistles in terms of giving you a netflix or hulu like interface for you files.
Emby also has the ability to stream your files from your pc to other devices (provided you download emby server on your pc and emby clients on your other devices). Not sure if they have something available for apple tv, but they are developing a lot lately so it's possible. Plex and kodi are also options for streaming your shows from the pc to something else, although I don't know how much organizing they do.
All of those are free-ish. They will do most of what you want for free, but there are premium versions that cost some money that may have features that are useful.
You have a couple of options. The easiest may be to hook the drive up to your PC, drag the entire contents onto the iTunes window, let it import all of it (it will go into Home Videos), then retag things in iTunes. Stuff like titles, episode numbers, seasons etc will be written back to the files but media type (TV vs movie) will not.
That assumes - and it is a huge assumption - that the files are in an iTunes friendly format. If they have MP4 or m4v extensions you may be in luck, if they are mkv or avi you have a long road ahead.
If you are comfortable building programs from source code and running / editing shell scripts, I can share some of the stuff I've written for my own use with you. Most of it relies on well-formed file names, though, and it doesn't sound like that's the case with what you have there.