[300] MovieDater: a movie date mass modification tool

[Nosferatu]

This thread assumes that you don't use NMJ to browse your movie collection, and simply use the file browser and INFO page instead.

If you set your PCH to display file dates in the file browser, the LastModified file system field is shown for every file.
I find it very convenient using that field to store the movie premiere date.
Sorting by file date is so much more meaningful now!

Changing this field can be done with many command line utilities and a SMB or NFS share pointing at your PCH, but since I may not be the only one on earth with some yottabytes of old Bela Lugosi files to manually re-date one after another, I wrote this quick Java routine to do the dirty job for you and me.
The movie release date is retrieved from every .nfo file, previously downloaded via the INFO button on the remote.

Given a Windows machine with a SMB share mapped on a drive letter, simply do as follows:

1. place MovieDater.jar and FileTouch.exe in your Video directory on the PCH
2. in a Windows command shell move to the SMB mounted Video directory and launch the jar file redirecting the standard output to a batch file using the ">" operator
3. launch the resulting batch file
4. delete jar, exe and bat files
   

All media files without a proper .nfo descriptor file will be ignored.

Usage example:

Code:

N:\Video> java -jar MovieDater.jar > launchme.bat
N:\Video> launchme.bat

Sadly Java cannot set this field before 1970, so I had to rely on some external tool instead of a straight call to the File.setLastModified() method.
I chose the "FileTouch.exe" DOS utility available on http://www.softtreetech.com/24x7/archive/47.htm but you can change this to whatever you like, simply by changing the Java code a little. If you work on a Linux machine this is mandatory, since FileTouch.exe is a Windows executable.
Just remember that all DOS command line tools need the SMB share to be mapped to a drive letter to work properly.

I include the source code for everyone to play around with.
Note that I'm nothing like a software engineer, so please be forgiving.

Download: MovieDater.zip

[accident]

Might be worthwhile to make a novice friendly thread n th e nmj forum for what this does and how to use it

[Nosferatu]

You are perfectly right.
I posted here just to show a convenient reuse of something that's already there (the filedate field).
My own tool is in fact just a way of saying "hey, is there anybody interested and willing to write something better tailored to the everyday usage?"
Maybe something that:

• doesn't rely on an external platform-dependent piece of software (FileTouch.exe)
• doesn't rely on any machine other than the PCH itself
  

In my own humble opinion the DOWNLOAD button in the INFO page should do this all by itself.

I mean... what's the LastModified field for? It takes note of the last time the file was updated, right? But why would you need to "update" a document that's non updatable in the first place?
Provided you need to apply any modification to your media, of course you'll create a brand new file, not update the one you started with. So from my own POV that field is not so meaningful for a movie file, thus is reusable without much worry.