[harryhazzit]

I have over 1000 films on blu ray/dvd/various movie files all of which XBMC seems happy playing. I want to have them all listed in the XBMC Video folder with artwork thumbnails so I can visually search.

For each disc or file I have labelled a housing folder with the movie title (ie. "Birds, The" or "All The President's Men" or "Inception" occasionally with a second tier of folders for "Feature" & "Supplementary" if there are 2+ discs for a film)

As far as I'm concerned, the BDMV files or VIDEO-TS etc. which in turn contain a multitude of files all of which are irrelevant when it comes to sourcing artwork and create huge problems for scrapers when they mop up all the sub files (all my video-ts files apparently require Videodrome artwork, other entries such as "Alice In Wonderland" have 100+ duplicates which can only be deleted one by one!)

Isolating the folder name seems the logical thing to do but if the meat of the film is 1 or 2 levels down then it says "No video files found in this path!" so I can't even apply movie posters manually.

Other films don't show up at all in library mode at all, my guess due to XBMC believing they have invalid path structures.

All I want is a scraper that will look at the top folder name and source me thumbs and movie info for that name - nothing deeper. I don't mind manually updating a few that get away. I don't want to mess with the disc structures.

I had a brain wave - use aliases for every movie folder then turn off the hard drives containing the discs. That way I can just target folder names and avoid the red herrings the scrapers keep picking up. Again - "No video files found in this path!"

This should be so simple. What am I doing wrong?

I'm on Mac OS Lion.

[Ned Scott]

Moving this over to the general help forum since it's not really Mac specific, and we'll get more exposure of your thread this way. I'm certain there's an easier way to do this, but the details escape me right now (time for sleep, methinks).

[PatK]

Welcome aboard... hope you find this posting again. Of course XBMC is the kind of program that likes to organize stuff that has been dumped into a HDD in wild abandon and make some sense of it.

Without addressing your eureka brainwave moment.. You've pretty much handled your collection correctly. I've found that if you don't want to use sets e.g. a James Bond collection.. and prefer to have a folder labelled 'James Bond' and then sub folders with videos of each, you'll need to have at least one video showing up in that root folder for the scraper to be able to see the sub folders and recognize the parent folder with a cover. In this case I found a James Bond biography video.... and made a custom 'generic' James bond cover and copied it into the folder as folder.jpg and with recursive scans all my James Bond covers and backdrops are looked after.

I guess you can say this is a failure of XBMC in someway, but for the fellow who has movies thrown in with system files, games and junk, I hope you can see why this kind of scraping was designed to not pick up folders without videos. It's a minor irritant that challenges me to bring order to how I set up my shares.

Re: Your issue with VIDEO-TS are not something I have a problem with, I use handbrake and turn them into .mp4 or .mvk's but this question has been answered before. A comment by a high posting dev mentioned that using Google search on the forum is better than using the forums search.

Kinda wordy... sorry for that.

[jmarshall]

The problem is your "feature" and "extras" folders. When you have "use foldernames for lookups" on, then XBMC uses the name of the folder that contains videos for the lookup: In your case this is "Feature" or whatever, whereas what you want is the NEXT folder up.

Get rid of those folders and all will be good. If you're not prepared to do that then try scanning with "use folder names" turned off - it *may* do the trick as the stacking will take care of the VIDEO_TS stuff.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[harryhazzit]

Thanks guys for your help - always amazed how generous people are with their time online!

Pat - I've tried using 'dummy' movies (just small 2mb mt2s files which i've renamed 'for your eyes only.mt2s' for example) but scraper doesn't find it even when placed directly inside the housing folder. As for using handbrake, problem with that is you loose quality in the conversion.

Jonathan - 'use folder names' turned off seems to find even fewer posters...

Any other thoughts? All gratefully received...

[PatK]

Try renaming the file to filename.ts see if it flies.. If you look at the 'movie information' you should see a path to the file, and if that doesn't play... it's not a video file in the format XBMC likes. I suspect you have non video files that are causing XBMC to trip up...

[elconcho]

Hi harryhazzit,
I have exactly the same issue with my collection.

My structures like:
movie-name-folder
- VIDEO_TS
- - VIDEO_TS.IFO...

result in the poster info only showing up on the IFO file within the folder.

My structures like:
movie-name-folder
- movie.iso

result in the poster info only showing up on the iso file, but the thumb shows up on the parent folder without fan-art

I can't create a scenario where the thumb and fan-art show up on the parent folder named for the movie.

Did you ever find a workable solution to the problem?

[harryhazzit]

So this is driving me crazy! Every time I attempt to do this simple exercise I give up and just play files manually... any help HUGELY appreciated.

I've imported/ripped my DVD & Blu Ray movie collection onto my Drives. Literally 1000+ films.

Issue number 1 - I have just ripped the complete discs as I don't want to recompress using Handbrake etc. Why should I need to if XBMC is so good at what it does? I have to point XBMC at the individual movie files in the Blu Ray stream or right click the DVD video_ts folder and press play. Isn't there a simpler way of playing my films, ideally with menus etc intact?

ENFURIATING Issue number 2 - I have been trying to use scrapers on my ripped discs for artwork. Each disc rip folder has been carefully named (ie. HD/American Gangster) within that folder is the standard Blu Ray full disc contents which totally confuses scrapers. I just want to allow XBMC to do a pass which will pick up the top folders and ignore all the gubbins inside it. Unfortunately, it seems XBMC tries to be too clever and ignores everything I've done to make it easy to scrape. How do I say - XBMC, please will you scrape these lovely folders that I've named for you and just don't look inside?!!!

I'm on a Mac (Mountain Lion) using XBMC (Eden) and doing this one by one is not going to happen - days would be required.

[Ned Scott]

Issue number 1- you are using File view (Videos -> Files) instead of Library view (Movies).

Issue number 2- When you "set content" on your movie folder (such as "HD/"), make sure "Scan recursively" is unchecked. That will tell XBMC to stop looking inside the folders.

[harryhazzit]

This appears to be working now, perhaps in part due to an update to Frodo - the resolution for me was...

Just importing my movie file hard drives wasn't enough... I had to set content (by right clicking each hard drive) after import and then deal with the scraper options.

The Movie View (which makes everything make sense) only appears after you have set content. Aliases don't work but in Movie View all the films from the different HDs are combined into one list so that's fine. If you have empty folder that you want to cheat XBMC to see and scrape - simply put a tiny .mov file that's a couple of seconds long inside and then scan recursively - it should get picked up.

For some reason, XBMC doesn't like 'Artist, The' - it prefers 'The Artist'.

Thanks for the help!