I spoke with Reinhard Pointner via email last week (since he’s 13 time zones over from me!) about the project and his involvement in it.

Rich: What is Filebot? What does it do?

Reinhard: It’s really just about renaming and organising episode and movie files. It’s gonna make sense of pretty much any kind of filename and match it against online databases for additional metadata like episode titles, movie genres etc. Next to that it’ll allow you to download subtitles for your files and create or check SFV files.

Rich: What’s the technology stack?

Reinhard: Java for most of the application base, Swing for the GUI and then Groovy as scripting engine for user scripts. FileBot uses quite a few 3rd party libraries like miglayout, nekohtml, ehcache, jna, mediainfo, 7zip-jbindings etc

Rich: What led you to start the Filebot project?

Reinhard: To scratch a personal itch, as they say. Also there weren’t any proper tools for renaming episodes, downloading subtitle or checking SFV files, just loads of half-baked projects. Someone just had to fix that.

Rich: How is it that six years later there’s still more to do? What’s coming in future versions of Filebot?

There’s always corner-cases with the filename-based auto-detection logic but it’s pretty mature now.
At some point it’d be cool I could build a big database of hashes and metadata so files can be matched to episode or movie data with perfect accuracy.
Subtitle upload has been on the list as well for a long time.

Rich: How can other folks get involved in your project?

Reinhard: Quite easily. Just write tutorials. There’s not a lot information out there, especially not good tutorial for various use-cases.

Also the format expressions for episode/movie naming and user scripts for automation can be written easily by advanced users and provided for other people to just copy and paste.

Again, we need tutorials tutorials tutorials and more tutorials.

Rich: Congratulations again, and good luck with your project!