[User Study] Take a screen recording and earn yourself a free license

[rednoah]

As developers, we often don't really know how end-users end up using our tools. Everything is intuitive if you already know how it works, but how about new users? How is the on-boarding experience? What pitfalls are there? How do do various kinds of users interpret and explore the FileBot user-interface? What thoughts do they have?

You may download and evaluate FileBot without having to purchase a license first:
https://www.filebot.net/download.html


If you take a screen recording of your on-boarding experience, you can earn yourself a 1-year complimentary license. Your assistance is greatly appreciated.


Feel free to think out loud and narrate what you are doing.
Screen recordings can be shared publicly via YouTube, or privately by sharing a Google Drive link via PM.


This offer is also available for seasoned FileBot veterans who would like to provide detailed constructive criticisms for the various more or less intuitive features, and discuss ideas on how to make things work more smoothly.

[Antz123]

So... My prime uses has been anime renaming, rarely its a TV series or some Movies.

My feedback

1) places like Horrible subs which I use for anime, many times filebot doesn't pick the names. Reason could be two fold, a) many anime series names are in Japanese, out of those some names are easy to pick may be ones like Naruto, Megalobox, however longer names e.g. "Dungeon ni deai motomeru no wa machigatteiru darou ka" or a name that mixed up could be an issue. There I use things like BulkFileRenamer to rename bit of names of a batch of files to immediately convert the Japanese name of all files to English version. And then Filebot picks up the English name of the anime series quickly. So some bulk renaming option that could rename bits of batch file collection would be a great help. B) many of anime uploaded would put their name in front e.g. At horriblesubs all files are called (horriblesubs)Naruto - 245 (720p).mkv these sort of files at times also need BulkFile. It just helps me remove first 14 spaces of filenames and that solves the issue and FileBot picks it quickly and renaming entire batch is perfect.

2) same happens on tv/movie or music. So I use BulkFile and FileBot in tandem for things I wish to keep. For Music mp3tags or MediaMonkey I prefer more as their metadata I find much more easily. So if more metadate like how those two use it, can make FileBot for me 1 stop for all three.

3) this is more of a feedback the episode list part actually at times has picked up some things which the automatic matching doesn't. However, I explored that bit quite late, almost for the first time this year.

4) I don't know much of this is possible, but if FileBot has an extension like a library of all entertainment that person has over the Hard disks, could it even play/stream/connect to smart devices as it eliminates many other softwares that we all keep jumping to/from.

Hope this somewhere helps. Thanks.

[rednoah]

1a.
FileBot does support file-based renaming so you can do any kind of pre-processing even if the files don't match any databases:
viewtopic.php?t=2072


1b.
FileBot will generally ignore group names, especially when in parenthesis. So that should work.

In any case, if you find file paths that don't work as expected, just paste them here in the forums so I can have a look and see what's happening exactly. More often than not, things can be fine-tuned to make things work.


2.
You should be able to access any ID3 tags generically via the MediaInfo bindings:
viewtopic.php?t=4285

If it's more or less easy to use than other 3rd party software that I cannot say. But if you're missing any bindings, just post here in the forums so we can have a look.


3.
IDK. I'd need to see screenshots to have a guess at what's happening. If it's a reproducible problem, please post the file paths. You can copy & paste debug info from the Rename panel by pressing the F7 key.


4.
FileBot can certainly copy selected files to selected media devices, but any capability that resembles an DLNA media server is not currently planned.

3rd party media server plug-ins are conceivable though. Though, there's only my Plex FileBot Xattr Scanner plug-in at this point AFAIK:
viewtopic.php?t=10969

[VideoMox]

I want to piggy-back a little on Antz123's response. Note -- I can't PM yet because I haven't posted enough as I'm a new forum user. I've been using Filebot for a while, though. So Antz is the case of primarily having 1 media type to manage (anime).

I have several types: Anime, Movies, and "default" for regular TV shows. Each one of these is expressed as a Preset because each one has a different file naming convention, something like
Anime - I want to preserve the subbing group information and I also like to include whether it's sub, dub or dual. Specifically, I use this template:

Code: Select all

{n} - {s00e00} - {t} {fn.match(/^\[.*?\]/)} {(audio.size() > 1) ? '[DUAL]' : audio[0].language} ({vc} {vf})

Movies - I just want the title, year, encoding, resolution, number of audio channels
default (for TV shows and regular cartoons) - title, episode, resolution

So I really like that I can just select my preset with my files loaded for renaming and it goes off, searches and comes back with a reasonable guess as to what I want. This works maybe 60-70% of the time.

The other 30-40% of the time, however, things get cumbersome. Most of the time I can predict when Filebot won't be able to get a match and I go under "Episodes" to get the complete episode listing for a show so I can manually match them. This is usually do to weird file naming or something odd about the episodes themselves as they exist in TheTVDB.

Now, if I haven't "pre-loaded" a preset before I manually match the episodes, what will happen is that they get matched with some default naming template (i.e. not my "Default"). So then I have to load the correct preset, lose my matching (because it will either fail the match on the preset load or match the wrong data), and I have to go back to the Episodes tab, re-select the episodes and THEN match them. At that point, since the desired preset has been loaded, it will format the matches correctly.

This basically means that I start my workflow with a dummy preset load before I do anything just to establish the correct file naming template I want to use. This is especially annoying since I'm still on 4.7.9 and TVDB queries always fail now.

Is this better in 4.8.5?

[rednoah]

Can you provide screenshots or perhaps a screen recording to illustrate the issue? (reproducing GUI issues via textual description is like fixing your moms computer via the phone line, it just doesn't work)

Examples for file paths you have trouble with would also be most appreciated.


In the meanwhile, I've sent you a test license so you can try and evaluate the latest revision, which hopefully has some quality-of-live improvements in this regard:
viewtopic.php?t=1609

[VideoMox]

Sorry for the late reply, it took me a while to reproduce the issue. So basically, the parser gets confused when there are numbers in the title itself.
And this example is about as bad as it gets:



It got the title correctly, but it wasn't able to pick up on the proper season number for some reason, even though the "0048" was part of a "word" in the title and not isolated by whitespace. I've also seen Filebot get confused when there are isolated numbers, like years or sequel numbering. It seems like any kind of numerics in the title throw it off.

Also notice that it doesn't consistently pick the right or wrong season. The pattern seems random as to whether it chooses Season 1 or Season 2.

For additional background: I ran my "Anime" pre-set:



Hope this helps track down the issue.

[rednoah]

Looks like a typical Absolute ⇆ SxE numbers mismatch to me, rather unrelated to numbers in the series name. You'll want to match with Absolute Order and then either go with that, or dynamically re-order to Airdate Order (SxE) in the format:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2769

[thenegativeone]

Hay @rednoah are you still giving out free licenses for this or not

[rednoah]

Hay @rednoah are you still giving out free licenses for this or not

Yes, of course, I have yet to receive a single screen recording.

[thenegativeone]

What do you need a recording of. Or shall I say do you want it as a review or what I need more info to go off of

[rednoah]

Just start the recording, and then do whatever you wanna do, and narrate your thoughts. From download, to install, to first launch, to first usage, to first rename, etc.

* What thoughts come to mind?
* What makes sense?
* What doesn't make sense?
* Where are you stuck?
* What works as expected?
* What works different from your expectation?

TL;DR A screen recording of you using FileBot, narrated by you thinking out loud as you go along.

[thenegativeone]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18nmZqn ... sp=sharing

Here you Go My musings on this fabulous program

[rednoah]

I've sent you a complimentary license. Your time is much appreciated. I'll see if I can make any improvements based on the issues you illustrate in your video, additional docs and tutorials, especially for the supplementary tools.


Upcoming releases will auto-exclude NCED and NCOP files, as to not interfere with matching normal episodes.

[jack123l]

hi @rednoah are you still giving out free license for this?

[rednoah]

hi @rednoah are you still giving out free license for this?

Yes, this program is very much in effect. Almost nobody is taking advantage though.


EDIT:

Thanks for the contribution. Your license has been sent.

[rednoah]

- dark mode
- feature to indicate the last episode of the series (eg: font colour) so to make sure that I'm choosing the right series
- folder for special (Season 0/) not showing eg: Season 1/
- able to rename subtitles together with video files
- for some reason, filebot read videos file without any season number on the file name as season 2 when season 2 is avaliable
- able to download subtitles from kitsunekko.net directly from filebot

Thanks for the video. It was interesting. In particular, I've never seen FileBot running on a Japanese Windows machine, so there's some interesting strangeness there that I'll have to look into. As for your feature requests, I can probably help as some of them are a bit non-obvious I suppose.


Dark Mode can be enabled manually, and will be enabled automatically based on system preferences in upcoming versions:
viewtopic.php?t=9827


You can add Season 0/1 and Special folders via your custom format, e.g.

Code: Select all

{regular ? "Season $s" : "Season 0"}

The level of red indicates how sure FileBot is about the match. If it's red-ish, then it's best to double-check the match, because FileBot isn't sure. Might be correct. Might not. If you need to fix individual matches, then you can do Double Click ➔ Edit Match.
https://twitter.com/filebot_renamer/sta ... 1996178436


Anime can be tricky. Because officially Anime don't have seasons, but TheTVDB will organize related Anime in seasons if it makes sense, and so different numbering schemes may not be compatible and lead to mismatches. Here's a dedicated thread on how to convert Anime / AniDB numbering to TheTVDB / SxE numbering:
viewtopic.php?t=2769


Enhanced support for subtitles is unfortunately not planned, as subtitles are a legal grey zone, sites come and go, different sites blocked by different countries, etc. OpenSubtitles managed to be around forever somehow, and works well, though a login is required nowadays.

[p11ps]

Hey noah,

Are this study still available? In case of yes, could it be in Spanish? I guess no, but I'm not a native speaker and my English is not as good as I would like.

Thanks!

[rednoah]

Are this study still available? In case of yes, could it be in Spanish? I guess no, but I'm not a native speaker and my English is not as good as I would like.

Yes, but narration would have to be in English and ideally show interesting use cases or usage that exceeds the video tutorials.

[substance]

Hi rednoah, I´m new to the forum. I just recorded a couple videos using the software, I tried sending you a PM, but it seems that new users aren´t allowed, is there any other way to send you the video links on private? thank you.


EDIT: I tried a second time, I think after the my first post it allowed me this time.

[rednoah]

I just recorded a couple videos using the software

Thank you for your time! Your complimentary license should be in your inbox already.


EDIT:

Note that this is by far the most useful screen recording to date. Few have bothered to narrate the thought process. There's a few interesting bits where you're searching for features that you thought should exist (and do exist but perhaps a bit hidden) but just couldn't find at the time. So if you have another ~3 friends that might benefit from a free 1yr license, please PM me their emails.


You can use Double-Click New Names ➔ Edit Match to fix matches. See FAQ #2 for details.
You can use Presets for pre-defined actions and associated keyboard shortcuts
You can use a custom format such as {collection}/{ci.pad 2} - {ny} (ci ... collection index) to generate file paths like Star Wars Collection/04 - Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Though for Star Wars Episode 1..9 the "watch order" might be tricky, and the best option here might be just passing through the number from the original filename. It's easier for other collections. In any case, this particular topic probably deserves it's own thread.

[MickeMM]

It cant find the right name for Harry Potter movie (8 movies). See pic:

http://www.bilddump.se/bilder/202112301 ... 18.160.png

I have try both Ubuntu and Windows with same result.

[rednoah]

Please include file paths as text when reporting mismatches (press F7 to copy debug information)


EDIT:

Looks weird though. My first guess would be some misleading IMDB ID in the *.nfo file that forces the same movie by ID for all files in the same folder.

What's the text content of the nfo file?

[Robin]

Hi rednoah
Is this free license promotion still available if I sent you a recording? I could try it on my QNAP Nas.

Looking for a reply. Thanks in advance.

[rednoah]

Is this free license promotion still available if I sent you a recording? I could try it on my QNAP Nas.

Yes. Please do.