Z-Keeper.com - Master your Zidoo media library

I will provide more answers to you when I can (I’m away on vacation), but in short, your current Zidoo DB is in no risk of being damaged by Z-Keeper. It makes the same calls to the Zidoo that its web UI uses, plus more functionality that the web UI does not provide. You can feel confident it won’t damage the significant effort you have put into arranging your library.

 

Thank you for your reply !
It is already helpful, although I will be happy to have more details when you return.

Have a wonderful holiday !

 

You can create , edit and add multiple genre using TMM on your PC or MAC followed by a refresh metadata on the Zidoo. Use to drive me mad when I first got my Zidoo. You should be able to do it on the web editor.

 

The web UI has always been... er... interesting... It never seemed to get fixed in any of its iterations - I gave up asking years ago...

I never really got along with TMM, but Z-Keeper is evolving into a very impressive bit of kit...

 

I have signed up for the beta. This is amazing work. Zidoo surely should donate a player to Chris for this program

 

Thanks Cary.
I ponied up and just bought a Z9X 8k. I needed to get the multi-Zidoo device logic working and there were no offers from the beta group (understandable). Plus - what a good excuse to upgrade my Z9X Pro.
Perhaps there's a future where I can help the Zidoo team with their efforts on the HT app. As a user, I am pretty motivated, and as a programmer, maybe I have something to offer them that they feel would be of benefit.

 

Beta 7 does this quite well thanks to a new method that our contact at Zidoo told me about (undocumented). Set your poster and backdrop to any image you like off your PC.

I will have to dig into the API documentation and see if I can find a way to create new genres. Z-Zeeper already lets you assign the predefined genres to your movies just like the web UI does. If I can figure out how to create custom genres, I will add that feature too. I must admin, with all the genres the Zidoo already has, I didn't expect this would be something users would want. Would you mind sharing an example of a custom genre for me - like "Home movies" or something like that?

Wow! You have put quite a lot of time and effort into managing your movie library! I'm far too lazy to put in that kind of time into customizing my posters and genres. While the list of genres assigned to movies in the Zidoo (likely from TMDB, actually) is really awful (eg. it calls a lot of movies "Comedy" that are so far from it!), I find the default posters are usually pretty good (although lately I don't like the ones it's going with - but again, this is a TMDB thing now that I've spent time interfacing with the TMDB interface - we pick the top choice of poster and backdrop art which should be the official one, but too often now it's a fan-created thing that looks wrong for the movie.

Z-Keeper's design is non-invasive. It keeps its own database on your PC that mimics the one in the Zidoo. You can change things in the Zidoo database, like poster art, genres, collection grouping, categories, etc., but you are doing this intentionally. Z-Keeper won't damage anything in your finely-crafted movie catalog. The only way Z-Keeper can make changes to the Zidoo database is through the API interface it supports (primarily for the web UI, as far as I know), so it's safe.

The #1 goal of Z-Keeper is to help you find problems in your collection and fix them. Yes, you can edit it as well, like the custom posters, but my main purpose for building this (for myself) was to help me manage all the bad matches the Zidoo would do, and the video files the Zidoo simply refused to acknowledge even existed. I know TMM is a commonly used tool that can do a lot, but it doesn't interface with the Zidoo and the user interface and I just didn't have an understanding. I love designing fun and attractive UI's so if I can get all the functionality TMM has, and also have it talk directly with the Zidoo, look good, and have many features TMM doesn't do, then I think it's a fun project to be a part of.
So "sophisticated" to you may be par-for-course for others. I want it to be easy to use, but still powerful at batch processing many titles at once and capable of more advanced tools, such as the shared catalog comparison tool (doesn't share actual videos, but the runtimes of videos to help us check that our titles are correct - especially episodes of TV series which can be tricky to rip in the right order).

While I have more folder structure than you do, I personally want to stay away from NFO files if possible. It's just one more "sidecar" file to have to maintain. But people like @Markswift2003 like the NFO approach as it gives a lot of control to ensure the Zidoo does what Mark wants it to do. It doesn't work for Favorites and Watched and some other metadata that the Zidoo database supports because the Kodi NFO standard doesn't have those tags.

Zidoo keeps it's own DB. While Z-Keeper has a more robust DB to do what it does, it's only there to help you maintain the Zidoo DB, so the Zidoo doesn't know Z-Keeper exists, so stop using Z-Keeper and the Zidoo is none the wiser. No risk to your Zidoo or any dependency on Z-Keeper.

Oddly, I have never had a corrupted Zidoo DB in my many years owning them. It's pretty stable, though the newer HT versions have many issues that resulted in my building this software. And all the manipulation I've done to my Zidoo using Z-Keeper, nothing bad has happened and it's been quite stable.
I hope this helps answer your ponderings.

- Chris

 

Now only if Zkeeper could parse multi episode TV files, for example; NameS01E01S01E02... and correct what is my main bugbear of HTx this inability. Dune's My Collection is actually capable of this.

Zkeeper at present does not parse these TV titles automatically.
Note that you can define multi episodes in at least two ways such as "ProgramName SxxE01SxxE02SxxE03.." or "ProgramName SxxE01E02E02.."

McBluna's Zidoo db program did mange this very nicely but it had no front-end/GUI to speak of, so was awkward to use. But still it worked very well indeed.

 

Interesting…
I was not aware the Zidoo was capable of multi-episode records. I will give this a try and if I find it can, I can definitely update the filename parser to understand that syntax.
Thanks for the suggestion.

 

I don't think multi episode mkvs are supported in the API - not sure what TMM does - maybe just treat a multi episode mkv as a single episode?

 

From my research, the Zidoo doesn't support multi-episode video files. However, the Kodi standard does. Since Z-Keeper is now (beta 8) able to manage your movie library outside of a Zidoo, I have updated it to support the official Kodi filename convention for multi-episodes. This allows Z-Keeper to create NFO files that indicate the multi episodes. When talking with the Zidoo, however, it will only reference the first episode of a range. I will reach out to our contact at Zidoo to see if I'm missing something.

 

If tmm supports, I doubt it, I’ve never been able to get it to work, I’ve tried all the rename options. I end up splitting the eps with Avidemux or in one case renamed to Ep1 and created a Ep2 dummy file to get the synopsis in HT and adding to the Synopsis READ ONLY.

 

Via AI
TinyMediaManager (TMM) handles multi-episode files automatically by parsing filenames during a data source update, but offers limited output formatting choices and no manual creation option. [1, 2, 3]

How Multi-Episode Detection Works

• Initial Detection: TMM reads consecutive numbers or patterns in your original file name (e.g., S01E01E02) when you first scan or update the data source. [1]
• Linking Files: A single media file must be mapped and linked to multiple individual episodes within TMM's internal database. [1]
• Manual Limitation: You cannot manually flag a single file as a multi-episode entity inside TMM if it fails initial automatic detection; it relies entirely on filename parsing. [1, 2]

Renaming Behavior & Styles

• Default Output: TMM's renamer typically outputs multi-episode files using a spaced format like ShowName S01E01 S01E02 rather than continuous hyphenated blocks (like S01E01-E02). [1, 2, 3, 4]
• Settings: You can check or adjust basic options under the TV Show Renamer Documentation to see available multi-episode naming style choices. [1]
• Fixed Grouping: TMM groups all season/episode numbers together based on internal patterns, which some users find rigid if they prefer alternative media center (like Plex or Emby) naming conventions.

 

This is my parser's rules for multi-episode files (after the series name):

• .S01E01S01E02S01E03
• .S01E01E02E03
• .S01E01-E04
• .S01E01-02-03
• .S01E01S01E02

and dot/space-separated variants.
My personal preference is to keep each episode one file, but I have also ripped multiple episodes into a single file when there was just too many to rip (lazy), and I've just dealt with the Zidoo thinking it was just a long single episode.

 

I used tmm and now Media companion both do multi-episode files. As I stated in a previous post McBluna's program dealt with multi-episode files and transferred then successfully to HTx. It's the HT parser which does not like multi episode structures but once in the database HT reads them back fine. Obviously for example if the file is Program S01E01S01E02S01E03.xx and you select episode 2 or 3 HT will play from the start of the file and also set the watched tag for the whole file. However the database shows the plot description for each episode correctly. so It parses the multi episode nfo correctly. I can post or dm a sample nfo file if required

 

I just noticed this thread for the first time. Does this app have any functionality that would help keep watched/unwatched items in sync between several Zidoo boxes? I appreciate that Trakt was added to HT, but support has been lacking

 

This is going to be possible, yes, but it's not built yet. It's part of the "Master Catalog" concept that is being introduced in Beta 8 soon. The Master Catalog is device independent so you can use it to push updates of meta data (like Watched and Favorite) to individual Zidoo devices.

 

A teaser of some of the new functionality that's going into Beta 8:

There are two places where you can have Z-Keeper do a mass-correction on the Zidoo based on the new Master Catalog (which I get set by TMDB Match, but can also come from approving Zidoo matches). For my 600 movie test suite, the Zidoo gets 132 of them wrong so this is what the tool looks like that automatically floods the Zidoo with corrections based on "cemented" matches in the Master Catalog. It has 2 phases: (1) the 3-API calls to assign a ZidooID to a new TMDB ID, and (2) a read-back verification phase to ensure all the change requests were honored. This also updates the poster art and meta data (perhaps a movie change resulted in Collection changes as well) so a new Sync may not be needed afterwards.

Phase 1:


Phase 2:


And the final results:


There a scenario where the API approach won't work: when the Zidoo doesn't see the file in the first place.
Those 132 fixes took about 4 minutes for the 2 phases.

And the Library tool has some new toys.
Beta 7 (and prior) only had the "Current Zidoo" poster wall.
Beta 8 gives you the ability to see your currently selected Zidoo (it supports multiple devices), your curated "Blueprint" which is what you expect a particular Zidoo device to have, and your "Master Catalog" which is based on the filesystem's source video files (it's not bolted to any Zidoo device at all - you don't even need to own a Zidoo). In my test case, I have one Zidoo with 100% of my collection and a test Zidoo with only my 4k movies and series. My Master Catalog is what I have carefully curated as the proper matches for each file-to-movie/episode and the organization into collections I want. For example, I put all my Marvel movies into a single collection whereas the Zidoo puts all the Iron Man movies into an Iron Man collection.
If I approve a file-to-movie match on any of my Zidoo devices, that cements the marriage between that file and that movie's ID (TMDB ID) in my Master Catalog. This effectively expects all the Zidoo devices to also have that same match and if any files have a different match than the cemented one in my Master Catalog, Z-Keeper let's you instantly identify them all and correct them all in a batch update (as shown above).


Approving (cementing) matches in the Poster Wall itself:


Beta 8 is by far the most significant update to the application to date. I hope to have it released within a week.
There's quite a bit more to it than what I've shown here so the regression testing is taking a lot of time.
Thanks for your patience.

- Chris

 

I need to re-organise my storage and have a lot of files that need to move from one NAS to another. It'll be about 50~60% of my collection. If I create a Win10 virtual machine and install Z-Keeper, will it help me with this, without having to do any rematching at all?

The idea being, that I'd like to preserve all the database contents on the Zidoo, including the watched state, custom collections, etc. and have them updated to reflect new locations of the files. The only things that would change is the underlying pathnames from "userA@NAS-One:/path-one/(Movies|TV)/*" to "userB@NAS-two:/different/path/(Movies|TV)/*". There won't be a neat pattern as to what will move from one place to another - it'll just be ad-hoc selections.

I can't just move the whole source, since some items will stay behind and some will move.

If Z-Keeper isn't the tool for this, can anyone recommend a suitable method?

 

This is a good use-case and Z-Keeper will certainly be able to help with this in later releases, but not yet.
Perhaps someone else has a better idea in the meantime, but if you have the Zidoo export the NFO and poster art for its entire catalog then after you move the files you wish to move (the mkv will move with the nfo and jpg artwork), it should re-marry them back to the proper matches (file-to-movie).
However...
The Zidoo HT database contains the Watched state a few other data elements that are not supported in the Kodi NFO standard so these data elements will be lost for the movie files you have relocated.

The Z-Keeper concept is designed to handle this scenario, however, but it will be a feature I add later after the more principle features.