[mythtv-users] Video Library vs. Watch Recordings

[Brian J. Murrell]

I've seen this repeated push for the Video Library vs. trying to poke TV 
programs not recorded by Myth into the TV recording library with 
myth.rebuilddatabase.pl for example.

TBH, I find the interface for the Video Library, at least in 
MythCenter-wide, to be significantly inferior to that of the Watch 
Recordings interface no matter which view I choose.

Just having to manually "Scan for Changes" on every front-end is a 
complete non-starter for example.  How do I explain that to the family? 
  "Well it's really there, you just need to tell the PVR to go look for it".

Is there somewhere where I'm supposed to be able to see a TV episode's 
air/start/recording time (i.e. so I know which order to watch them in) 
in any of these views?  Does the video library database support such a 
data item?

I suppose "Retrieve All Details" is supposed to grab the metadata for an 
item?  That doesn't seem to be working.  Neither the front-end log nor 
the back-end log indicate doing anything when I choose that.  Mythweb 
does seem to be able to get the back-end to retrieve metadata for 
recorded programs though.

Metadata grabbing does seem to happen when I Scan for Changes though, as 
I have that selected.  That said, I still don't see any metadata for any 
of my videos.  I don't even see the grabber being run for many of the 
items in my Videos folder although it is run for many items that end up 
returning "No results".

The other big problem with this push for the Video Library instead of 
Watch Recordings is that now anyone wanting to sit down and watch 
something, but not know what they want to watch ahead of time, has to 
look in two places to see what's available.  What's more is that an 
important feature of Watch Recordings that I cannot seem to replicate 
with the Video Library is "what's new?".  With Watch Recordings, I sort 
my All Recordings list by recording date so I can easily see which new 
episodes are available.

Does anyone really find this Video Library interface a suitable 
replacement for Watch Recordings?

All of this said, is there a CLI tool that will add a given file to the 
video library, asking me for things like episode title and sub-title and 
then do a metadata grab for it?

b.