"Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

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mgutt
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Joined: 26 Dec 2019, 23:32

"Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

Post by mgutt »

Sometimes I'm facing a series with completely wrong ordered files. Usually I then open The Movie Database, check the episode description and screenshot, run the episode and jump forward, until I'm sure I found the correct episode number. As this is extremely time consuming I thought about how this could be optimized:
- a user renames his episodes with filebot
- filebot analyzes the waveline of all audio tracks and stores the first X minutes as a text-based file in a cloud database (which should be safe against DMCA takedowns as no copyright relevant material has been stored)
- after x users did this and/or "trustworthy" users did this, all other user can choose an "auto-detection" and filebot analyzes the audio tracks and renames the episodes through the database

So this would be something like a "Shazam" feature for detecting TV episodes. What do you think?
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rednoah
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Re: "Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

Post by rednoah »

Support for some kind of perceptual hash would certainly be nice, but the use case isn't all that common for FileBot users since files never really come in "completely wrong ordered files" as there's usually some order to things. It'd be a very large amount of effort - and huge increase in ongoing costs and risk - that is useful for only to a very small fraction of FileBot users in very specific uncommon circumstances. The only situation I can think of is data recovery, and even that wouldn't be an issue if files are tagged.


More importantly, from a business point-of-view, if we had the algorithms and the data to make this work reliably, that would immediately be the core business - much more valuable than renaming files - and almost certainly force a "the customer is the product" kind of business model, or not be viable at all.


:arrow: That said, if it was somehow easy, then you could implement it yourself, and then access your service via a FileBot custom format:
viewtopic.php?t=12957
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mgutt
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Joined: 26 Dec 2019, 23:32

Re: "Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

Post by mgutt »

rednoah wrote: 11 Apr 2023, 14:12 that is useful for only to a very small fraction of FileBot users in very specific uncommon circumstances
Search for "determine episode order makemkv" and you find a huge amount of users facing this issue. I would say 50% of all TV shows are "unsorted" and need manual sorting, why I check them all manually. One user in the MakeMKV forums posted this in the year 2022, which is my opinion, too:
So I've got to ask if there's any method or software out there to find out the right order of episodes on a tv series Blu Ray Disc?
(doesn't matter if it costs money)
I would pay 100 € for such a piece of software as the time saving is huge.

Of course this would cause massive changes in Filebot as it does not include any audio analyzing features by now. So I understand why you are not a fan of this idea, but Filebot would be the "perfect" place for such a feature I think. Or maybe inside of one of the popular media servers like Jellyfin, Kodi or Plex as part of their indexing process.
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rednoah
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Re: "Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

Post by rednoah »

mgutt wrote: 12 Apr 2023, 11:40 Search for "determine episode order makemkv" and you find a huge amount of users facing this issue.
The first search result suggests that you can determine the order of episodes quite easily, at least in some (most?) cases:
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20327


Depending on how files are named, and what metadata is available, e.g. order of episodes via *.mpls, or playlist metadata, etc, might just doable with filebot --db file and filebot -list -rename calls.


If you could provide sample files (all metadata files and file paths; empty video files is fine) then we could have a look and see what can be done.
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mgutt
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Joined: 26 Dec 2019, 23:32

Re: "Shazam" for identifying TV series episodes?

Post by mgutt »

rednoah wrote: 12 Apr 2023, 13:46 (most?)
I already use the naming scheme "S{season_id}D{disc_id}_t{mpls_id}.mkv" in MakeMKV, so yes it works for some, but not for all TV shows.

But even if only 10% would be wrong, you need to check 100% as you don't want a single TV show in a wrong order in your collection, because this has a super low WAF :mrgreen:
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