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Topic: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager? (Read 5159 times) previous topic - next topic
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Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Videos seem a fairly natural fit for the poweruser management tools and UI of foobar2000. Has anyone tried using foobar2k in such a way?
   
The main problem I can see is thumbnail support, since Windows generates them itself when loading a directory. If there was a way to detect/force Windows' thumbnails in foobar2k I'd switch from using the standard File Explorer since it would offer a variety of useful inline tagging abilities and filtering. Also the files would have to be set to open by default in an external program.

Alternatively there may be a way to embed thumbnails in the video containers themselves. Could find this on Stack Exchange but the linked article is dead. Would be interested to know if there could be a foobar2000 solution.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #1
Has anyone tried using foobar2k in such a way?
No. There are much better alternatives for classical video playback. Some of the database/tagging tools would be desirable in other programs but it doesn't change the fact that foobar was not made with video playback in mind and would be a major pain to make it even remotely usable. Exception are perhaps the youtube playback components.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #2
No. There are much better alternatives for classical video playback. Some of the database/tagging tools would be desirable in other programs but it doesn't change the fact that foobar was not made with video playback in mind and would be a major pain to make it even remotely usable. Exception are perhaps the youtube playback components.

The topic was about management, not playback. I mentioned the files would have to be opened in an external program.

The usefulness of foobar2000 as a management and tagging tool for videos is the reason for the topic, since tagging videos via filenames or directories isn't anywhere near flexible as what is available for audio files and apart from thumbnail support was wondering if anyone had tried using foobar2000 as such.

Was also interested in what might be possible for thumbnail support, but that's covered in the OP.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #3
You can make foobar2000 add video files to library and even write tags to them, using foo_input_exe and ffmpeg. But some video files can become completely unplayable after tagging with foobar.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #4
You can make foobar2000 add video files to library and even write tags to them, using foo_input_exe and ffmpeg. But some video files can become completely unplayable after tagging with foobar.

Don't MP4 files share the same tags as M4A (audio), or is it that some players have issues with certain tags added? I'd say around 80% of the videos I have are using an MP4 container.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #5
foobar2000 can handle mp4 out-of-the-box if audio steam in them is aac. If audio is not aac (ac3, dts for example) , you will need appropriate dcecoder.
Anyway, why you wouldn't test it yourself?

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #6
foobar2000 can handle mp4 out-of-the-box if audio steam in them is aac. If audio is not aac (ac3, dts for example) , you will need appropriate decoder.

Good to know.

Anyway, why you wouldn't test it yourself?

Mainly to see first if there were any who had tried it and could speak of any experience or problems they encountered. Reading that videos can become unplayable when tagged incorrectly due to incompatible audio streams is such an example.

Also since foobar2k can't separate it's monitored directories into separate playlists it's more difficult to divide directories by content. It's possible via formatting in components like Facets, and I do use it but it's not always ideal. I ran into this problem before for Podcasts and had to settle on the Playlist Bind component which doesn't auto-update changes.


Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #8
But you can separate tags from files using foo_tags: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,97164.0.html , https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_tags

This would be perfect for metadata exclusive tagging. It's hard to know how I would adapt in my use. Currently I write the 'genre', category, author, description/tags, and source in the filenames for organizational and search reasons. So ideally I'd want to use Mp3Tag for some initial filename re-formatting probably by moving the descriptions into a comment tag, and the author and source to custom fields to keep the filenames leaner and continue the bulk of the formatting in the metadata.

In the case of foo_tags there also may be the issue of uniquely ID'ing the video files so the database doesn't fall out of sync with real changes to the files. I frequently experience this with the Playback Statistics component where even some small updates to files cause the Playback Statistics data about a track to be lost. Not sure how it would handle directory restructuring, either.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #9
Hi @Coreda , have you made any progress with this ? I would also be interested in using foobar's tagging abilities for video management only (NOT video playback - just opening the containing folder would be enough for me).

I have thousands of videos, from most if not all known video formats, and I just don't know how to manage them, besides the usual folder hierarchy and "tags in file name" tricks. However that is clearly insufficient. My video library right now is a huge mess, while my audio library is perfectly tagged thanks to foobar.

Nowadays, video files should be treated exactly as audio files, with extensive tagging and such. I am desperately looking for a video management software (again, NOT a player) that would offer such abilities. Does such a software even exist ?

foobar would be perfect for that, if only there was an EASY solution for tagging all kinds of video formats without some of them becoming unplayable (so without writing tags to the video files). The proposed foo_tags component doesn't look easy and I can see some potential problems. A centralized tag database handled by foobar would be better, don't you think ?

Otherwise, how about encapsulating all the videos into mp4 or mkv containers ? (without reenconding of course). Could that work tag-wise ?

Thanks in advance for your help :)

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #10
Foobar movies manager? Yeah I did that, didn't pursue it any further as I saw no real use in it to warrant further effort.
Made a test layout with columns ui with playlists, playlist viewer, library tree, image brower and infos. Click action in the el playlist launched vlc player via foo_run. This is what it looked like.
Just put all in an mkv container. Foobar can tag the files (the audio part) and they play in vlc without any issue.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #11
Then you have this thing, now renamed Chimera:
 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,113166.0.html

It kinda makes sense to use fb2k to play what fb2k can tag, but frankly what I miss the most, is a way to auto-tag DVDs.
I have a lot of music DVDs, and I once tried to batch convert to .mkv only to find out that e.g. Discogs is not half as useful - Discogs users enter songs in "human natural song order", and not in chaptermark order, and all for sudden there is something in between or before or be-annoying.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #12
I think proper video management would require a plugin which does not exist at this time, AFAIK

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #13
foobar would be perfect for that, if only there was an EASY solution for tagging all kinds of video formats without some of them becoming unplayable (so without writing tags to the video files). The proposed foo_tags component doesn't look easy and I can see some potential problems. A centralized tag database handled by foobar would be better, don't you think ?

Yeah the thing to watch out for is trying to tag the video files themselves since after doing some encoding myself any videos encoded with 'faststart' (or non-Mp4 equivalent) for browser/streaming optimization would require re-encoding since it places the metadata/subs at the beginning of the file. Hence why some files 'break' when tagging them (there could be other causes but that's the one I know of).

Haven't looked at doing the foo_tags method since I prefer tagging the files directly for important tags and often rename files. I suppose wrapping the videos in another container could work, though I have so many of them :p

Currently I still just name the files in my usual method which keeps almost 4,000 of them all organized in a single directory, and search for them using Everything. Oh, and for looking at recent videos I also use File Explorer's Sort By and Group By to group them (eg: Today, Yesterday, Last Week, etc).

Foobar movies manager? Yeah I did that, didn't pursue it any further as I saw no real use in it to warrant further effort.
Made a test layout with columns ui with playlists, playlist viewer, library tree, image brower and infos. Click action in the el playlist launched vlc player via foo_run. This is what it looked like.
Just put all in an mkv container. Foobar can tag the files (the audio part) and they play in vlc without any issue.

Very cool.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #14
Foobar movies manager? Yeah I did that, didn't pursue it any further as I saw no real use in it to warrant further effort.
Made a test layout with columns ui with playlists, playlist viewer, library tree, image brower and infos. Click action in the el playlist launched vlc player via foo_run. This is what it looked like.
Just put all in an mkv container. Foobar can tag the files (the audio part) and they play in vlc without any issue.
@jazzthieve , that looks great ! Thanks for your input. I could probably achieve a similar result with DUI.

So the key point would be to put everything in mkv containers. A batch converter (wihout reencoding, obviously) should do the trick. This one for example : https://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/04/change-video-formats-to-mp4-or-mkv-quickly/
I am however worried that such converter can only handle a limited number of video formats. What about old .rm files for instance ? (or many other formats)

And what about the tagging ? Did you do it yourself ? That looks like a tedious work (all movie info, titles, dates, names; etc.). Or is there an online tagging database such as for audio files ?

Ultimately, I wonder if other software such as JRiver would be more appropriate for such purpose (or an equivalent free software with extensive tagging abilities, if there is one).
I'm undecided right now.

Re: Anyone tried using foobar2000 as a video manager?

Reply #15
I only used mkvmerge and yes all tagging was done one by one (within foobar)). Wmv files won't work for example since mkvmerge can't convert those. Most files were mp4 and had no problem with those after converting to mkv both in playback and tagging. I have no idea about .rm files.
And yes, you're right, there is other software that is probably more appropriate, don't ask me which one because I'm not using any. I only did this foobar project to testing purposed and see if it was possible to combine music and movies into one config without getting into each other way (it wasn't).