FileBot

I use filebot a lot to rename downloaded videos, but on one set of files it seems to fail and I can't see why. The four files are MP4 videos, they all play fine, the info looks good but filebot always says "No video files have been selected."

intel iMac running macos 12.7.3
Error log is empty:

The keyword Behind the Scenes marks these files as extras. FileBot cannot process extras since they're not episodes and thus do not correspond to anything in the database, so they are preemptively ignored to avoid mismatches.


What would be the desired target file name for these files? What would be the expected Episode match for each of these files?


If these files are special episodes that are listed in your preferred database, then the Manual Matching approach will work. However, you will not be able to process episodes that are not listed in the database.

They are special episodes of “Father Brown”, I had no idea that there were keywords that could cause problems! I’ve transferred thousands of movies and episodes from the last 20 years or so, and it managed to identify and process all their specials.

I removed the “behind the scenes” part and it works, thank you so much.

This seems really silly behaviour. Is there any way to turn it off and is there a list of these special keywords that might cause issues in future?

It frequently screws up the matching, using the episode number as a series number or using parts of the path rather than the filename, not a problem I can manually sort them out, it’s annoying and time consuming but at least it works. Why not let me do that for all files rather than just refuse to have anything to do with them.

Bizarre and very annoying.

Anyway I will keep an eye out for this sort of thing in the future, many thanks for your help.

Manual Matching always works. In this case you'd just copy & paste the matching Episode items from Episodes into Rename. It'll take 15 seconds at most.





You don't actually need to know why Automatic Matching doesn't work in one case or another. That'll always take more than 15 seconds figure it out. Maybe it's because it's a *-sample.* file? Maybe it's because it's a *.txt file? Maybe both? Maybe something else entirely? Maybe the episode at hand does not exist in the selected database? There are countless corner cases where it just doesn't work for one reason or another. We can investigate to satisfy our curiosity, that might yield interesting insights, but as a user you'll just want to use Manual Matching instead and leave it at that. Aligning files / episodes manually is quick and always works regardless of file name, file type, file content, etc.


Excluding extra files by default is important, since matching extras to Episode information almost always fails, which is problematic. Here's a recent example of what happens when FileBot does not ignore an extra, behind the scenes, bloopers, etc that ideally should have been ignored.


Not all files are created equal. Behind the Scenes is a keyword that suggests that the file is an extra. But if the video file at hand is reasonably large or long, then Behind the Scenes is perfectly fine as movie name, episode title, etc. You just happen to have found the rare corner case where you have a file that appears to be an extra by file name and appears to be an extra my file size and video length. See Clutter File Size and Video Length Limits for details and configuration options.

I've always been good at breaking software, i used to do a lot of beta testing.

Cluttered wrote: ↑25 Jan 2024, 10:25 I've always been good at breaking software, i used to do a lot of beta testing.

Keep 'em bug reports coming!