Z-Keeper.com - Master your Zidoo media library

I think of a "Local DB" as the snapshot of the Zidoo and of the filesystem which can change by Acts of God. Maybe Local Backup. But my entire career I leaned into strange names for nearly everything. It makes people remember them. No acronyms. You should have heard some of the conversations we had in the office! But people knew exactly what we were talking about even if was years since the topic came up.

I am about to release Beta 4. A huge improvement over beta 3, including the auto-match feature which is fun to watch.

 

Fantastic! I'm out and about today but I'll have a good play with that this evening!

 

Ha! I found a way to set a custom image for a poster and backdrop. Just creating an NFO doesn't work - the Zidoo has no reason to read it (this is where I wanted to hear from you about your experience because my experience seems different). So now the Change artwork tool breaks the match (API call), copies the custom image to the movie folder, names it properly then creates a complete NFO (all fields that the Kodi standard supports, which actually isn't all fields in the Zidoo, like favorites and watched flags). So long as the Zidoo HT app is running it will automatically find the NFO and use it and Walla! The old matching information is preserved within the new NFO so we don't loose anything except Favorite, Watched, Category assignments and other misc. fields the NFO format doesn't use (at least not the format the Zidoo uses - based on the exported NFO's I analyzed).

 

New name replacing "Local Truth". I had someone tell me that it reminded him of "Truth Social". That was enough to convince me.

 

Now you are going to have people complaining that the word Master is offensive or insensitive.



Don't laugh - plenty of people went renaming their git branches from master to main.

 

I’ll name my catalogue Boss Man Files

Isn’t git offensive ! I’m an old 88 year old git.

 

New in Beta 5... Support for multiple Zidoo devices. The [Scan network] will find them all so all you have to do is give each one a name, like "Kids room".
Each device can have its own set of movie folders, or as you can see in my test example: my Bedroom one shares the same movie folders as my Home theater device, but my Kids room Zidoo has its own subset of movie folders.

 

All great stuff Chris!

Just prompted to download Beta 4 today so have cleared down and will have a test.

Had some really funky stuff going on yesterday - the Zidoo scraper pulling in Chinese and Russian covers (maybe 10% of covers) and then completely missing others despite the fact they were available if you went to change it... It turned out to be a symptom of using NFOs generated by Z-Keeper without local art - possibly to do with lack of <country> tag?

Removed the NFOs, cleared and rescanned and the covers were correct.

 

Nice!

 

Oh, interesting. I can look into the COUNTRY tag. I started getting some odd behavior an hour ago with my Z9X Pro - even with the web UI, so I'm going to let it take a break. It's been running 24x7.
I am just posting Beta 5 with a lot of new stuff.
I will focus on the NFO issue tomorrow. Creating an NFO that works is critical for several reasons now.
Thanks for your analysis.

 

I don't think it matters now - the NFO is fully populated so I think that problem will go away.

Just interesting because there seemed to be no logic to its choice of cover order - even if you query TMDB directly - but it's a Zidoo issue, not yours and won't affect things going forward.

 

Interesting. Ok, thanks. I thought maybe it was related to the Zidoo stopping to process the NFO’s I created for custom poster change, or using the Matching Tools window to create an NFO from a clean TMDb lookup.
methinks my Zidoo is having issues. As a programmer, I prefer consistency, especially from a Black Box. But that’s certainly not what I’m working with here. Even the Web UI started acting strange.
So… I’m calling it a night. Have a good day, Mark.

 

I updated to Beta 5 - This getting quite impressive now!

I tried a full library scrape with Z-Keeper on its own - so I started with a reset and completely empty HT.

This worked extremely well and is fun to watch! - about 5 incorrect matches out of 100 and all but one easy to rematch - the odd one was "Arthur (2011).mkv" which just didn't return a match for that movie - it matched to Arthur Christmas and the Arthur remake wasn't in the list, although the original one was. In this case I had to use the TMDB number to rematch - no biggie and probably more to do with TMDB than anything else.

So I'm interested in why your experience here is different to mine - If I have an incorrectly matched movie and I correct it with Z-Keeper and add an NFO, if you simply rescan (Source, right-click > Update) then nothing gets updated - it's always been like that. At the very least you need to clear the matches in the entire source (Source, right-click > Clean up) or remove the source (Source, right-click, Remove).

There are other ways - you can delete the movie from HT (break the link is probably the same thing) and then restore it and it'll pick up a new NFO or you can Refresh Metadata but both have to be done individually.

Just curious how you usually do it?


I tried the "Change Artwork" tool which is great but whilst it updated on the Zidoo immediately, it didn't update the NFO and add a jpg to the movie folder as you said above.

Given that NFOs and local art are inextricably linked I think it's maybe a good idea that both poster and fanart are automatically saved locally when an NFO is produced? Or at least have the option to do that.

But a great update - I particularly like that you can simply create and maintain the offline library on a PC now. But as I say, it'd be great to see local art in that NFO export.

Of course writing directly to the Zidoo database would be ideal - I may have to ask the devs about that at some point...

 

When matching movies from scratch with Z-Keeper (ie no HT database exists), once you've run Auto-Match there seems to be no way to identify incorrect matches other than checking the TMDB number.

As an example I have a file called "Ghostbusters 2.mkv" (deliberately named incorrectly - it should be Ghostbusters II.mkv)

This gets matched to a documentary called "Time Is But a Window: Ghostbusters 2 and Beyond".

But I can't see a way to identify this in the Auto-Match window - it's identified as "Ghostbusters 2" so appears ok unless you check the TMDB number on the right



Arthur 2011 is the same - the Movie/Episode column says Arthur but the TMDB number shows it's matched to Arthur Christmas, but you'd never notice that. The Movie/Episode column should show the matched movie name:

 

While I'm rolling...

The way I understood Auto-Match was that you Auto-match first then create NFOs when happy with the result.

But if I select all the files that are "awaiting auto-match", hit the Auto-Match button then NFOs are created at the same time.

 

I'm going to get more adventurous tomorrow and go for a 1000 or 2000 title library and process from scratch and see how that goes...

 

I love this bro-mance between you two

 

I've just installed and initial run found everything on my NAS and the 2 internal drives in my Zidoo. Everything was matched and from my point of view no problems, however! see image - So maybe someone could explain why trailers should be matched ? I tend to download and edit my own trailers, so I have quite a few

 

I'm sorry, what do you mean by
"(Source, right-click > Clean up) or remove the source (Source, right-click, Remove)"?

To break the link (tell the Zidoo to forget about a video file), there is this tool...

This is what the current logic does when assigning a custom PM poster file. It creates the new NFO, copies the image file you selected alongside the .mkv and hopes the Zidoo adds the file back into the catalog using the NFO which references the new poster art (or backdrop). This did work for me quite a few times. But I also did it to the movie 1917 but the Zidoo refuses to re-connect it. It's not even in Unmatched. I've renamed the file many different ways. I put it in a subfolder. I copied it so it has a new file ID on disk. Nothing has worked. I've spent a few hours on this crazy problem and the Zidoo still refuses to recognize it.
All this to say...
Break the file-movie link in the Zidoo via the API (which I assume is the same as the Zidoo menu option to "Clean up matching information").
What's frustrating is this was not a problem for the movie 2012 which I kept changing the posters, and 1408. Assigning custom pictures (of my dog), so it broke the link, created the NFO and the Zidoo loaded it back up right away (I didn't have to start the scan). So this inconsistency is frustrating as a developer.
So it seems to me the only option I have left is to nuke the entire HT DB - start over, after exporting the NFO's and JPG's. But that's truly a nuclear option I really don't want to do. Not until I have Z-Keeper further along in development for the mass-restore function.
Any thoughts from someone with far more experience?

When you pick a TMDb image, the NFO works like the the Zidoo exported NFO's: it points to the image on TMDb rather than to a local file.
I could change Z-Keeper to download the TMDb image you selected and write it alongside the .mkv then have the NFO point to the local file. Just seemed overly heavy to download these images when the NFO tells the Zidoo where to go get it.
I can make this an option (checkbox to copy the TMDb image to the local storage, just like a picture of my dog would do).
Thoughts?

So this is where my head has been at today (other than cussing at 1917.mkv),
From what I've heard from the testers thus far, there are 3 very different scenarios that people use their equipment in:
1. A Zidoo referencing files on my NAS that my PC can see, so Z-Keeper's job is to keep those 2 works in sync. And this team has 2 camps:
1a. (me) the Zidoo is the source and I work on trying to keep it accurate. The files are the slave to the Zidoo. Z-Keeper has tools to play with the files only so it can convince the Zidoo to do something.
1b. (you) the filesystem is the source so something like TMM is an approach to get the filesystem all setup so you just give a newly wiped Zidoo HT a pointer to your files and you hope it does all the matching like you expect.

2. Those who have a Zidoo and their movies are on an internal HDD or HDD's that are otherwise inaccessible to the PC running Z-Keeper. Thus they only want the tools to play with the Zidoo and not the filesystem.

3. Those who may not even have a Zidoo but want to manage their movie catalog for Plex or some other method, so Z-Keeper should only play with files and not deal with the Zidoo at all.

It kinda handles all 3 of these scenarios, but it handles none of them particularly smoothly, though it favors (1a).
I'm thinking I really need to put some architectural changes to Z-Keeper to really work in these 3 scenarios more purposefully. It would provide a TMM type functionality for those who don't have a Zidoo.

Curious your thoughts on this - the Big question.

I've reached out to Zidoo twice now and no response, once to their HQ main email and once in their main Facebook page. I have no contacts there and I have some fundamental behavior questions that are roadblocking my progress.
For example, I learned today that if the Zidoo is running the HT app but is not playing a movie or doing anything (other than screen saver) for a "long" period of time, it quits the HT app. This probably caused my problems last night. My wife is using the TV so I couldn't see what the Zidoo was doing, but I know it WAS in the HT app. Alas, it just exited the thing after too long a pause of use.
I also learned that some of the REST API calls to the Zidoo work even if the HT is not running, like loading the full catalog. Most functions that I use seem to work without HT running. But some don't, like setting a Favorite flag. And get this... if HT is not running and I use Z-Keeper to change a poster to another TMDb image, that change is not posted - until I start the HT app and then it does the change. It's like the change is queued up! This is quite surprising behavior! So some answers from people who know this black box would really go a long way.