# Tiny Media Manager
by Seth Kenlon

The trouble with media files is that they are not easily
parse-able. How can your computer tell whether that 8 GB file in your
`~/Movies` files is the latest superhero movie or just your daughter's
soccer game? For some music formats, we have ID3 tags that can help,
but movies and non-ID3 music files don't benefit much from that.

I consider myself more or less an early adopter of digital
content. Any time I can get a movie or album in a digital format, the
better, for me, and since I consume a lot of independent content that
hasn't got the budget for physical releases anyway, it works out that
most of my purchases are digital files. These, I keep on an NFS shared
drive and stream to [Kodi](http://kodi.tv) or
[ncmpcpp](http://rybczak.net/ncmpcpp/) or whatever media client I
happen to be using on any given Linux or Android device.

For a long while, I had devised my own naming scheme for my files but
not all media clients handled that very gracefully; they tended to
attempt to parse the names and determine what the content was based on
file names, or else they'd ignore the names entirely, and sometimes
they'd ignore the file.

I did a little bit of research, though, and discovered that for well
over a decade, a sort of unofficial standard had emerged for exactly
this problem, and in typical open source fashion, there were dozens of
applications available to scan a media library and generate external
meta data files and assets so that all the best media clients could
better parse all the crazy things you throw at it.

The one I've been using lately is **TinyMediaManager**.


## Getting Tiny Media Manager

[TinyMediaManager](http://www.tinymediamanager.org) is an open source
media management tool designed to generate metadata for the media
players like Kodi (formerly **XBMC**) and other clients that use the
same metadata schema. It's written in Java with Swing libraries, so it runs
on Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS, and anything else that Java runs on.

After downloading the TinyMediaManager archive (it will be a `tar.gz`
file if you're on Linux or BSD or similar, and a `zip` file for all
other platforms), untar it to whatever path you prefer. I place my
non-packaged applications in `~/bin`, but it works just as well from
`/opt` or `/usr/local/bin`; it's up to your own management style.

As with any Java application, a hard requirement of tinyMediaManager
is Java, or more specifically either 
[JDK](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html),
[OpenJDK](http://openjdk.java.net/). On Linux or BSD,
install one these from your software repository or ports tree; other
operating systems should visit the Java site directly for downloads.

Once Java has been installed, you can optionally add
`tinyMediaManager.desktop` to `/usr/share/applications` so that it
shows up in your applications menu, or just launch it directly from a
terminal on an as-needed basis with the included `tinyMediaManager.sh`
script (which is what I do, since I only use it occasionally):

    $ ~/bin/tmm/tinyMediaManager.sh &

## Getting Started

When you first start TinyMediaManager, a setup wizard prompts you to
provide it with *source*: a drive, either local or on your network,
containing media. Add your media location and then wait as
TinyMediaManager scans the location.

![Tiny Media Manager startup](tmmsplash.jpg)

It may seem obvious, but in order for a network drive to be added as a
source, that network drive must be mounted on your current
machine. You can't just export the volume as NFS or share it via SAMBA
and have it pop up in TinyMediaManager on another machine; the
computer running TinyMediaManager must "see" the drive as a usable
location. So if you're not seeing your media drive in TMM, make sure
you see it on your desktop first!

The setup wizard also gives you a choice in the metadata format you
want to generate. If you don't know, then it's probably safe to use
the default.


## The Big Parse

The reason you're running TinyMediaManager is so that when you launch
your media player of choice, you get titles and movie poster
thumbnails instead of generic icons and an endless list of
"Unknown"s. That means the next step is for all those video files you
have on your drive need to be identified.

To generate metadata, your media needn't be in any specific layout,
but the closer you get your files to easily-parsed entities, the
better. It helps, I have found, to at least separate TV shows from
Movies. It also helps to pre-emptively recognise when something really
is too independent to be identified; you'll just have to sort through
your [obscure](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbRDEBC36teNzs4nbUw_Mw) [nerd](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC08MSCPIk5InIwVLTQfWfeg) [podcasts](http://scannerdrome.com), collection of
[Let's-Plays](https://www.youtube.com/user/lejonicom), [indie](http://haphead.com/) [web series](http://www.referencepointseries.com/about) and [leekspins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFPmARQHylY), yourself.

In terms of everything else, the very existence of digital media is,
strangely, *still* a hotly debated topic, so there isn't really an
industry-standard schema for naming and sorting. Schemata have
emerged, and at least in my experience it seems that Kodi's preferred
format is the leader.

Once TMM has listed the movie files it has found on your drive, click
the Magnifying Lens icon in the top toolbar to start scraping the web
for data.

Kodi (and many other projects) expect to find one movie per directory,
with the directory title and the movie file it contains being in the
basic format of `Movie Title (Year)`; for instance, in a directory
called `Infest Wisely (2007)`, I can place the movie file `Infest
Wisely (2007).webm`, and half of TinyMediaManager's work is done. From
that information, TMM can accurately identify the movie
authoratatively, and then pull in all the data the web has to offer
about it.

Not provided with such explicit identification, TinyMediaManager makes
every effort to parse whatever you do give it. Generally, it's pretty
smart and will at least propose titles that seem to match up to your
file names. Names like
`infestWisely-jimMunroe-anarchistSciFi-xvid-SD.mp4` might result in
prompts for movies containing the words "infest" and "anarchist" and
maybe a few others, but chances are good that one will be the right
hit, and TMM will let you choose which to use.

![Metadata](1tmmUI.jpg)

Metadata can be sourced from a wide variety of websites, from the most
obvious but not necessarily most reliable (IMDB) to several others,
like [themoviedb.org](http://themoviedb.org), Rotten Tomatoes. You can
even use more than one as a source, which I have found generally to
render impeccable results.

![Metadata](3tmmUI.jpg)

In the **TinyMediaManager** > **Settings** panel, you can even choose
what metadata you want to pull from the web. For instance, I opt out
from pulling data about a movies "genre", or its trailer, or rating.


## Manual Override

Some things, for whatever reason, cannot be identified; maybe you had
to split a movie into two parts, or maybe you've done a fan re-edit of
a film that you prefer to the original, or maybe you've made your own
movie from scratch and the world has yet to discover it. In these
cases, you can manually create your own metadata from within the
TinyMediaManager interface.

Predictably, the **Edit** button is the pencil icon in the top
toolbar. Select a movie to edit and click the **Edit** button to add
or change information about any movie file.

![Editing Metadata](2tmmUI.jpg)

All metadata about a movie or TV show gets saved into the directory
containing the media file. This means that there's a natural
association between a movie file and the data about that file, so
there's no messy database required (although TMM maintains one, but
that's just for its own features) to keep track of what data goes with
what file. It's all on your file system, completely independent of any
one media client, and entirely human and computer parse-able.


## Cut, and Print

The point of TinyMediaManager isn't *necessarily* to be a pedant about your movie collection. The end result of finally getting your movies and tv shows in order is that they look really nice when browsing your collection in your favourite media center.

![The Kodi Interface](kodi.jpg)

There are, certainly, several other media management applications out there, including the terminal-centric [Kolekto](https://github.com/NaPs/Kolekto), [MediaElch](http://www.kvibes.de/mediaelch/download/), and others. Tiny Media Manager, however, balances nicely between providing the basic features plus a few extras that make "offline" (I mean, outside of Kodi, or your media center of choice) viewing a pleasure.