Chocolate: Open-Source Media Manager | Hacker News Reader

Chocolate: Open-Source Media Manager

github.com

55 pointsthunderbong35 comments

I'm really hoping that a project is picked up that removes the lock-in and centralized storage of the metadata providers. Having TMDB/TVDB/etc all have a feed of everyone's media content via ip is a privacy issue and potentially a legal issue if the MPAA/RIAA/Whatever target it.

Storing the metadata into something like IPFS+TOR would be amazing for privacy concerns.

Fetching metadata deeds not imply I have highest movies. I could just be testing my movie app.

Looks nice, but never seen so many rules on file organization. A good media manager would be able to sort that stuff out automatically. Am I missing something?

> Looks nice, but never seen so many rules on file organization. A good media manager would be able to sort that stuff out automatically. Am I missing something?

Same here.I want to just name. Seriesname - Season xx - SxxExx- If I have to rename a serie for using an app its a no-go. I will still try it once.

This is an actual good use case for ML.

My attempts at making a media manager/server (like Jellyfin and Subsonic) have shown that it's easier said than done to reliably sort video files since there's not really a standardized way of embeddeding metadata into video files like music files have with ID3v2. I imagine this is because unlike with music which had the MP3 player craze, by the time it became normal for users to have access to digital AV media due to improved storage and networking, locally saved files were bypassed by streaming. So you have to resort to ugly regexes to strip out all the nonsense from a filename (like if you have acquired a movie file from a torrent or something), which has a whole bunch of edge cases. It's made even more annoying by TMDB not having something like MusicBrainz to rank similarity of searches, so you better hope the file you end up with is a good quality string with ideally also the year of release, otherwise you'll probably have to tag stuff manually.

So I can't blame the devs for just expecting the user to sort their movie files beforehand (maybe with a different tool (except there aren't any for movie files as far as I know)). It's the kind of thing that there aren't any good solutions to. Not sure how Plex manages to guess movie files better than Jellyfin (I just ended up stealing JF's regexes for my thing) but since it's proprietary there's no way of knowing what regex magic they use.

For films and TV series, I'm a fan of using TinyMediaManager (https://www.tinymediamanager.org/). It performs a search on TMDB, IMDB etc and you select the best match. It populates an NFO file with the relevant data as well as downloading actors, posters etc and renames the file/folder.

Reliable for all cases is one thing, but it should support scene naming fairly trivially. The approach they are taking seems to lose information that's within the filenames, particularly with movies (i.e. the year).

For scene naming you don't really need to filter much of anything out, the tokens are there to split on already. For TV "<seriesname>\.S<ss>E<ee>\.<junk>", for movies "<moviename (greedy if REGEX)>\.<yyyy>.\<junk>".

Just a strange choice to go with something nonstandard that you can't come back from. It's a barrier to testing it.

Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr are doing great job. Everything is easy and compatible with other system. Jellyfin sometimes needs help with media identification to create good nfo files, but that's rate. Then you can use Tdarr or unmanic to standardise on what the media contains, like, remove languages, hardcoded subtitles and convert to a single codec and container.

Sorting moving like this project suggests: E1.mkv, E2.mkv... yea, no thank you.

Filename.nfo

Jellyfin creates them automatically. But you can adjust them

Yeah, requirement to rename files makes it no-go when you want to continue seeding your Linux ISOs.

  > Looks nice, but never seen so many rules on file organization. A good media manager would be able to sort that stuff out automatically. Am I missing something?

I feel the same way. It's sort of reminds me of Plex. Why are they making the same mistakes (regarding file-organization) as Plex?!

The thing is everyone has different ideas about how files should be named and organized. Plex really wants you to name your media files in a particular way, and I find that annoying.

After all, the Plex server maintains a database.

One should be able to point Plex to ANY media file, with ANY filename in ANY accessible filepath, fill in metadata and organizational tags for that media, and have that info useable by the client. But for whatever reason, Plex instead enforces weird naming conventions on your actual filenames and practically forces people to use software like filebot to mass-rename files.

It doesn't help, of course, that media file formats are a jungle with unreliable garbage meta-data in the files and widely varying limitations on what you can put in there.

I love the video game support, but I have concerns about the 'proper name' requirement for movies. It would require me to reorganize my entire library and lose a lot of information that other apps use. Also, the lack of subdirectories for organizing books is a limitation for those with large libraries. Overall, it seems like your app is targeted towards users with small, non-automated libraries, and the organizational requirements may prevent some people from using it

To be honest, I throw everything into one enormous directly by category without looking. I let a certain app figure it out because there's no value in me spending time to structure things when it's already indexed and organized automatically by the app. I don't need ROMs and not sure how I'd play them across all devices. Is there webassembly MAME?

Which app do you use to automatically index and organise the files?

>Is there webassembly MAME?

https://archive.org/details/internetarcadeturbo

Does this have any clients? That's the problem with stuff like jellyfin, not really the backend server/web interface

Jellyfin has clients. The mobile app and web clients work fine for me.

Yes I know that, I am using them. For set top box the android client is ok too. The rest of the clients are in varying states of ok to not great though and the linux client is a pain to setup for set top box use when I tried it.

That's one of the reasons I prefer Jellyfin over other media servers. The Web UI works fine on a plain browser. No need for a proprietary client.

There’s plenty of need if you’re one of the millions of people that has a device plugged into their TV like an Apple TV , Android TV or Roku. None can use a web interface. This is what keeps me on Plex despite preferring the open source nature of Jellyfin.

There was a discussion here recently[0] where many people recommended Jellyfin in conjunction with its apps[1] for Android, Android TV, Roku, etc. I have never used Jellyfin before but their recommendations made me put it on my list of things to look into.

So what are you (and GP) missing from those apps?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461596

[1]: https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/

I’ll caveat by saying it’s been a while since I looked into it but last I checked the UIs weren’t super intuitive. This is a rare tech thing my entire family uses so that’s a much bigger factor than it usually is for me. I admit there’s also an extent to which Jellyfin can’t win here: my family always knows the Plex apps very well, switching would be a pain and (from their perspective at least) not have any notable advantages.

I use jellyfin with their androidtv app running on whatever the amazon 4k hdmi dongle is that can decode h265/av1 for this reason and that's why I was asking. While we're on the topic, hardware for the tv that runs android, does h265 and av1, has frequent security updates and isn't spying on you nonstop is kind of non existent as well. If someone figured out who manufactures the amazon firestick and can get something very similar with stock android (or even better lineageos) I would pay double what I paid for the amazon spy box version....

Half of the readme is about what technologies this project uses. Why would the first thing about the project be about Vue, JSON and database, or planned move to React? You better give me compatibility with Sonarr and better ways to name files than E1.mkv E2.mkv.

Probably one of two things:

- you’re looking for contributors.

- you’re using this as a “portfolio piece”.

Because it's the readme in the GitHub repo. That's what the readme is for.

what is the advantage of using this over jellyfin?

looks like chocolate supports ROMs

A lot of us have been waiting for a Python project to contribute to because we don't know .net.

Other than that I predict a lot of growing pains. Media management seems simple until you run into a new use case every day.

> because we don't know .net

But Chocolatey is a totally different kind of project. ;-)

https://chocolatey.org

> Other than that I predict a lot of growing pains

Agreed. It's a larger, more nuanced, more finnicky problem.

Previous commenter was talking about the fact that Jellyfin is written in C#/.NET, nothing to do with Chocolatey.

>>"To use it you first need to rename your files"

What the hack

Looks good, but imho too many rules rules on file / folder org

but can it play doom? or download and install packages from the command line on windows?

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