The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I would like to have a few options to control the display of media titles.

1) optionally disable splitting the title into artist, album, title.
I use VLC exclusively for watching videos. So, there is no such thing as an "Album" or an "Artist", only a title. That's why I remove the unneeded columns from the playlist window.
But if I have some series, most videos have a title like e.g. And even if I remove the first hyphen after the episode number, it still spilts after "day three" or even after "Fred".

I know the title spiltting was intended to be a feature that's useful for music. But there is one thing I always say about features like that:

You can only call it a feature if the user has the option to turn it off.

2) optionally use the title from the playlist (if included) instead of the metadata included in the file.
Most of my videos are created by myself: TV recordings from VDR, then cutting out the commercial breaks. For my own videos, there is no need for such an option.
But to save some working time, I share videos with some friends. I'm recording and cutting "Big Bang Theory", another one is doing "Two and a Half Men" and so on ...
So far, I could not convince a few of them to add either meaningful metadata or no metadata at all.
And I have heard rumors about videos downloaded from the web where the title in the metadata is the name of the release group instead of the episode name.
So, overriding the metadata title with data from the playlist would help not only me.

I think 1) applies mostly to the title in the playlist window, while 2) applies to the title bar as well as the playlist window.

Aloha,

I have a large collection of videos from friends, family members and students, some of which have the program name (from eyeTV) or the program used to encode (re-encode) them in the meta-data. So, for example, while browsing and playing multiple files I see " Filename" or "Big bang theory" in the playlist (as another user pointed out) ten or twenty times for the video's I've got queued up. (i.e. no meaningful indicator of which episode / number is next) So… it would be extremely helpful if there were an option to display the actual file name ("john_doe_assignment1.mp4" or "Big_bang_roommate_connundrum.m4v" in the title bar and play-list rather than erroneous metadata.

And, yes, I know in an ideal world the metadata would or should be correct, but with a heterogeneous source of video and audio files from users who may not know how or are too lazy to enter metadata (or whose platform/encoder doesn't do it right) having the ability to edit the meta-data OR display the actual file name would be much appreciated.

mahalo,
Kimo

Yes, that would be a valid option, too.

So, if Imerge your proposal with mine, the options would be:

• Title from playlist (if any)
• Filename
• Title from file's metadata

Maybe the best way would be to specify some kind of a priority (like the boot order in BIOS setup) instead of selecting one option.

But let me explain a bit more detailed the way I use playlists and how they can be used for titles better than filenames:
For TV series, I usually create a playlist per season. To create the file list, I open the first episode, then Drag & Drop all further episodes to the playlist window. Then click on the player window to give the focus to it, and save the playlist with Ctrl-Y.
I am using the m3u format because it is the easiest to edit. And editing is always necessary
If you look into an m3u file you will find an #EXTM3U header, and after it two lines per episode:

• one #EXTINF, containing the length in seconds, a comma, and the title
  (VLC stores the filename, but the title is editable)
• and one with the full path of the file

In the #EXTINF line, I change the title (and that's what I suggest to use by VLC).
In the file line, I remove the path and leave the filename only. I prefer relative filespecs. But you can leave this line as is if you don't mind having absolute filespecs.

This way, the title can differ from the filename, allowing you avoid blanks and national characters in filenames, but still have them in the displayed title.