[DXer]

Earlier today I installed Watchdog to monitor library changes and I think it broke something in my library in rather spectacular fashion. It, or maybe something else I can't explain, completely #$%#ed up my "Extras" folders. My library now has about 30 instances of some movie called Extras instead of the actual Extra stuff like deleted scenes, Marvel "one-shots", blooper reels, trailers, etc, that I carefully named and stored for each title. My paths are typically "D:\Movies\MovieTitle\Extras" for such material.

How can I get all this back the way it's supposed to be? Can I tell Watchdog or Kodi or whatever to ignore anything called EXTRAS, and **ONLY** have the Video Extras add-on address these files? It took me a week or more to set my library up the way I wanted and now the only thing I can do is delete the items from my library (which will remove them from the disk). Gaaaah. Is there a better way to handle this? I don't have another week to sort this out and I'm angry to the point of cursing in tongues here.

[PatK]

Yours wouldn't be the first expletive I've heard after installing watchdog, at this point it would seem that advancedsettings <excludefromscan> and <excludefromlisting> might offer some solution. I have no idea on how to return or undo what watchdog did. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Adv...defromscan

[DXer]

OK, went to that link (above) and sorry, but I don't understand code or HTML/etc. I"m a push-the-button, click-the-menu kinda guy. Watchdog is now gone from my system, but I'm wondering if there's anything less offensive that will monitor for new shows/movies at pre-determined intervals?

[PatK]

I think that Kodi is set-up to scan the entire library once in a while, so you should get automatically new arrivals in that scan, then using most recent should give you the last bunch.

[Milhouse]

No, Kodi will not automatically scan for new content. It will periodically refresh thumbnails of already scanned artwork, in case that's what you are thinking of.

[black_eagle]

Checkout this addon http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=119520 by robweber. You can set it to update every hour if you so wish and you can do both libraries or only one. Also has options to update only specific paths and to only run if XBMC is idle.

It runs on my main rig every four hours to update the video library, and I've never had any issues with it.

[jjd-uk]

Removing items from the Library will not remove them from the disk, you should be prompted on the action you want to take. If you not confident then practice by identifying the file location using Movie Info and copy else where before doing the remove, then once you're confident in what is happening you stop backing up the file location first.

[DXer]

The problem is that anything in a folder called EXTRAS is now identified as the HBO show called Extras: The extra-special series finale (2007), and there doesn't appear to be any way to override it. Even with Watchdog gone off the system, I ripped a new Blu-Ray and added an Extras folder for bloopers and got yet another instance of this HBO thing, whatever it is. How can I tell Kodi to completely disregard every single one of these things and not identify any new ones?

[DXer]

Update: I just went through this now for the second time. I deleted every one of the 32 "Extras" entries in my library. Shut down Kodi and restarted .. and every damned one of them came back again. Somehow the bad info from Watchdog corrupted something, somewhere that I can't find. I need to purge that garbage once and for all. Any ideas? This just wasted about 90 minutes, and I can't seem to batch-delete them either, so one at a damned time. At this point, I'd give major money (as in mid-3-figures) for a software/hardware solution that didn't require me to spend 2 hours of screwing around with the setup for every hour of watching! One good locked-down piece of software that works 100% reliably, as my cable box does. MediaBrowser, Plex, now Kodi are all fiddlers' paradises. I need one solid, reliable and properly-functional piece of playback software; money really isn't an object but extreme functionality is. The family is getting into shouting matches because "it's always something". Any help greatly appreciated but the shouting matches here are extreme because nobody can ever get Kodi to behave. The Watchdog fiasco just causes a 3 hour fight with the wife because it corrupted her library as well as mine.

[Milhouse]

Presumably you did a scan (update library on start?) after deleting the Extra entries from your library - a debug log (wiki) of your scan might help. Maybe delete two of them rather than all 32, enable debugging, then restart/rescan, showing them come back, and upload your log.

[DXer]

Not sure what a debug log is or how to scan one. As you can see, I'm not really a computer guy here....And all that crap came back a third time, so I'm at my wits' end with this stuff.

[jjd-uk]

As in the 2nd post you need to set up <excludefromscan> if you don't want those folders added.

Could you give an example of one of your extras folders with all the files it contains then someone might be able to suggest exactly what you require.

[DXer]

That excludefromscan thing you linked to was utterly incomprehensible to me. See earlier comment...I'm a writer, not a computer guru. I can follow directions but not logic these things out on my own in most cases.

The path to the extras folder is typically:
D:\Amelie (2001) for the movie
D:\Amelie (2001)\Extras for the extras folder

The extras folder contains only the .MKV files for the extras -- screen tests and supplemental stuff for this particular film. Many others are just trailers, some have blooper reels. The Avengers has numerous short features ("Marvel One-Shots"), so it varies depending on the movie. There is nothing except actual video files (.mkv, .mp4 mostly) in any of the Extras folders, and each Extras folder is nested under its movie to make the "Video Extras" add-on work.

NOTE: Everything was fine before Watchdog, so whatever that add-on mangled is what needs to be unmangled. It didn't appear to add any metadata, fanart, pictures or anything else to the Extras folders themselves. It just seems to thing the word "Extras" means something other than what the Video Extras add-on needs to make work, if that makes any sense.

---

I guess maybe to distill this down to one simple question, is there a master table or file somewhere where I can edit the association between anything called EXTRAS and the unwanted garbage that Watchdog spewed out of its own volition?

[wgstarks]

Sounds like you need to add this to your advanced settings file-

Code:

<advancedsettings>
<video>
  <excludefromscan action="append">
    <regexp>-extras-</regexp>
    <regexp>/Extras/</regexp>
    <regexp>/extras/</regexp>
    <regexp>[\\/]Extras[\\/]</regexp>
    <regexp>[\\/]extras[\\/]</regexp>
  </excludefromscan>
  <excludetvshowsfromscan action="append">
    <regexp>-extras-</regexp>
    <regexp>/Extras/</regexp>
    <regexp>/extras/</regexp>
    <regexp>[\\/]Extras[\\/]</regexp>
    <regexp>[\\/]extras[\\/]</regexp>    
  </excludetvshowsfromscan>
</video>
</advancedsettings>

Make sure you restart XBMC after creating/editing the xml file.

---

This is all described in the instructions for installing and setting up the VideoExtras addon.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add-on:VideoExtras

[DXer]

Man, you folks sure know how to make life hard for the non-techno-elite. I'm really not trying to be daft (although I'm afraid I'm succeeding wildly, alas), but this is material best suited for computer engineers not regular non-power-users who are just trying to not get a corrupted computer system after adding a wayward program. I am comfortable editing actual things whose hierarchies I clearly understand or are obvious, but this ain't one of 'em. I think I got it edited right but darned if I know....

I had an advanced settings file and it now looks like this. Will this work? What else do I need to do or will it now just not re-add the Extras?

Code:

<advancedsettings>
    <fullscreen>true</fullscreen>
    
    <musiclibrary>
        <itemseparator>/</itemseparator>  
    </musiclibrary>
  
    <video>
                <excludefromscan action="append">
            <regexp>-extras-</regexp>
            <regexp>/Extras/</regexp>
            <regexp>/extras/</regexp>
            <regexp>[\\/]Extras[\\/]</regexp>
            <regexp>[\\/]extras[\\/]</regexp>
        </excludefromscan>
          <excludetvshowsfromscan action="append">
            <regexp>-extras-</regexp>
            <regexp>/Extras/</regexp>
            <regexp>/extras/</regexp>
            <regexp>[\\/]Extras[\\/]</regexp>
            <regexp>[\\/]extras[\\/]</regexp>    
          </excludetvshowsfromscan>

        <timeseekforward>10</timeseekforward>
        <timeseekbackward>-10</timeseekbackward>
    </video>
    <audio>
        <timeseekforward>10</timeseekforward>  <!-- Time to seek forward in seconds when doing a short seek.  Defaults to 30. -->
        <timeseekbackward>-10</timeseekbackward>
    </audio>
    <navigatevirtualkeyboard>true</navigatevirtualkeyboard>
</advancedsettings>

Again, THANK YOU to all who are helping; unfortunately I am not at the knowledge level of many of you good folks here and I have little understanding of how this all works. I'm really just after something simple that works to the point young children/grandchildren and an annoyed wife can navigate as if it was a box sold by the cable company rather than a cobbled together old PC. I'm about 75% of the way there, but there's still too many user-stability problems (like Windows or notifications popping up in the middle of a movie, sync issues (now resolved, thankfully), and just BAD source material in MKV that skips or stutters or looks like the TV has a diffuser screen in front of it (supposedly high resolution 720 or 1080 shows that are one step above SD). It's still a long, hard row to hoe! Thanks once more!