Video

Video Day

Generally defer work on the video library until Mondays. Easier said than done.

Overview

Video is the global classification of recorded material that is commonly presented on a TV or viewed with an application on a computer. The common term for the repository is media server.

I have arbitrarily broken this down into a few classifications. The first is movies. Included here are theatrical and non-serialized media. Movies are obvious. They are a video recording with zero or more supporting files. The supporting material may include files containing subtitles in English or other languages, image files like cover art, logos or posters. In some cases there is extra content like director or cast interviews, "the making of..." videos and deleted scenes. Documentaries are the red-headed stepchild here because they fit the general case of the content limited to a single video file, but they clutter up the movies directory. I am inclined to break them out to a separate documentary folder if I can solve the automatic classification problem.

The next classification is serialized content. The most common case here are TV shows. TV shows have an arbitrary organization of episodes within seasons. Because of this there are set naming conventions. When everything is working, the media server support software sees the new video on release date, downloads it, names it appropriately, and places it in the correct location.

There is kind of the concept of a video junk drawer. This is where material that doesn't fit the above get put.

A number of people who collect are into Anime and so they would include it as a separate classification. Never being interested, I have no problem not storing and organizing it.

Workflow

As of February 2024, the movies and TV shows are largely self-maintaining. Addin a movie generates a request to the backend to find and download it. The same is true for TV shows. At this point, the system will download current episodes as they are released, but it doesn't do well back filling missing episodes. I believe that it should, but I am having to get them manually.

The user facing applications are Plex which is a full media server running on the Qnap and Ombi which does a better job of displaying the collection than Plex does. Ombi also supports users making requests for movies and TV shows. As a backup media server, there is Jellyfin. It is not as fully featured but does have some benefits. As Plex tries to make themself into a streaming media outlet, they tend to prioritize their content over mine.

The 'arr Web Sites

At some point, someone decided that trying to maintain a media server for TV shows was pretty complicated and, like so many times in the past, they created a tool to simplify things. This first tool was Sonarr. I am speculating that the "arr" was related to the fact that the material is largely pirated. Be that as it may, Sonarr, and the other "arr" tools, erforms no downloading on their own. It works with indexers and download agents to locate, request and store media. The "arr" tools make maintaining even fairly large collections pretty easy.

After Sonarr addressed the problem for TV, a fork of it was created to do the same thing for movies and Radarr was created. There are similar tools for book, comics, music and, since this IS the internet age, porn. A case could be made to give users access to Radarr and Sonarr, but they are set up with a single admin account. Once you get into the details it is easy to see why it is like that.

There are several support tools that go along with these; most of which are not interacted with after being setup unless there is a problem. Prowlarr acts as a single point of contact for any indexers that have been defined. Much of the material comes from the Usenet. Usenet significantly predates the web. It started out pretty small and was distributed by a networks of mail connections. As it grew, people started to post moore and more content and the list of newsgroups grew from under 100 in 1983 to over 100,000 now. There are really only abour 20,000 that are currently active.

This is collection related to processing in video material.

The general goal is to have the video libraries updated from the download areas.

The Plex Media Server application runs on the Qnap and requires very little attention. The Plex software periodically re-indexes Movies and TV Shows so that they display on the dashboard.

Periodic task: Review the display names and fix the ones that have resolution and extra information.

Unless there is some pressing need, it is expected that the files will be processed on "Video Day". It is a good idea to not let the source areas get too backed up or the task gets to be a bit tedious.

Movies and TV Shows primarily come in through NewsHosting for Usenet or the BiglyBT Bitorrent Client for torrents. Newshosting is its own application, but BiglyBT handles requests from a torrent search website. The typical ones are Pirate Bay and Torrent Galaxy. They are downloaded onto the G: drive into the Newshosting, or Vuze Complete, folders respectively. When a magnet link is clicked

The FileBot utility is used to rename the files to conform with the Plex requirements. It is a standalone program that runs on the PC desktop. Open the app and drag content to the left pane. Select the presets icon from the bottom list and select "Organize [Movies|Episodes] for Plex. The relocates and renamed files will appear on the right. Do a quick check for sanity and then click on the Rename icon in the middle.

The files will be moved to the top-level Media folder on G:. Pro-tip: Moving to the top-level Media folder for the disk where the source material was loaded from is the normal behavior. The folders under Media are as expected, "Movies" and "TV Shows".

The Radarr and Sonarr web applications manage the video libraries, movies and tv shows respectively and, in addition, request downloads of video content as it becomes available or is requested. Bring up the web site, https://radarr.lan and search for the movie to add. Assuming that it is new, double click on the description of the video and it will prompt with a request to add it. Click on "Add Movie". This will create the movie description with default values. Currently the video location is created without a MovieDB index, but FileBot creates the directory with one. Drag the directory containing the movie from the Media/Movies folder into the \\maceys.lan\Multimedia\Movies folder. Double click on the movie description and click on the Edit icon. In the window that pops up, click on the folder icon at the end of path. This will open a file browser with the application's idea of where the folder is. Click on the path and the actual path will be displayed. Select it, hit OK and then "I will move the files myself on the next page. The status of the movie will change to Downloaded.

Handling TV Shows is almost the same. Go to https://sonarr.lan rather than the radarr one. The major difference is that in many cases, rather than downloading an entire new series, only new episodes will have been downloaded. Either way, drag the series folder from Media/TV Shows to the \\maceys.lan\Multimedia\TV Shows folder. Depending on what you are doing, you may want to drop down a level or two on both the source and destination if want to have better control. If this is a new series, follow the search/creation steps from add a movie. Note that FileBot has added TVdb index data which may not be present on the existing folders.

One of the goals for sonarr is to complete series lists.

Referenced sites:

The "arr" web application documentation

BiglyBT Bitorrent Client

FileBot

NewsHosting

The Plex Media Server

The Pirate Bay

The Torrent Galaxy

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