TV Shows - Rip to Rename

(aka there has to be a better way!)

I have a lot of TV Shows on DVD and Blu-Ray. Now that I have XBMC setup, I’d like to make these shows available without having to pull a disc out of the closet and pop it into a noisy drive. The basic principle of what I want to do is rip the episodes from the disc, rename them to a format that XMBC can easily work with, and then insert them into the XBMC library. One would think there would be a very straightforward and automated way to do this, but apparently that’s not so. It’s certainly possible, but there are a lot manual steps in the middle. I’m trying to eliminate as many of those manual steps as possible. It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll describe where I am so far.

1) Rip – There’s really no way to automate this step. You have to put each disc in the drive and pull the contents off. The best you can do is pull them off in a format that make the next steps a little easier. I’m not going to go into detail about ripping. There are plenty of guides on the internet for that. What I eventually end up with is something like this:

Show
--d1
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv
--d2
----title1.mkv
----title2.mkv
----title3.mkv

 

2) Initial Rename – There are tools out there that will perform a lot of the renaming automatically. I’d love to find a tool that would allow me to simply feed it a list of manually ordered files, tell it what show and season those files are supposed to be for, and then have it just go off and do the renaming from there. So far I haven’t found a tool like that. The tools I have found require at least some meta information in the names of the files before they will work. So, to setup this initial information, I use Bulk Rename Utility (BRE). The process for this fairly easy:

1. Go to the parent “show” directory for a season of episodes in Windows Explorer (assuming Windows 7).
2. Do a search from that directory for *.mkv
   
   
3. Sort the results on the folder they were found in (i.e. D1, d2, etc.). This should get you a list of episodes in the correct order.
4. Drag the files from the Windows explorer to the main BRE window. BRE has the unfortunate tendency to reverse the order of the dragged in files. Keep an eye out for that and adjust the following instructions as necessary. I’m going to write the instructions as if BRE did reverse the files, because it almost always does so for me.
5. If you don’t know the “proper” name of your television series, go the thetvdb.com and look it up. Most are pretty obvious. For the purposes of this example, we’ll call our show “My Tv Show”.
6. In BRE box #3, type “title” in the “Replace” box and “My Tv Show 01x” in the “With” box. Change “01” to match whatever season you are renaming.
7. Make sure BRE box #5 is checked and up the “Last n” number to 2. If you select one or more of the files in the top window, you can see what the resulting rename would look like. It should be something like “My Tv Show 01x.mkv” at this point.
8. Put a check in BRE box #10. Again, assuming the files were reversed when put into BRE set the “Incre.” field to “-1” and then set the “Start” field to the number of files you have present. Set the “Mode” to be “Suffix” and the “Pad” to “2”.
9. All of this should result in a rename that looks something like “My Tv Show 01x01.mkv”. Naturally you may have to fiddle with this if there are combined episodes (Star Trek The Next Generation Episode Season 1 ep. 1 and 2 comes to mind). The good news is that you can save all of the work you just did as a BRE configuration file and in the future, you should only need to change the TV show name and the “start” point for the numbering.
10. Back in Windows explorer, perform the same search for *.mkv. You should now find the newly renamed shows. Select them all and ctrl-x them, then navigate to the parent directory of the discs and paste all of the mkv’s into one directory. You can delete the “dx” directories now, if you’d like.
11. Start up TVRenamer and lets change some setting under the “options” tab. You know, I don’t’ actually remember which options I changed from the default, so I’ll just include some screen shots of my settings for each section. The only one I do remember heavily customizing was the Naming Options section. So….
    General
     
    Detection – No changes; nothing checked
    Episode Titles – I don’t know why TVRage is selected, but it seems to work well
    
    Naming Options – I used a custom format based on the one Sick Beard uses for it’s downloads
    
    Aliases & Preserved Tags – I don’t’ use this, but it might be helpful to you.
    Subtitles – Again, I don’t’ use this as I pull the subtitles from the discs that I am ripping.
    
12. Now, that the options are set, back in “Raname” tab, in the “1st Step” area, browse to the folder where the shows episodes are.
13. If you named the files with a matchable name from TheTVDB.com site, you should now be able to go to the “2nd Step” box and click the button “Look up titles online”. It will take a minute to respond. When it does, the possible show options will be presented in the 2nd drop down box. Select the appropriate one and click “Use this name”.
14. Finally, click Rename. The episodes should be renamed and put into a “Season xx” folder.
15. At this point all you have to do is create an appropriately named show folder where you keep you media files for XBMC and put the “Season xx” folder in it. To get the appropriate fanart and images, I just open XBMC and tell it to update the library. There’s probably a better way to get that stuff, but this seems to work well enough. UPDATE: Well, I said scraping via XBMC directly was “good enough” because I would have sworn that doing so stored the thumbnails and show art with the video files themselves, but I guess I’m wrong about that. I haven’t found a “perfect tool” for this yet, but Ember Media Manager Revisited seems decent enough. Yet another manual step unfortunately.

As I said above, this is far too manual of a process, but it’s the best I have for now. I love to find a better way to do this, and I will definitely keep looking or maybe even write my own little utility for this specific purpose.