my life as it stands

1.) WE HAVE AIR CONDITIONING! And I have been depressingly penniless for two weeks, but all is forgiven when one sleeps in a room at a temperature somewhat below that of boiling water and the surface of Venus.

2.) To compensate, we are on Day 4 of The Internal Server Error Festival at work. So far, this is what we have learned:

a.) no one knows why they are happening, or more terrifying, why they aren't when logic--oh rapture--dictates they should have.
b.) they don't always display as a giant white Internal Sever Error page.

Here's where things became weird.

After entering info in a text box, the page autopopulates three other text boxes below it at the top of the page. Mysteriously, when loading stopped, nothing was autopopulated, but to the right of my text boxes, in the smooth, completely featureless white space, was a line of what looked like the first fifty characters of an doctype declaration for html, followed by the html tag and head tag on line two, and enclosed in title tags, the words 500 Internal Server Error.

If I selected the first line and scrolled down, an entire html markup was hidden in there up to closing html tags.

Pulling the source, I was surprised to see that the page was peppered with tiny boxes, if you will, of hidden fields stuffed with hidden views and mysterious javascript. I mean, it's not mysterious in that I don't know what it and the views do. Just for the life of me, I can't figure out why all the text box validations and drop downs need to be assigned to views and then hidden in the goddamn page. On the other hand, as indicators of what went wrong go, it usefully told the programmers (and me) exactly where the errors were coming from, so.

3.) I did not know one could be coding blocked. It's like writers block, but even worse, because for me, it comes with an obsessive need to keep making it worse. I finally pulled apart my Mediatomb sorting code and got alphabetization to work, albeit not the most graceful looking code (it is so ugly and so repetitious it makes me want to cry), but it works and autosorts all my TV show folders and movies into alphabetical containers because dude, I have about 2T of movies, videos, and TV shows and scrolling through those on my bluray player's very pretty interface was freaking slow.

Okay, you probably dont know this about me, but I'm really anal about organization. This is where it all went wrong.



As of 2007 and having to buy a new computer so I could finish my final C++ assignment (and recover a virused hard drive the really old fashioned way, with taking it out and using an enclosure after intensive refrigeration), my laptop became a bastion of hideously rigid organization so in emergency recoveries I would never be left in the terrifying uncertainty of having to grab folders from multiple locations in a very brief time. All I need to save at any given time is on one partitioned drive and is limited to documents, folders, and settings. All my media on my laptop is immediately mirrored to my server within a week of download, and I only keep what I'm watching right now on my laptop to save space, so at any given time even at catastrophic hard drive failure, the most I lose is my latest youtube downloads and everything I download I put into a private playlist on youtube so I can find it again.

This sounds good, and for backup it is. But that means a folder system of exacting and kind of creepy specificity at all times, and I subdir like a lifestyle choice so I can be sure if I'm looking for something specific, even if I don't remember the file name, I can pinpoint the folder it's in and figure it out from there. For vids, this is pretty much all I have to work with sometimes.

For all my media, there are seven primary container: Television, Movies, Vids (fannish), Music Vids (official ones from youtube that I liked), Clips, Trailers (I really love trailers), and Parody, which is a catch all for anything I don't know what to do with but I like watching (LED Sheep Art are an example). Television is broken down by show, then season, movies are broken down by BBC, Documentaries, Mini Series, and Theatrical Release (subdirectoried by movie series, aka Star Trek), Vids by fandom, clips by show/movie, Mini Series by show, and the rest don't need subcategories. Again, good for organization, not good for putting up on a DLNA and having to choose between endless lists of stuff and scrolling forever or way too many folders for like, five videos.

Setting everything into alphabetical containers when they appear on the interface seemed like a good idea, but after I got it done and enjoyed the beauty. It's like this right now.

Mediatomb-->Television-->A-E-->A-->MyShowFolder-->MyShowSeason-->MyShow.aaa
Mediatomb-->Vids-->A-E-->A-->MyFandom-->vid.aaa

What I want is that and this.


Video-->Television-->A-E-->A-->MyShowFolder-->MyShowSeason-->MyShow.aaa
Video-->Television-->All-->MyShowFolder-->MyShowSeason-->MyShow.aaa
Video-->Vids-->A-E-->A-->MyFandom-->vid.aaa
Video-->Vids-->All-->MyFandom-->vid.aaa

For reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture that include music having metadata to work with, the default Audio sort can place a single file in multiple containers easily. So you can have this.

Audio-->By Album-->AlbumName-->TrackName.mp3
Audio-->By Artist-->ArtistName-->TrackName.mp3
Audio-->Genre-->TrackName.mp3
Audio-->Year-->TrackName.mp3

So I kind of hate Audio's default for being much, much better at this, but having metadata is freaking magic, apparently.



All of that is to bring me to my question. Does anyone know if custom metadata can be imbedded in a video file that's also readable? I want to go through and imbed fandom as a metadata tag in all the vids I have (which is going to take possibly the rest of my life) and show metadata in all the show files. That would, quite literally, change my life at this point in time. I compiled Mediatomb with three separate programs that can read metadata, so any help here would be deeply appreciated before I begin to cry helplessly over my javascript, which would not be fun for anyone.

Oh God, air conditioning, never leave me again. For the record, it's magic.

Comments

[flamebyrd]

Do you work with ASP.NET? What you're describing sounds an awful lot like some of the more painful ASP.NET applications I've worked with. XD If you don't watch it like a hawk it can end up generating some really wacky code behind the scenes...

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

Air conditioning, lovely, blessed air conditioning!

Hope you overcome your programming woes soon.

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

*applause*

I know of which you speak...the house I grew up in didn't have central heat/AC until I was in my 20s. Which meant in the summer, we boiled and in the winter we froze our asses off (except in the bathroom which is scarcely larger than a handicap stall in a public restroom--some idjit put a gas heater in there. WHY????).

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I have a pretty similar layout of my media drive. 2tb.
TV
Movies
Music
Vids (fannish)
Music Videos (prof)
With a couple of others to store random things.

In each the movies are in a folder, the tv ar in folder by show, then season and so on.

But meta data would be great. In doubt, I toss things into the TV category- a lot of the BBC movies and mini series wind up there. I don't know what I would do if they were deemed movies.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

I spent three days once in random Internal Server Error Festival hell. My sympathies.