v31 and MXML files. How are they supposed to work?

[kdx7214]

I found out about mxml files the other day and threw together a quick QAD in c# to generate them (one at a time) for my videos. The reason I'm doing this is to simplify things when my wife does a "retrieve all details" from the video list. As it is, she gets dozens (or more) of popups asking her to pick which title she means - and frequently the actual title isn't in the list.

So I generated a quick mxml file, named it the same as the movie, and put it on my storage volume. So now I have "movie.mkv" and "movie.mxml" out there. When I tell it to retrieve details for just that title, it still pops up the box to pick which title I mean, even though I have specified that in the mxml file. The pastebin below has the actual mxml file I'm using for the actual movie.

https://pastebin.com/33Git6zj

Am I doing something wrong or is there something I just don't understand yet?

Edit: The situation is similarly strange with tv series. I have a file called "Series\Season 1\S01E01.mkv" and it's corresponding mxml file. From the frontend logs it always goes to the ttvdb grabber even when an mxml file is present.

[rjmorris]

Did you ever work this out? I'm also interested in using mxml (or nfo) files to store the metadata for my videos, so I gave this a try, and it worked as expected for me. I'm using v29 instead of v31, but the source code for handling mxml files doesn't look significantly different.

I tried the exact mxml file you pasted, except I don't own that particular movie, so I renamed it to match one I do own (Fight Club). Otherwise I didn't modify it. Then from the Videos screen, I selected Fight Club and pressed the "w" key to retrieve its details, and it immediately populated the details from your mxml file. I saw the following in the frontend log:

Code: Select all

2020-07-11 15:56:04.426091 I  Matching MXML file found. Parsing myth://Videos@hostname/movies/Fight Club.mxml for metadata...
2020-07-11 15:56:04.445552 I  Result Found, Season 0 Episode 0
2020-07-11 15:56:04.445767 I  Returning Metadata Results: Fight Club 0 0

Did you have anything in the logs?

I also tried a TV episode, and that worked as well.

[paulh]

It's a while since I used this, could be 2 or 3 years ago so something may have changed or been broken and I do use my own fork of MythTV and not everything gets committed to the official MythTV repo.

The way I used to use it to import video into MythTV was I have a modified version of MythArchive to copy the video file and to create the mxml file into the MythVideo storage group. Then when you rescan for video files it is supposed to prefer the metadata from the mxml or nfo files then if it's not found use the lookup scripts. I used it that way for many years to import stuff from my Sky box into Myth and it definitely worked using mxml files but like I say that was a while ago and there may be changes to my fork to enable that I honestly don't remember.

[dnalorernst]

Works for me on v31 as well.
I created a video file and put your xml file alongside to the video, did a scan and pressed 'w' to import metadata on the new video.
Then I got a selection screen with multiple entries based on the xml. I assume this is due the fact of having multiple countries, studios, languages or categories defined in the mxml. The proposed title for the movie was always the same: "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Enclosed a log file generated with "mythfrontend --verbose,general,file,system"