Well, I must be a moron, but I cannot figure out how to use the filters. I’ve tried every combination of ideas and nothing works. If I leave both ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ blank, when I press ‘start new’ (with 9 recordings on the Tablo) it runs for a second and quits with the status of ‘all done’. If I enter ‘walking’ (no quotes) in the include filter, with 2 episodes of The Walking Dead, I get exactly the same result, ‘all done’ after 1 second. I’ve tried it with quotes in the filter and still nothing. I’ve tried The Walking Dead with and without quotes, same result. What the heck? It can’t be this obscure! I know I’ll be slapping my forehead once I get it.
Try unchecking the box “Skip Incomplete”
Chas
No luck, thanks.
Let’s see if we can figure this out. The way the filters are designed to work is they must match the title starting in the first position. For example, if the title is “the walking dead”, then “walking” won’t match. If you have an include filter of “the walking”, you will get your recording. If you have an exclude filter of the “the walking” you won’t get your recording - even if it’s in the include filter.
Clear? Maybe not, but I’m always looking for useful suggestions. So chime in.
Next issue - not being able to get your recordings using the “start new” button. That button uses the filters, as does the background service, so if they’re wrong, it won’t work.
What happens if you select an episode, then hit “start selected”? That button ignores filters, and should always work IF the recording is really available. Tablo keeps a recording list inside the box, and that can get out of sync with recordings on your hard drive. If you can watch a recording, you should be able to rip that same recording.
PS - don’t use quotes in your filters - you want the actual content of the filter to match the title, no quotes required.
Okay, starting from the beginning. Startup Tablo Ripper, enter The Walking in the include filter, press ‘Start New’, and all I get is the one second All Done status. By all accounts that should work. Sounds like we need to troubleshoot this one step at a time, so I’ll leave it at this step for further help. I’ll include a screenshot so you can spot any possible problems on my end. Thanks.
Oh yeah, if I use Your Selected Recordings with the Start button, it works fine, so I know the software is doing its job on that point.
I sent you a PM with a couple suggestions, but while I was confirming things locally, I found that I’d injected a bug in the filter matching process. Thus version 1.0.9 was just uploaded.
Sorry about that!
PS: Also wanted to mention that filters are case insensitive. So ‘The Walking’ is the same as ‘the walking’.
Since our PM conversation I did get the first Walking Dead going, but after it completed the first one it’s now just hanging without doing the second one. Been like that for about a half hour. When I get some time I’ll start all over with the new version, the Labor Day party has just begun so it will be sometime later! Thanks for the help, and Happy Labor Day to all.
Downloaded the newest version and all seems to be well. Thanks again.
3 Likes
I am happy to report back that the 32 bit version is working flawlessly. Great work!!
1 Like
I may be missing something about ripping to Plex compatibility. So far my ripped files have not been of the NAME - SOMTHING ELSE - S0xE0y format that Plex accepts. Is there something by way of set up that I should be doing? Not complaining, this is a really valuable utility and much appreciated, especially while Tablo 2.2.2 / Roku play back is broken, so I have been ripping to Plex just so anything. Just have seen postings about direct to a Plex folder and I haven’t been able to pull that off.
Sometimes Tablo fills in the season/episode and sometimes it doesn’t. Soap operas are an example of shows I’d expect to have that information, but they don’t.
TabloRipper has two different naming schemes. If season/episode is available, you’ll get the standard Plex TV show naming. If not, you’ll get a generic file name that includes the title, but not s00e00 naming.
PS - Plex still plays those videos just fine. It just can’t get the really cool metadata you’d see if the season/episode was known.
I looked further and found that others I ripped did have the data, so I figure it depends upon whether Tablo has captured the episode data, etc, or not. However at least on my version of Plex if it doesn’t have the shows named properly the whole thing does not show up.on the TV list.
But I did see something curious. I ripped quite a few shows, and they are all listed with the season/episode numbers in the folder I selected in the ripper GUI, but the ones that did not have Plex-compliant naming were put into a sub-folder by the ripper titled “TV Shows”. Not a problem, just trying to learn the system.
BTW: you clearly can read the shows available on the Tablo and off load them. Can you also delete them? If so, you could provide another utility wherein the user selects how many of a given show to keep, and when it runs it deletes those that are in excess of that number, oldest first.
And as others have offered, please set up a Paypal account so I could at least buy you a beer, if not dinner!!!
The Tablo API distinguishes between episodes, movies, sports, and manual recordings. I’m saving episodes to ‘TV shows’ and everything else to ‘movies’. Perhaps I should save episodes without the season/episode data into movies instead?
But this scheme seems to work, at least for me - a universe of ‘one’. So weigh in if you have a better suggestion.
Realizing that someday Tablo will have its own built in support for ripping, I’m avoiding delving deeper into their internals. And that’s what it’d take to count/delete episodes.
Thanks for the kind words.
Hmmmm; I ripped at least 40 shows, and the only ones that went into “TV Shows” were the ones with no season / episode information (A.D. The Bible Continues). All of the rest did have the season/episode marked, but did not go into that folder. However, I did the big rip several weeks ago, and looking back at posts it may be been prior to the Plex naming scheme implementation. I’ll do some more to confirm.
As for those without the season / episode, I think you are right that it would be best to put them into Movies, because Plex is not fussy about naming those.
Sorry to be a pest, but I’m really interested in setting up an automatic system for Tablo-to-Plex. I have a utility in my Ubuntu media server (all it does is Plex) that takes downloaded shows, figures out if a movie or TV, and if a TV show it puts it into a folder with a season number sub folder and renames the downloaded file to be Plex compliant. There is another input folder I call “Media_In” that does not process any torrent-type stuff but just anything that does in there. I guess you could say it pretends it was a down loaded bit torrent show. I copied some of the Tablo shows ripped with your ripper into Media_In and it did a perfect job of creating a show folder, season subfolder, and videos into it. So I set up about six recent shows to rip and set Media_In as the target. However the ripp"… er then puts the TV Shows subfolder (and Movies, but that doesn’t matter right now) into Media_In; I’ll know in a while if Ubuntu can figure that out, or if they get ignored. If ignored, could there be a switch to suppress creation of the sub folders?
I’ll report back later as to how the TV Shows folder got handled.
Well, that didn’t take long. The Ubuntu utility did just fine; moved the shows out of TV Shows, created the name folder, season folder, put the shows in there, then deleted the TV Shows and Movies folders! Terrific! Now I gotta figure out setting up the automatic ripping of new Tablo shows. Man, this is really great.
Rats, spoke too soon. The system did all I described, however it did so way before the ripping was completed. They all got moved with only about 7GB of file, while the ripping sessions are still ripping. Perhaps the ripper followed the moved files and are still downloading, but I doubt it. I’ll let them bake a few hours and see what shows up.
Sounds like you’ve got it doing what you want? To answer your earlier question, unchecking the ‘separate episodes’ option dumps everything into a single folder.
There was an issue with that particular option in an earlier version. Are you running the latest/greatest?
If my utility sweeps them out before finished ripping, I’ll need to save the rips locally, then write a VBScript to sweep them over when done. If separate episodes is unchecked I thought it meant all of the same show base name would be concatenated into one file. If the only difference is having or not having the subfolders, then yeah, that would work fine.