sets not updating unless movies refreshed

I have a problem with my movie sets not updating - say I put the Godfather trilogy into a set (I do it through Ember Media Manager, and it updates movie.nfo correctly with the <set> tag), now when I update XBMC the movies do not get added to the set, unless I right click on the individual films, select movie info, then refresh.

I even deleted the database file and rebuilt the DB, but the problem persists after. Basically sets are added correctly initially, but later can' be changed; I can't rename it, or add / remove movies (unless I refresh them).

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? thx

(I'm using 9.11, r26017)

The database keeps a folder contents hash to determine if anything has changed or not within that folder. It's a very simple hash of all the filenames within the folder. You need to add another file to the folder to force the hash to change. Just "touching" a zero byte dummy.avi file will work, which can be deleted afterward. You may get a "dummy" movie in your library that you'll have to remove, but if you scan again after you remove the dummy file, Xbmc should remove the dummy movie.

Thanks for the tip - though it's not really ideal behavior, I guess I'll submit a suggestion.

As an alternative, is there a way to refresh ALL movies? Or I would have to remove folders and re-add them?

That's to speed up scanning so Xbmc skips over folders where the content hasn't changed. (Or where it thinks the content hasn't changed.) The scanning code supports a way to udpate all, however its functionally the same as removing the folders and re-adding them. I forgot which option may use this. It very well may just be remnant code that's no longer used.

Now that I think about this, you have a different problem. You're trying to "refresh" the content, which means either re-reading all the local nfo files or scraping web data again. Naturally, this so-called "refresh" would have to ignore the content hash.

Here's where the issue arises. Even if you were to force the content hash to be different by adding an extra file, Xbmc still wouldn't refresh the content of the previously existing items in the library. I believe the only way to refresh the content is via the Movie Info dialog.

kraqh3d Wrote:Now that I think about this, you have a different problem. You're trying to "refresh" the content, which means either re-reading all the local nfo files or scraping web data again.

I think you hit the nail on the head here, this is I think exactly what's needed. It should be much quicker to just go through the nfo files and look for changes there, and I would imagine make working with external tools such as EMM easier.

Hopefully it's not too difficult to implement something like this.

Submitted a ticket:

[XBMC] #9050: add a function to refresh all videos by checking if the .nfo files changed