I use Salami's Movie Organizer for metadata for movies, but for TV I wasn't entirely happy with the ruby script, because I'm not a huge fan of CLI, and it didn't get "posters" for seasons/shows.
So, rather than complaining about it, I created TVScout (I…shouldn't be allowed to name things, first name was VideoBrowserTVMetaData). It requires .NET 3.0, I figure since VB is for Vista, that really shouldn't be a problem. Like the ruby script, this makes use of TheTVDb for metadata.
TV Scout v0.1
Features
Fetches "poster art" (where available) for seasons and for series
Renames files, gets metadata, etc, just like the ruby script.
Handles S00E00 and 00×00 (and S0E0, 0×0 and anything in between)
Limitations/Known bugs/problems
always updates metadata (for series.xml)
always fetches posters
always renames files (if they match)
can't set custom file structure filters
Files must be in a season folder. ie, "Battlestar Galacatica (2003)\Season 1\s01e01.avi"
Unlike the ruby scrapper fetches all the metadata for a show first. This means if you're only processing one or two episodes, it'll be "slower" (30seconds?) depending on your connection. For more than that, it should use less web calls.
To Do
I want to get a popup/prompt which will do a basic search, then ask what show you're talking about, so that the folder names don't' have to exactly match theTVDB's. Ie, For the "remake" of Battlestar Galactica, the folder has to be "Battlestar Galactica (2003)".
Parse files not in a season folder so that they put inside one (/create season folder), then processed properly
Make the options usable
Process "root" directories (ie C:\TV\) instead of just specific shows (ie, C:\TV\Battlestar Galactica (2003))
Make source code available via CodePlex - just a time/can-be-botheredness thing. I'll do it when I get the popup working
Instructions
Run TVScout, and browse to a folder of a particular TV show, ie "C:\Red Dwarf"
Put each seasons files into their own folder, ie "C:\Red Dwarf\Season 1"
Assuming the filenames contain "s01e01" or "01×01" (for episode 1, season 1), when you "Fetch Metadata", TVScout will get metadata, as well as any available images for each episode, season and finally overall series.
Fire up Windows Media Center with Video Browser installed, and your show should have metadata associated with it!
Disclaimer
Use this at your own risk. While it works pretty well for me so far, but I won't be held responsible for loss of data, hair, or anything else you may lose in a result of downloading or running this app.
Download (save to HDD first, then run, don't just run from IE, that will most likely crash) Visit codeplex for the updated downloads
If you're like me, navigating video in Windows Media Center can be painful. The titles are small, the images are more often than not blank, or worse – get dropped so WMC regenerates every time you go into the folder. On the flip side, navigating music is easy because of the album art and metadata.
Enter Sam Saffron's Video Browser. Video Browser is a MCML plugin (so it is compatible with Media Center on the XBox 360), which uses MyMovie's XML for metadata, so if you already use MyMovie for metadata that's perfectly usable, but I've found Salami's Movie Organizer to be the easiest to use to fetch metadata for movies. This makes Media Center have even more WAF (Wife Approval Factor)! Apart from a poster-view of all your videos, it also brings up meta data (such as actors, rating, running time, director, year of release and a blurb!), making it easier to decide what to watch.
Video Browser also handles TV episodes/seasons, however the only way to get metadata for it so far is with Sam's Ruby TV scraper, which while it works is sucky if you don't want to install Ruby.
Last year I began creating a Windows Live Messenger plugin which set your status (through DDE) to what game you were playing. Unfortunately development was cut short when I realised it had a really nasty habit of chewing up CPU resources.
However, I'm happy to say I've squashed that bug by using a single process handler, rather than one for each game. A rather obvious mistake when you think about it, but truth be told, I haven't thought about it for months! I've also added all the games in the Xfire_Games.ini file, which is somewhere in the thousands! Obviously, I haven't tested all of these, so they may not all work.
Unfortunately, WLM still requires signed DLL's/can't seem to handled unmanaged code wrappers for the plugins so it has limited ability to 'replace' XFire for in game chat…a separate program would have to be running/called by the plugin for that to work. My knowledge of DirectX is limited at best, so it may be one of those things that never happens.
In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger, set AddInFeatureEnabled to 1
Create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Aeoth, add a new String Value called Location. Set the value of 'Location' to where you extracted the dll and xml files (ie, D:\wsg0.1)
Install the DLL into the Global Assembly Cache - drag and drop it into C:\Windows\Assembly or from commandline, gacutil -I wgs.addin.dll
Run Windows Live Messenger, Options, Add-ins, Find the DLL, Click 'Settings', Detect Games. Close that settings window
Use the drop down where you set your 'status', and you should see a "Turn on 'WGS'". Select that.
Play games!
To Do
Easier installer
In game chat (via separate program/relaying messages)
XFire_games.ini import utility/auto-update of database file
