Metadata Tool Goes Visual

I originally wrote the Batch Metadata tool because I had a large collection of movies, and Sage didn't provide a way to import my existing collection with metadata. Nielm's IMDB tool was good, but it's a one at a time solution.

So, a tool was born, and it works quite well at what it's meant to do; fetch metadata and create output properites and thumbnails. Now, I'm looking at a bigger picture, that includes full media management. Obviously the Batch Metadata tool is a part of the solution, and I decided to use GWT (Google Widget Toolkit) as the UI. I was looking for an excuse to try out GWT and this project became my excuse.

I decided to make this a web application for one main reason; I like web applications. I read my email online, my photos are online, my calendar is online, and all this translates into convenient access to my information. I wanted my media to be accessed in the same way. I have 7 computers in my house. I don't use all of them, but I do use 4 of them. I wanted to be able to quickly access my media, make changes and import new movies from any of those computers. A web application made sense.

The features that I'm looking at putting into this application include

• Media importing from local filesystem.
• Metadata fetching (from multiple sources)
• Batch metadata updating (from multiple sources)
• Metadata editing
• Cover art updating (from mulitple sources)
• File management (moving and deleting)
• UPnP Server
• Media playback
• SageTV integration
• Handle TV media (recorded shows) as well as movies.
  

This project has started. I'm hoping to have a beta of it ready to go in a few weeks. Obviously the beta won't include all the features, but hopefully it will provide some of the core ones. I realize that there are a couple of web project from SageTV, but this isn't a SageTV application. It's a web application that may or may not integrate with SageTV. It will not run in the same java process as a SageTV server (but it could).

Stay in touch. I'll update my blog on the progress.