beet import and 'ignore_video_tracks’ behavior

[apnea]

Hi all,

Just came across beets and was blown away by the complex flavor and deep red color of this super food. I mean the sheer scope and flexibility of this super tool. Testing it out on a minimal set up before let loose for real I noticed the following:

config (v 1.6.0):

directory: /media/foo/music
library: /home/foo/.config/beets/library.db

import:
    move: yes
    copy: no
    write: no
    ignore_video_tracks: no

So, beet import is ignoring an album ripped into ogg format. -vv and logfile options are not providing any info or errors. After much faffing around with forum posts, permissions, file name character escaping etc. it occurred to me to look into the ogg container, and sure enough it has a video stream in it (the album cover)…

When I remove the theora stream with ffmpeg so only the vorbis stream remains in the ogg container beets is happy.

Reading docs again, there is the ‘ignore_video_tracks’ option, but setting that to ‘no’ still ignores the offending ogg files. What about mkv? If I put both streams, or just the audio stream, into an mkv container both versions also get ignored.

So I’m a bit confused now. Removing the video streams is not an issue as it’s very fast and and simple, but am I mssing something here?

Thanks a lot for looking!

[sampsyo]

That's interesting! Indeed; ignore_video_tracks is not quite the option you want here; that controls whether we ignore those tracks in the MusicBrainz database (that is, on the metadata-source side, not the your-files side).

The thing that's rejecting your video-containing files is MediaFile, here:
https://github.com/beetbox/mediafile/blob/ea0558fbfdc7bd99671f0534e593cc5cdb7a8e65/mediafile.py#L1584-L1616

That is, we hard-code a list of file formats we know how to deal with, and those are all audio formats (e.g., Vorbis and Opus). Unfortunately, this might be somewhat challenging to relax…

[apnea]

Thanks a lot @sampsyo, that clarifies it, and I now know what to do. Also, I should have noticed from the documentation that ignore_video_tracks is part of the auto tagger functionality rather than physical files import. Note to self: RTFM. Again. It would be nice though if -vv could say something like ignoring file x for reason y. Then again, this topic doesn't seem to show up in the old forum or here, so perhaps not worth the bother.