Working, reliable install of Tablo Ripper/MCEBuddy/Comskip/Plex?

UPDATE: See if I answered my own question from the original post. I had “TV Shows” as the start of the custom file renaming as I think that was in the screenshots. By removing it, MCEBuddy should either create the show folder or add to the existing one if it’s already there…I think haha. End Update:

Great thank you, that really helps @Bruce and I have things running. Still one minor (possible) hiccup, MCEBuddy creates a folder in each Plex Folder. Example: My setup is P:\Plex\TV Shows then that directory is filled with folders for each show I have, mostly pulled in from sources other than Tablo. MCEBuddy stores every show inside the TV Shows folder in that directory with more folders for each show. Now Plex picks those up of course but that leads to one question/possible issue:

What happens if I have another program that pulls in an episode of a show already in that TV Shows folder? That would mean there could be a “Walking Dead” folder in each subdirectory of the main TV Shows directory. Maybe Plex handles that fine, but not sure especially if both were to pull in the same episode into the 2 different folders. I can manually move/combine here and there to clean up my folders but I’d rather not have to do that on a regular basis.

I don’t think I have had enough coffee yet. I think I understand what you are describing … But I’m not positive

Would you mind using the Windows Snipping Tool to grab a screenshot of your Plex directory structures? Send it to me via a PM. Once we work it out we can post the resolution to the community.

Bruce got me straightened out. By not specifying a folder at the start of the renaming string, MCEBuddy just writes to Plex directory chosen. If the folder for the show/movie already exists it will place the file there or create the folder if not. I’m pretty tech savvy but this setup has a lot of moving parts. I’m happy to help anyone who needs it. Feel free to ask any questions you want.

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Based on what you found I have updated the TabloRipper documentation and example configuration.

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Anyone have issues with shows from ABC? All my half hour shows have issues. The first few seconds (10-15) are cutoff and then about 30 seconds at the end. I’ve verified the Tablo recordings and the rips from Tablo Ripper are fine. I have the exact recommended settings in MCEBuddy.

I’m trying to get this setup but am running into problems. I’m having these put on my NAS drive (with over 4TB of space available) but it looks like MCEBuddy isn’t reading the free space correctly (from the log: “Destination space -> 0 GB”). Conversions are erroring out with “MCEBuddy.Engine.ConversionJob --> Insufficient destination disk space avalable [sic] in (NAS Drive)”.

Anybody with any ideas how to either bypass the space check, or get it to pull a correct free space?

UPDATE: It appears to be a NAS/network issue. I copied the file I was testing it with to my local hard drive, and it works fine there. Not sure what to check now.

I haven’t tried it myself, but TabloRipper can include the ‘channel number’ in the output file name, which can be used by Comskip to trigger ‘custom processing’ when the defaults fall short.

There’s more information on how to customize by channel on the Comskip site. Might be worth a shot?

My only thought is that MCEBuddy has a service component and it may not have access to the NAS share.

Have you seen the following note on the MCEBuddy site? (mid way down the page). This might give you some ideas on resolving the issue.

MCEBuddy cannot access mapped drive, network path/share or other drives such a google drive, dropbox drives etc in CustomCommands (https://mcebuddy2x.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=MCEBuddy%20Common%20Issues)

THanks @CycleJ I’ll checked that out. It looks like there’s a user supplied .INI for Comskip that improves commercial detection so I’m going to check that out.

New Question for @Bruce or anyone who has faced this : I setup my conversion task for TV Shows and Kids Shows separately in MCEBuddy. Each time MCE runs though, it converts the Kids Shows twice. First using the TV Shows task and then another time using the Kids Show task. That puts one copy in each of my Plex directories (TV Shows & Kids Shows) and causes me to have to clean it up. How do I prevent that? I’m using the Selection Filter - Recording Title Match from the Wiki.

You probably need a corresponding negative selection filter for TV Shows.

If you want to specify a name avoid list, i.e. select all/abc files EXCEPT xyz, then prefix the name selection criteria with ~ operator. E.g. ncis*;~ncis miami* will select all files that start with ncis but NOT those starting with ncis miami. E.g…;~.mp4;~*.avi will select all files except those starting with .mp4 and .avi (https://mcebuddy2x.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=MCEBuddy%20Advanced%20Commands)

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Thanks! Makes perfect sense now. I was assuming (incorrectly) that if one task picked them up the other would not. I think it would help to add this to the Wiki. If anyone follows just as is, they’ll get the same results as I did.

There already is a link at the start of the Kids TV Show section of the wiki page to the section of the MCEBuddy docs that explains how this works. :wink: The MCEBuddy help section has 5 or so small paragraphs on this topic. I didn’t want to repeat all that.

But, I can make it more explicit. :smile:

Sorry! haha. I’m pretty savvy with directions I swear. I thought that going to that link was only needed to do things beyond the examples. That’s my defense anyways :yum:

Yes, I’m positive that’s it, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it working. :frowning:

Click the button I’m pointing at (the red arrow) in this dialog box, that’s where you can enter your network credentials!

I had that setup, but it wasn’t working.

I just figured it out though. For the username, it’s not just username, but “RouterName/UserName”. Once I changed that, it worked.

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For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been waiting for my entire Tablo library (2TB) to be ripped. I’d have to guess that it’s probably only about 1/3 done. We’ve lost power several times and sometimes it starts back up and sometimes it doesn’t. (The new upgrade might help with that.) But now it says that it’s done, and it’s only converting newly recorded items. Yet there is a bunch that got skipped.

Any idea how I can get all of the skipped stuff processed, without having to redo everything?

Right-click on any recording you’d like to revisit, and mark it as ‘new’.

But what if you have thousands? There’s no easy way to have it do just ones that it didn’t do before? Why would it have skipped so many? Could it be ones it tried while the power was out (my laptop would have been on initially, but no network or Tablo visible)?

I can honestly say I’ve never attempted “thousands”!

What it’s designed to do is:

  1. make a list of new recordings
  2. for each one
    A) rip it
    B) if successful, add it to the completed list

I’d suggest a different approach. Pick all episodes in a single show (manually), then rip them. Repeat as necessary.

PS: There’s no path in the code that’d add a recording to the completed list that wasn’t ripped successfully. It sounds like something else is going on.