Feature Request: Basic Matroska (MKV) Metadata Indexing (Director, Actors, Characters)

[majklvi]

Hello David and community,

First, thank you for creating Everything – it’s an outstanding tool that has become essential in my daily workflow.

I’d like to suggest a feature that could greatly benefit users who manage collections of films and series: support for reading and indexing basic metadata from Matroska (MKV) video files.

Specifically, it would be amazing if Everything could index these fields:

- Director
- Actor
- Character (as in the name of the role played)

The Matroska format supports structured metadata stored in the <Tags> section as XML. This includes not only generic fields like TITLE or GENRE, but also actor-to-character relationships. Here's an example of how such metadata may look:

<Tag>
<Targets>
<TargetTypeValue>50</TargetTypeValue> <!-- Actor -->
</Targets>
<Simple>
<Name>ACTOR</Name>
<String>Keanu Reeves</String>
</Simple>
<Simple>
<Name>CHARACTER</Name>
<String>Neo</String>
</Simple>
</Tag>

This metadata can be embedded directly in the MKV file and is accessible using tools like mkvextract, mkvpropedit, or even via libraries such as libmatroska or pymkv.

I understand that implementing support for all Matroska tag types would be a large task. But even limited support for just Director, Actor, and Character could allow powerful media-related queries like:

actor:Keanu Reeves

character:Neo

director:Lana Wachowski

Thanks for your consideration of this feature!

[therube]

Just noting that it seems that MediaInfo sees at least some (what I'll guess are) tags in .mkv

Code: Select all

Movie name                               : ARMIN ONLY 2008
Writing application                      : Lavf58.76.100
Writing library                          : Lavf58.76.100
Copyright                                : 2008
Comment                                  : Live registratie van Armin Only in de Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, 19-04-2008
ErrorDetectionType                       : Per level 1
ARTIST                                   : Armada