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Indexing and flagging offline removable DVD Video discs in the library database? - Printable Version

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- da-anda - 2010-01-07

pecinko Wrote:Put every DVD, add it to a library and than XBMC will say - you have to put disc labeled 'TJERRY002_CZ' (which is a label on original Tom&Jerry DVD) in order to play this item?

I think technical there is no other way from within XBMC to index "physical" movies - the removable media has to be available to the pc. What could "ease" things up for you might be some external tool that's pulling your ANT or whatever movie library into XBMCs library - but you will there also need the correct label name.

Another way would be the fake movie folder stuff as SPIFF suggested it, but that's about the same workload as you have to write the volume label by hand in the nfo file and therefore most likely have to insert the DVD anyway. But the advantage would be that if your DB is broken you still have the folder structure you can reindex.
But apart from the usecase for DVDs/Discs, storing the volume label is also highly useful for any other removable media like USB-Sticks, USB-HDDs and memory cards - although the possibilitiy for custom labels (additionally to the real label) could be taken into account.

So maybe both approaches (volume label and fake folders) are together the overall solution for offline media in general (be it discs, cards, hdds, etc)

I'm not sure, but I think there might be something similar to CDDB for movie DVDs on the net where XBMC could grab the "humanified" label of the CD/DVD? Does anybody know something?

- luvien - 2010-01-09

Hello,

I'm playing with XBMC since a week or so. Before that, I was using mymovies.dk. With the collection management, it's really easy to add offline movies. Would it be possible to use something like that in XBMC? You manually add a title by placing a disc in the drive or by querying a website and it download all the metadata?

Luvien

- pecinko - 2010-01-09

luvien Wrote:Hello,

I'm playing with XBMC since a week or so. Before that, I was using mymovies.dk. With the collection management, it's really easy to add offline movies. Would it be possible to use something like that in XBMC? You manually add a title by placing a disc in the drive or by querying a website and it download all the metadata?

Luvien

XBMC does not support offline DVDs yet.

There are a few ways to 'imitate' this feature, see my post above as one of the ways to do it. You'll have to put offline DVD number in MyMovies plot field in order to see it in XBMC.

Auto play external MVK's in XBMC Live - ForceTen - 2010-01-13

Just yesterday, I installed XBMC Live on an Acer Revo. I keep a number of my movies off-line on DVDs in MKV format. In my office using XBMC for windows, I'm able to insert the discs and have them auto play perfectly (after first displaying a message stating that the title is off-line and the disc needs to be inserted). However, my Live install on the Acer does not have this functionality. It will auto play standard DVD's just fine but it will not auto play MKVs when placed in the external drive. Is this feature missing in Live or is there a configuration change I must make somewhere? Thanks in advance.

Dan

Offline DVD Collection - Dragen - 2010-07-15

Hi.

I'm new to XBMC, and I really like it. But I'm missing a vital feature, which is really bugging me.

The feature in question is the ability to add offline dvd media to my library without manually creating dummy files (this would take for-wait for it-ever). I have a fair number of movies and TV-shows on retail discs, and since my apartment doesn't allow me to add more shelf space anymore, I need to have said discs under various objects around my apartment.

Now, what I was thinking was that when you insert the DVD or Bluray the first time, a prompt would ask you if you would want to add the movie / TV-show to your library.
If you selected yes, the title in question would show up as normal in your library, but with a DVD / Bluray tag. If you then select play, it would ask you to insert the disc.
The entries for these objects could be stored in a library file, with disc info and such stored in it.

I am not asking for offline storage support, such as USB drives or sticks, as that would require the software to rescan every thing you stuff into the USB socket. Atleast with Windows and drive letters, which tends to change.

I hope I'm not asking for too much, and that I don't offend anyone with this.

- Harry Muscle - 2010-09-24

Hope nobody minds me resurrecting this thread from a few months back. I'm actually thinking of implementing this feature in XBMC.

First I thought of something that would link entries in XBMC to individual DVDs, etc. But I'm not sure if we would have to go as far as associating entries in the XBMC library to individual DVDs since the only benefit I can think that that would give us is the ability to tell the user they inserted the wrong disc ... I'm hoping the user can figure that part out on their own.

I've read a few comments about people wanting XBMC to be able to add a DVD to the library if they insert it into the computer, but personally I think this would get very tedious if you're trying to catalog a few hundred DVDs, plus I'm not aware of any reliable way to tell the title of the movie from the DVD content especially once you start dealing with "custom" DVDs of commercial movies. Plus if you ever lost your XBMC library (upgrading XBMC, etc.) it would prove a lot of work to readd all the movies this way to the library.

That leaves the option of using some sort of file to represent a DVD and dealing with it very similarly to the way we deal with other files. XBMC would just know that when it scans this special file type it flags the entry as being on a DVD (for the purpose of displaying the codec type in the skin) and asks you to insert the DVD (probably present a prompt to insert and a button to play or cancel).

I've been thinking maybe some sort of dummy file with a special extension like .dvd for DVDs and .brd for BluRay Discs. The file would have to be empty (ie: zero bytes) and all the normal rules would apply to it as any other file we scan, so a user could create .nfo files to describe this entry if they wish, provide custom thumbnails, covers, etc.

What do you guys think of this idea? Feel free to provide any feedback, etc. I haven't had a chance to read this whole thread so if you wanna bring something to my attention, please post a comment again. I'll probably start coding this in the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Harry

P.S. I've also started this thread over in the Feature Suggestion section before I realized this one already exists: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=81780

- pecinko - 2010-09-24

Harry Muscle Wrote:I haven't had a chance to read this whole thread so if you wanna bring something to my attention, please post a comment again. I'll probably start coding this in the next few weeks.

Well maybe you should, since you're planning to code it :-)

- Harry Muscle - 2010-09-24

pecinko Wrote:Well maybe you should, since you're planning to code it :-)

Fair enough Smile ... I just read the whole thread Smile

It seems it's more or less a split between people wanting offline media support that requires a user to insert a DVD to catalog it vs those that want dummy files to represent DVDs, just better and more streamlined than the way dummy files for DVDs work today.

Personally I'm on the dummy file side, like my idea of implementing this points out. I really don't wanna have to insert all 100-200 DVDs I have, it's so much faster just to create dummy files for them, especially since you'll most likely have to type out the title of the movie when you insert the DVD since XBMC more often than not won't be able to figure out the movie title based a on an 8 letter DVD label.

Thanks,
Harry

- pecinko - 2010-09-25

Harry Muscle Wrote:It seems it's more or less a split between people wanting offline media support that requires a user to insert a DVD to catalog it vs those that want dummy files to represent DVDs, just better and more streamlined than the way dummy files for DVDs work today.

Maybe we should start by realizing XBMC is not cataloging SW. If we can agree with that, than it's about telling XBMC how to recognize already cataloged content.

a) for those not wanting to get their hands dirty with nfo files, I suggest using dummy file with convenient name ie:
offlinemedia(disc_number_here).avi or maybe even better would be name_of_movie(year).disc_number Devs will know better.

b) Add convenient tag to nfo file <offline></offline>

c) We should put this disc number in DB URL field so it is recognized as offline and it number gets reported for..

d) ..presenting user with message: "Insert disc * in order to play"

Hope this helps.

- da-anda - 2010-09-25

Hey there,

at first I also was one of the guys that wanted XBMC to index my "offline" media by indexing inserted discs. Now I'm also more a fan of having fake files for the case you have to recreate your library. So I like your idea of having 0-byte files with special file type suffixes like ".dvd", ".hddvd" and ".bluray" (is there a need to limit it to 3 letters?).
But - additionally to that, it should be possible to bind the disc label to that file - be it by naming the dummy file like that, or better by adding a dedicated field to the nfo files and in the DB. So like one of the pending patches adding label support IIRC.
For private video collections this would ease things up if the prompt is telling you "Please insert the disc labeld 'Holiday-3'".

By having label support, it should also be possible to index inserted discs - so the dummy-file approach doesn't have to exclude the indexing stuff. I could even imagine that there could be an option to autocreate such dummy files, be it while indexing a inserted disc (would be nice for indexing a single new movie), or via a DB export.
Binding the disc labels/IDs to the offline movies would also have the benefit, that XBMC could show the correct movie infos, posters and fanarts for the inserted discs when in file mode.



While thinking about that feature and the dialog box lately the following idea came into my mind. Wouldn't it be nice if there would a option like:
"While you're searching, would you like to:
- listen to music (using some defined playlist)
- watch the trailer
"
Best would be if those options could be added/modified using addons.

The same options could then be provided for WOL devices while you have to wait for them to become ready (once the WOL feature is implemented nicely in the GUI, but that's a different story).

- pecinko - 2010-09-25

da-anda Wrote:suffixes like ".dvd", ".hddvd" and ".bluray" (is there a need to
What if you have offline music or mkv files?

Isn't it sufficient to have:

Avatar.BR.1080p.(2010).120 for
HD BR Avatar movie.on_disc_120

- Harry Muscle - 2010-09-26

pecinko Wrote:What if you have offline music or mkv files?

Isn't it sufficient to have:

Avatar.BR.1080p.(2010).120 for
HD BR Avatar movie.on_disc_120

You need a standardized extension of some sorts so that XBMC can know what kind of offline media you are talking about (to show the correct codec information in the skin).

Thanks,
Harry

- Harry Muscle - 2010-09-26

da-anda Wrote:Hey there,

at first I also was one of the guys that wanted XBMC to index my "offline" media by indexing inserted discs. Now I'm also more a fan of having fake files for the case you have to recreate your library. So I like your idea of having 0-byte files with special file type suffixes like ".dvd", ".hddvd" and ".bluray" (is there a need to limit it to 3 letters?).

SNIP

We could probably make it a longer extension ... maybe one of the devs could chime in just to be sure. I was actually thinking .dvd and .blu ... I'm not sure what a good one would be for HDDVD, although since it's no longer in production, maybe we should just skip it, after all we're not doing anything for VHS or Beta Laugh

Thanks,
Harry

- da-anda - 2010-09-26

Harry Muscle Wrote:We could probably make it a longer extension ... maybe one of the devs could chime in just to be sure. I was actually thinking .dvd and .blu ... I'm not sure what a good one would be for HDDVD, although since it's no longer in production, maybe we should just skip it, after all we're not doing anything for VHS or Beta Laugh

Hey there. After thinking about it again, we don't need any of those. We would just need support for a ".offline" suffix. Reason is, that XMBC is already parsing the filename for strings like "bluray", "dvd", "hddvd" etc, right? So names like "batman begins.bluray.offline" would work just fine.

The only thing we might find a nice way to implement would be the disc name support within the filename if not present in a .nfo file. My proposal would be the following: "MyPrivateMovies.dvd.#movies1.offline"
So prefixing the disc name with a #.

What do you guys think?

- da-anda - 2010-09-26

pecinko Wrote:What if you have offline music or mkv files?

Isn't it sufficient to have:

Avatar.BR.1080p.(2010).120 for
HD BR Avatar movie.on_disc_120

It doesn't depend on what file format you have on that offline media. So it doesn't matter if it's a bluray, dvd or a mkv on that disc, although it might get a bit more complicated if the media doesn't have a standard type (like bluray, DVD) to start autoplay on those discs. I'm not sure how to handle situations with multiple video files on one disc. I'm not even sure how to index that. I think you would need a offline file for each movie and the name of the offline file would have to match the filename on the disk.

For offline music it might become much more complicated. Just imagine a real audio CD - XBMC would have to look up CDDB or something to find out what's on that CD. While this might be possible, it's impossible for XBMC to guess which songs would be on a custom MP3 disc - so I think there is no way to support those via fake-offline-files. For those you'd need real offline support like for exchangeable USB harddisks - but this is out of the scope of the fake-file-offline-concept - but there should be a pending patch/ticket for this already.