search

postlund / pyatv

A client library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices
https://pyatv.dev
MIT License
888 stars 100 forks source link

Query: Why isn’t metadata complete? #1826

Open mschwartz opened 2 years ago

mschwartz commented 2 years ago

What do you need help with?

When I use the TV app on my computer, I can see there’s a lot of metadata associated with each TV show I have downloaded to my library. Things like description, season number, episode number, episode title, etc.

Yet when I play one of those titles, very little of the metadata appears in the metadata data retrieved via pyatv. I’m curious as to why this is so. It seems like Apple would transmit all this metadata. Yet using the Apple remote kinds of apps on my tablet or phone, little of the metadata is shown there.

Additionally, when I use the Spectrum TV app, the metadata is sometimes not present, but if I push up on the controller, then down again, it goes to “not playing” to the proper TV channel metadata.

I realize this may be entirely out of your control. But you have your head wrapped around all this protocols and data structures, so maybe there’s additional research to be done to come up with more information?

My current project is to incorporate TheMovieDatabase information into the now playing UI in my app. It would be nice if I could search using metadata retrieved from pyatv - like show name, season number, episode number. With that information, the queries to TMDB would grab the specific TV show and episode information and it could be glorious. Maybe something you might do for your projects and even pyatv.

Thanks for this great library!

postlund commented 2 years ago

I know that a lot of apps provides very little to no metadata at all. Not much I can do about that I'm afraid. By running atvremote with the --debug flag you can quite easily see what metadata is exchanged. If you can find metadata that is there that you want, but is currently not available in pyatv, then I can add it for you.

Apple has a lot more metadata available via iTunes/Music. So I expect that they look up all of the extra metadata via that API:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/iTuneSearchAPI/index.html

Assuming I have some identifier to look up, I could do that as well. But it's not something doing right now.

mschwartz commented 2 years ago

I appreciate the response. It’s just something I think we all should be watching out for. Apple needs to ask the app developers to do more, for Apple’s own apps’ benefits.

What’s odd is that I have TV shows being served locally from a Mac. On the ATV, I use the Computers App to watch. Even though I can see in the TV app on the Mac that there is a lot of metadata there, came from Apple when I downloaded the content. Yet the metadata isn’t available in pyatv. Even Apple’s own remote control apps and widgets don’t show more than we get with pyatv.

Here’s a weird one. I use Spectrum app for live TV. From pyatv, I do get the channel name, name of show, and the logo of the tv network I’m watching. But for the past few months, I’d get metadata like nothing is playing unless i tap up, then down on the remote. Seems Spectrum actually fixed this in a recent update.

Again, thanks!

mschwartz commented 2 years ago

BTW, I went down the iTunes search API rat hole and it’s not very useful unless you are building a store kind of application.

iMDB is extraordinarily expensive. Others are open APIs or $1/month but aren’t as rich and robust as IMDB.

from Apple, I was able to get episode information, but only a brief description and a bit of less useful metadata. Like how much the episode costs to buy. 😕