September 5, 2007

Setting iTunes metadata for downloaded TV shows

Below is a small piece of thoroughly untested AppleScript (well, it worked for me at least once) that will process files you might have downloaded from a torrent and attempt to parse out show, season and episode information from the file name.Below is a small piece of thoroughly untested AppleScript (well, it worked for me at least once) that will process files you might have downloaded from a torrent and attempt to parse out show, season and episode information from the file name. This relies on files being named in a regular way, but that’s been the case for everything I’ve downloaded recently.

Not that you’d illegally download torrents of course. Not if the major content producers weren’t such jackasses anyway.

My workflow for this is something like:

find and download shows with Xtorrent
convert to iTunes with Movie2iTunes (I’d love to know if there is a better way)
go to the “Recently Added” smart playlist in iTunes and select all the newly-downloaded shows
run this script
grab your FrontRow remote and enjoy!

Opps, I left out “profit”! Feel free to send me stuff.

Here’s the script:

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "."

tell application "iTunes"
    repeat with sel in selection
        
        -- try work out show, season and episode from file name (e.g. Californication.S01E04.HDTV.XViD-Caph.avi)
        
        set tokens to text items of (name of sel as text)
        
        set myShow to item 1 of tokens
        set myEpisodeId to item 2 of tokens
        set mySeason to text 2 through 3 of myEpisodeId as number
        set myEpisode to text 5 through 6 of myEpisodeId as number
        --display dialog myShow & " season " & mySeason & " episode " & myEpisode
        
        tell sel
            set video kind to TV show
            set album to myShow
            set year to "2007"
            set genre to "Drama"
            set show to myShow
            set season number to mySeason
            set episode number to myEpisode
            set episode ID to myEpisodeId
        end tell
        
    end repeat
end tell

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