I've made a huge mistake.
But first, the little one...
If I properly understood discussion, then choosing action "Add New Movie" instead of "Change File Path" from the context menu on a selected title in the File scanner, does exactly what are you suggesting as to be implemented?
OIC. Finally. Maybe. I always assumed "Add New Movie" meant "Add New Movie"—not "replace existing file with this file and rescan."
After figuring this out, I decided to experiment further and see if I could improve my scanning routine. My mistake was forgetting I had learned long ago to leave well enough alone. The scanner works fine in a one-movie/one-file situation. A file is scanned and matched to a movie record. If the movie record has no file recorded, it must be a new addition. If the path is not the same, the movie's file must have been moved. But if there are multiple files for one movie, then things become more challenging.
Now, regrettably, I'll have to explain why I have multiple files for some movies. I tend to download, watch and delete. That's not an issue for PVD—it doesn't care if the file in the file path has been deleted. But it is for my media manager. It can only manage information for files that exist. Furthermore, it gets all it's video data from the PVD database, and the common file path is what links each record in the two databases. My workaround is to use a macro that creates a null file with the same name, moves that to a "viewed" folder, and
then deletes the file. Both the PVD and media manager scanners detect and record the change, and the meta data for the dummy file is automatically updated. Strange, but all this works fine.
Things get more complicated, however, when I decide to keep a movie after viewing it. In order to have a record of viewing the movie in the media manager, I have to create the dummy file. Unfortunately, the scanner is not smart enough to propose adding the new dummy file to the existing movie file—it will only suggest replacing it. I can override this by changing the action to "Add New Movie." That will add another entry, and "Same movie" can be used to combine them. That, of course, is not at all practical—it's easier to just manually change the file path. Until recently, this has worked fine for me—probably because the number of movies I keep is small.
I recently started collecting trailers. I decided they'd be worthwhile having if they could be recorded in the PVD file path, and thereby integrated with my media manager. That much works very well. I use PVD to find the trailers, and as they're downloaded, I rename them by cutting and pasting the movie file name. At the same time, I cut and paste the trailer path name back into
File path (before the movie path, so it would play first). I'll probably continue to do this, rather than rely on the scanner to add the trailers.
What didn't occur to me until I had a sizable collection of trailers, was this would "break" my scanning routine. Now, if I attempt to replace a viewed movie with a dummy file and rescan, the scanner is only able to suggest replacing the trailer (which I want to keep) with the dummy file.
I still haven't got to my huge mistake. Some testing suggested to me (incorrectly, it seems), that the scanner could handle multiple files if they were named in the same way multiple disc movies are. So I renamed all my trailers by appending "-1," movies with a "-2" and view log files with a "-3." Rescanning worked—after fixing lots of exceptions. But it made no difference when it came to moving/changing one of those files. So I tried moving them into the same folder and rescanning. It still didn't work. To add insult to injury, the scanner was unable to properly detect the changes when I moved the files back to their respective folders.
So after many hours of recovery, I'm back where I started. It seems I can't record trailers in
File path and use the scanner to detect the change of the media files to dummies as movies are viewed. I'm sure I'm the only one with this particular issue, so maybe I'm expecting to much. But I find it disappointing the scanner does not compare each file detected to the files already associated with a movie, and propose actions based on that. Most of the time, the correct action would be to remove the file reference that no longer exists, and if a file previously referenced still exists, leave it and
add the new file.
And as weak nod to staying on topic... If it worked this way, it would be possible to determine whether a file scan is necessary and, if so, how it should be done (i.e., multiple or single file scan).
