TVRename Review

Here at The Media Viking, we are always testing new software and looking for even newer applications to improve our home theater experience. Since I’ve been using Ember Media Manager to manage, scrape, and organize the nfo files for my movies, I was left looking for something similar to handle the TV shows. I stumbled across TVRename and it seems to be working wonderfully for me. A quick and simple install gets you organizing your large TV collections easily and effectively.

Features:

- Rename files, using data from thetvdb.com
- Check if you’re missing episodes in your collection
- Tell you how long until the next time a show airs
- Monitor your library of folders for new shows and seasons
- Copy files from where you download them to, to fill in gaps in your main collection
- Un-name files, using names in a .torrent file

TVRename has been great for helping rename my large collection of TV shows into a standard and proper format and did it in minutes. It also pulls down the series posters and creates the nfo files for you. It should help out greatly for getting things sorted before adding to XBMC.

So far, one of the only “major” issues I have found so far is with the check process. Once you add your folders and click check to see what can/needs to be renamed and pull down assorted info, it does two annoying things.

The first is not a huge killer, but say it shows that there are six seasons of House. It looks for a folder for each season and a specials folder within the House directory. If you only have…..seasons 4 and 5, it will throw up a message about the other folders not being found for the rest of the seasons. Now on the upside, that same message gives you the option to:

-Browse and point it to the folder it is looking for,
-Create the folder then and there for you,
-Ignore that missing folder once,
-Or ignore that missing folder always.

And secondly, the way it handles season folders can be annoying. It looks for a structure similar to:

Show Name
-Season #
–Episode #.avi
—Season #

Now on the Season folders, it will default to looking for the format of “Season 1″, “Season 2″, so forth and so on. In this method, it does not recognize folders named “Season 01″, “Season 02″, etc very well. There is an option to set it to recognize the folders as having the leading zero, but then it doesn’t recognize the earlier format without the leading zero. I haven’t been able to get it to find both formats, yet. So you will have to decide on one or the other and manually rename all your folders in one format or the other. It would be very nice if they were to make it automagically recognize both formats, but give you the option to have it rename the season folders uniformly in one or the other.

Despite these couple minor annoyances, TVRename has proven to be a very valuable resource that has a lot of potential. It will be interesting to see how it progresses and how it will contend with the forthcoming Universal Media Manager which is showing a lot of promise. Why these groups have yet to collaborate on a single decent utility is beyond me, but we’ll see who comes out on top.