Imagine that you’ve downloaded a number of episodes of your favorite TV show. You’d like to watch these shows on your iDevice, but you can’t because they’re in the wrong format: XviD/AVI or x264/MKV. Perhaps you’d also like to use iTunes’ newest/oldest unwatched options when you sync these episodes to your device, so you have episodes you haven’t seen yet. You can’t, since this requires metadata: the show name, season and episode number.
OCDTV fixes all this. One command will locate video files, determine their metadata, transcode them (if necessary), and import them into iTunes for your viewing pleasure.
I’m crazy about metadata. I like my stuff to be organized, particularly when it’s digital. I could have sucked it up and fixed up metadata by hand for the nth time, or I could have spent even more time making sure I never had to do that again. I chose the latter.
$ sudo setup.py install
Or, if you’re as OCD about your workstation as your metadata:
$ virtualenv –no-site-packages . $ python setup.py develop
$ ocdtv ~/Downloads/TV
If no path is given, it defaults to the directory you’re running OCDTV from.
To transcode, you need a copy of the HandBrake CLI. You can put it
anywhere you want, but OCDTV looks in /Applications
by default.
OCDTV only transcodes to a HandBrake preset, so make sure you have a suitable one configured. The AppleTV preset is a good choice which works on most modern Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc).
While OCDTV can cope with most sensibly-named files, there’s a lot of crap out there, and are likely to be some cases where it fails to extract the correct information from files.
Feel free to contribute test cases which at least document the shortcomings. If you aren’t comfortable enough with Python, to do this, just open an issue on GitHub.
Certain shows (The Daily Show etc) don’t have the usual SEASONxEP structure, but are purely date-based. OCDTV does not handle these at all.
It would be awesome if OCDTV also coped with films, but it currently doesn’t.
If the show is already in iTunes, OCDTV does not yet notice that and skip adding it.
If you invoke OCDTV thusly:
$ ocdtv -p AppleTV ~/Downloads/stuff
Then again with:
$ ocdtv -p iPad ~/Downloads/stuff
OCDTV will add the AppleTV transcoded files again, rather then transcoding with the new preset and adding those.