[stew23]

Note that I didn't add the [LIVE] prefix, as this was also an issue on my previous XBox

Just installed XBMC Live on my new Acer Aspire, and am having trouble "scanning content" on more than one subdirectory at a time.

My XBMC Live streams media from hard drives in my desktop computer, and my TV shows folder naming convention goes something like this:

T:\America, etc\Animated Comedy\Family Guy
T:\England, etc\Sketch Comedy\Monty Python's Flying Circus

(T:\ being the 'TV Shows' share/source I have)

At present, I have to do appropriately 40 scrapes to TVDB for XBMC to pickup all my shows. I have to scrape at the "Animated Comedy" level and it will grab Family Guy & every other folder in "Animated Comedy" but don't wanna have to scan the rest of my "genre" folders. If I am to scan the "America, etc." directory I won't get anywhere, neither if i scan the root directory. Basically I wanna be able to scan the root directory & let it scrape all my shows all at once if possible - no matter where they are.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Jaken]

One "update library" should do the trick.

[stew23]

Thanks for the quick reply Jaken.

I just had a look around and could not find "update library". I found "clean library" in the settings though — which obviously was not help.

Can you please give me a hint as to where abouts I'll find "update library"? Cheers.

[Jaken]

Yepp, go to movies or tv-shows. Bring up context menu. There you should find update library.

[stew23]

I'm sure I seem pretty silly here, but I still can't work out what you mean lol.

I've clicked 'TV SHOWS' in the main window... I'm in library mode... where do I find the context menu? What do i click to get the context menu you're talking about?

I'm using the new XBMC with the new Confluence skin by the way...

[stew23]

Sorry, I'm no longer using my XBox remote so didn't find the context menu key (the Window key) until now. But even selecting 'Update Library' doesn't search through all my subdirectories (unless I have previously scanned that show I'm guessing?). In fact selecting 'Update Library' sometimes picks up my 'genre' folders as shows they're not based on keywords.

Cheers for your help Jaken. Any other suggestions from anyone?

[Hitcher]

Have you added all the separate genre folders to the main TV Show folder that XBMC scrapes?

[stew23]

When I say "genre" folders, I just mean regular folders as part of the overall file path (T:\America, etc\Animated Comedy\Family Guy)... with Animated Comedy being the "genre" i refer to. I'm sure you understood what I meant, just had to clarify in case I've confused everyone lol.

I have not 'added' any of these folders as a source (by 'Add Source), as they are all located in the main 'TV Shows' drive which itself has been added as a source. Am I making sense? Maybe if I did add each folder as a source it would work when I 'Update Library'? Is that what you're getting at? To add approximately 40 folders separately as 'sources' would probably take just as much time as manually scraping the 40 folders though...

[eg4190]

The scrapers don't seem to like nested genre subfolders (I had similar issues when my movies were grouped that way).

But consider that XBMC's library will automatically separate shows out by genre, and that you can create smart playlists for really narrow categories like "Anime" or "Adult-Themed Cartoons". Once everything's in the library, you won't use the folder hierarchy anyway.

You'll probably save yourself a lot of time and heartache by just putting all of the TV series into one directory level.

[stew23]

Thanks for the reply eg4190. You make a good point... mite as well just have every show's folder in the one root directory.

But I have my collection set up this way for reasons. (A) I have quite a large TV show collection, and (B) They are needed in this file structure for display when trading with people, etc.

To me, combining all my shows in the one folder isn't really ideal, and I see it as more of a "quick fix" or workaround when the real issue here is that fetching in sub-directories is clearly a needed feature for XBMC (I do find it hard to fault anything XBMC has done however!)

If the music library wasn't fetching my MP3s from their location properly (currently set up like this: M:\1990s\America, etc\Alternative\Garbage\Studio Albums\1998 — Version 2.0\Garbage — 03 — When I Grow Up.mp3) would I be expected to just lump all albums or artists together as one? I wouldn't think anyone would like that lol. See where I'm coming from? With people now amassing large TV show & movie collections, folders & subfolders are essential.

Help has been (& is) muchly appreciated

[Hitcher]

Maybe if I did add each folder as a source it would work when I 'Update Library'? Is that what you're getting at? To add approximately 40 folders separately as 'sources' would probably take just as much time as manually scraping the 40 folders though...

Yes, that's what I meant.

A quicker way would be to edit your sources.xml.

PHP Code:

<source>
    <name>TV Shows</name>
    <path pathversion="1">T:/America, etc/Animated Comedy/</path>
    <path pathversion="1">T:/England, etc/Sketch Comedy/</path>
</source> 


[stew23]

Thanx Hitcher! I like your suggestion. That would be a lot quicker I think!

My only issue with that (and it's a major issue in general lol) is I haven't managed to connect to my drive via FTP yet. My XBMC Live (on the Revo) can access the internet & it can also access my media through my home LAN. I'm not sure what I've done wrong... as far as I can see I've done all I can (installed Filezilla, etc.). If anyone can help me to be able to access my Revo over the network (which is only using XBMC Live) they would be a legend!

[TheDoughboy]

I thought I would chime in on this one as I have the same problem.

I have both my movies and tv shows in genre folders. This was mainly because of the other software I used on my HTPC that didn't do any sort or tagging or have a true visual interface. It was also a crude way of content management for the kids. I don't want to change it now, I already spent a month renaming files a year ago to make scraping easier and I don't want to do more file changes.

I also use Ember and Media Companion for Movie and TV Shows info, so I have .nfo files for each movie, show and episode.

The way my shares are setup is I have a Movie source containing each genre folder and same for TV. Movies work great, the scraper scans all the folders using the "Scan for New Content" no problem. But TV it doesn't. I went as far as to set the content of the main TV source as TV content and having the "contains single show" unchecked. Then on each genre folder I would do the same.

When I scan for new content off of the tv source it will find most of the shows but when it reaches my Cartoon folder it thinks that the folder is a show and proceeds to scrape a show called "Cartoon Alley" and then go on to add all the episodes in the folder under this show. I let it go one time and Cartoon Alley had something like 2,000 episodes in it. The episodes were correct but all placed under Cartoon Alley. Same thing with Food folder, it seems to think the folder is the show "Food Wars" and proceeds to scrape ahead.

So the way I got it to work is go into the tv source and run an update on each genre folder and it works fine.

Now I have my suspicion that the reason this is happening is because of the settings for Movie scraping and TV scraping. Under Movie scraping you have the "Scan Recursively" option and in the TV scraping you don't have that option. I really think this is why the issue occurs.

And in case anyone is wondering when I use Update Library it adds Cartoon Alley every time I run it.

[kraqh3d]

You have way to many leading folders before the TV show name folder. Xbmc's TV show scanning only works with this file system layout:

<SOURCE ROOT>/<TV Show Name>/<anything here is ignored>/media.s01e01.avi

You need to either conform to this, or modify the source to suit your needs and submit a patch. Sorry. You could try a multi-path source to collapse it all together for scanning purposes but it'll be annoying as it seem to have two folder layers above the show name. One might be manageable, two, not so much. (The way this works, is Xbmc fetches them one at a time, so it won't scan any quicker but it'll look nicer in your sources list.)

Music isn't a problem because music has a several defacto standards for attaching metadata directly to the media so we don't have to infer anything based off the path or filename.

** edit **
TV shows are automatically scanned recursively, based off the folder structure depicted above.

[TheDoughboy]

I don't think it's a lot of folders in front, it's just one more layer.

My TV Shows (on XBMC) are like this:

Code:

TV (Source Name)
  |__ Genre
      |__ TV Show X
      |    |__ Season X
      |    |   |__ Episode X
      |    |__ Season X
      |        |__ Episode X
      |
      |__ TV Show X
      |   |__ Season X
      |   |   |__ Episode X
      |   |__ Season X
      |       |__ Episode X

Movies are this way:

Code:

Movie (Source Name)
|__ Genre
     |____ Movie Folder
     |      |__ Movie
     |____ Movie Folder
     |      |__ Movie

I don't understand why the tv library isn't as flexible as the other are. This is the second issue with tv shows I've had, this and multi-part episodes. First they worked for me, then it was taken away because supposedly they didn't work. The latest was trying to keep a folder from the library on my children's setup. I first checked the Exclude folder from Scans in the Set Content menu and it still scraped the folder. It wasn't until I set the content to none that it stopped scanning the folder. Why have an option that doesn't work. And btw the wiki says this -

Exclude folder from scans
Excludes the selected folder from scans, even if it's a subfolder of a folder that has contents set.
- http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Set...eo_Library)

But to the original problem, I am trying to find a solution, if I have to look at code I'll try. Well if it's not recursive scan then I have to think it has to be getting the scraper to skip the genre folder as if it's not there. I thought I did that by not checking the Folder Contains Single TV Show in the Set Content menu on both the main source folder and genre folder.

Maybe another solution would be to have an nfo only option. What I mean is that the scraper would only look for an nfo file in the folder and only add shows that have the file, and not go online for information. For my situation my genre folders would be skipped because there is no nfo files in the folder. For everyone else it would mean you could go a few folders deep without worry. I could be wrong but I think a lot of people who are serious about the library feature use some sort of media manager (Ember, Media Companion) so having nfo files wouldn't be an issue for most.

If I find a solution I'll post it.