pseudoberries random thoughts about life, hacking and open source

Idea: automatic media organizer

I've recently become annoyed by how cumbersome it is to locate media (Movies, TV Series, etc) which are scattered around both my local hard drives and on various network shares. One episode of Scrubs here, another one there. Finding them is difficult!

Wouldn't it be nice if you could browse all available media files in one central location? Wouldn't it be great with an application which discovered all available media - both local and on the network - and allowed you to search for and locate a particular episode or movie without having to browse through an endless list of network shares? For example, let's say I want to watch an episode of Scrubs. I would open this application, choose "TV Series" followed by "Scrubs" and "Season 2". All episodes of Season 2 would appear in a neatly ordered list. I could watch episode 1 from my local hard-drive followed by episode 2 from a share on the network. All from one place.

How would the tool be able to recognize that one video belongs to TV Series / Scrubs and another one to Movies / The Godfather? With some nifty regex magic ofcourse! Most TV Series follow certain naming conventions. One common format is:

<title>.s<season>e<episode>.<other_info>.<extension>

Another one is

<title>.<season><episode>.<other_info>.<extension>

It should be fairly easy to extract this info from each filename and categorize away! Although there are a jungle of naming formats available, a collection of the most common ones would suffice. More could be added at a later point, once they're recognized

Another cool feature would be to query IMDB (they have a public API) for information about a Movie or TV Series, and use this to categorize each file more precisely. If the matching of different file formats was inconclusive, just ask IMDB! This info could also be visible when browsing for your convenience.

I'd love to see something like this in a media center like Elisa - it would make the experience so much more complete! Sounds like the start of a new pet project...