"Tricking" XBMC into retrieving art, plot info etc. for HD & BD Titles?
#1
Hi all,

I am new to XBMC after playing around with various MCE setups and I am just loving it so far. I cannot believe how this tiny little thing is breathing new life into my old SD DVD collection which I had considered "unwatchable" even when playing them in a high end player such as a Toshiba XA2. The available adjustments for video de-interlacing & aspect size re-scaling are just incredible. I have not even seen this level of adjustment in high end commercial systems! Hats off to the XBMC team!!

OK, I have given up on the idea of archiving all of my current 450+ HD-DVD and Bluray titles (at least for now). It is really pointless given my families lifestyle. What I really find is a more workable solution is to just archive my remaining 275 odd SD DVD collection to an external 2TB USB HDD connected to my patched Apple TV. I am going to be getting another (2) Apple TV's and doing the exact same thing.. Just adding their own local external 2TB HDD and duplicating the content. For us, this is a perfect solution for the Master Bedroom and Rec. Rooms. I do NOT want to stream content from one location.

I have been attempting to "trick" the setup into just retrieving Cover or Poster Art and plot/cast info for the High Definition titles with mixed results, as it will always want to see VIDEO files in folders. The idea I have is that SD versions of kids animated movies or SD titles that have not been (and probably never will be replaced) with HD DVD or Bluray versions can play instantly, but we want to still view and scroll through our high definition collection using the GUI. The physical discs will all be kept on the main floor in a central location which is within 20 paces to all of the other areas in question. We dont mind getting a little exercise!

I would appreciate any ideas or insight into how I can accomplish this.

I even thought about moving someting like a little THX or other sound demo clip that would play if someone were to inadvertantly select the play button when looking at a Bluray or HD title in the GUI.

I would like to get away from MyMovies. We actually like the idea of just using IMDB and now prefer veiwing the Poster Art as opposed to actual cover scans.

Hope I didnt confuse everyone.

Thanks in advance! Smile
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#2
ou can just create dummy files and place them on the hard drive, XBMC scanning doesn't really peek into the file before retrieving the metadata, any file named with the title of the movie should work.

Windows:
Code:
fsutil file create "Ratatouille (2007).iso" 0

OS X/Linux:
Code:
touch "Ratatouille (2007).iso"

Or you can just create any file of zero bytes (Open notepad, save a blank doc) and then rename it to the movie you would like to list.
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#3
create an NFO file for each title with the IMDB or TMDB url link in it

take a look at this

Flomaster Wrote:you could create an NFO file with a link to IMDB and it would use that nfo file and pull the proper info.

example:
Code:
<movie>
        <title>Brotherhood of the Wolf</title>
</movie>
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0237534/

open notepad and copy and paste the above code save the file as movie.nfo placed that nfo in the same folder as the movie. refresh the mover or remove it and re-ad the movie

the url link will force xbmc to use the info from the url link

-=Jason=-

EDIT:here is the wiki on NFO files
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Imp..._nfo_Files
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#4
Thanks for those quick responses!!

I will give those a try a little later today or tommorrow and let you know how it worked out. Could it be that easy? LOL

I had easily created lists in the VIDEO-FILES screens that simply grabbed the previously archived MyMovies covers. That was simple enough, but it seemed no amount of massaging would get IMBD or the other English lookups to retrieve more ususable info.

Then I had tried placing a few dummy video files with the proper folder names,etc. but it seemed that when I deleted the dummy video (to save space obviously) the system would respond by no longer wanting to do anything with that folder on the next library lookup. I forgot the exact error messages, but it had something to with it not "seeing a valid video file"Huh

Anyway, I have only been playing with my new setup a few days know, but this thing has great potential.

I dont know how I had overlooked XBMC all these years !?!?!?!

Just an fyi... Anyone remember ESCIENT and their VISION series... (they are now defunct!) I am not kidding when I say that their $ 5,000 VS100 server could not even compare to my simple little $ 375 2TB AppleTV/XBMC! Its no wonder that the former giants in the media server market... Escient, Imerge and may others have been going under in 2010.
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#5
I don't think you mentioned how you are archiving your SD DVDs.

If they are just the original vob files ripped from the DVD with something like DVD Shrink, (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders). Just name the folder that contains these 2 folders the name of the movie.
I would suggest using Ember Media Manager to scrape the movies as it is configurable as to what it keeps. I just gave it the path to my movies and it just did its thing getting cover, fanart, and nfo files for all my movies without my intervention.

It is here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=50348
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#6
Hey guys,

OK, I have given the suggestions a try but still NO JOY.

It seems the thing wants to see some actual video files just as my previous attempts ended up as. However, that is not the goal. I want to simply archive my SD DVD's and just catalog my HD DVD's and Blurays in the GUI.

Content is set to scrape IMDB and when I attempt the scans it just goes through the folder lickety split and doesn't report any new titles??

I do in fact have all my movies archived as VOB files (Audio & Video Folders). I have always preferred various versions of DVDCLONER and have 1:1 rips.

I may play around a bit more this evening and make a few more trial and error attempts.
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#7
PARTIAL SUCCESS !!! Laugh

Yeah.

OK... a glimmer of hope now.

After re-reading the wiki, I saw that because my files are in fact archived as VOB's, I had to rename the .nfo file accordingly and have it in the VIDEO_TS Folder. Here is the passage from the wiki...
===========================================================
Movies

movie.nfo will override all and any nfo files in the same folder as the media files if you use the "Use foldernames for lookups" setting. If you don't, then moviename.nfo is used. If there is only one nfo file in a folder, The scraper will use it for all media files in that folder. If there are multiple media files in a folder, the *.nfo should be named exactly the same as the video file it is representing (ie. moviename.avi and moviename.nfo). In the case of multi-part (stacked) video stacking, name the file either moviename.nfo or moviename-CD1.nfo where the first filename is moviename-CD1.avi. Note, if your movie is ripped as VOB's and stored in a 'VIDEO_TS' folder, you will have to name the file VIDEO_TS.nfo and place it in the same directory with the VIDEO_TS.ifo file.

Additionally the 'set' tag can be used to help sort movies that are part of a series or collection (ie Harry Potter, James Bond films). This sort of collection tagging must be done in the .NFO file before the movie is scanned into the library.

==========================================================

I used that Brotherhood of the Wolf example noted previously as that is in fact one of my HD DVD imports. When I re-started XBMC, the IMDB scrape did pick up the Brotherhood poster, plot info, trailer, fanart etc.

So that is start of the battle. Now the next problem is that if someone hits the PLAY button, the system will return the Boxee/XBMC error page and exit back out to the Apple TV screen since there are obviously NO valid video files to play and the whole point is to not waste any space on large dummy files.

I had always envisioned that as part of this process, I would need some small dummy video file that would in fact briefly play if someone inadvertantly selects PLAY. I had thought about something like an easily identifiable trailer, like that newer THX audio intro ((Can be found on the Avatar Standard Def. DVD... It is named VTS_06_01 for those that have Avatar ripped as VOB)).

I am not sure how to make this happen. That is just a simple MPEG clip that can easily be played if selected from within a file directory, but I am not sure how to make it happen in this scenario.

Any suggestions on the above, or any cool (and short) clip that any of you have used that could be possibly be used in this application?? Ideally, something with a BluRAy or HD DVD logo would be perfect in order to remind the person that the title they have selected must actually be manually played by putting the physical disc in a player.
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#8
CanadaPhil Wrote:PARTIAL SUCCESS !!! Laugh


I used that Brotherhood of the Wolf example noted previously as that is in fact one of my HD DVD imports. When I re-started XBMC, the IMDB scrape did pick up the Brotherhood poster, plot info, trailer, fanart etc.


I had always envisioned that as part of this process, I would need some small dummy video file that would in fact briefly play if someone inadvertantly selects PLAY. I had thought about something like an easily identifiable trailer, like that newer THX audio intro ((Can be found on the Avatar Standard Def. DVD... It is named VTS_06_01 for those that have Avatar ripped as VOB)).

I see, this is for your HD stuff that you have on disk.....

You could have your folder called Brotherhood of the Wolf. Inside that folder you could put the VTS_06_06.vob clip, but rename it Brotherhood of The Wolf.vob
Don't have any other folders in that folder!

After scraping, you would end up with:

Brotherhood of the Wolf.tbn (thumb of the DVD cover)
Brotherhood of the Wolf-fanart.jpg (fanart)
Brotherhood of the Wolf.nfo (info file for movie)
Brotherhood of the Wolf.vob (the clip or trailer)

As I said, I use Ember to scrape and then copy the movie folder over to XBMC. That way, I have more control over it. I know Ember will do it by saying each folder has a single movie in it and use the folder name.

I think you could do it through XBMC by just having:
Brotherhood of the Wolf (folder)
Brotherhood of the Wolf.vob (inside the folder)

Regardless, it will be a somewhat tedious process.
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#9
CanadaPhil Wrote:I would like to get away from MyMovies. We actually like the idea of just using IMDB and now prefer veiwing the Poster Art as opposed to actual cover scans.

Why would you want that? Can't you use MM scraper in XBMC?
My skins:

Amber
Quartz

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#10
pecinko Wrote:Why would you want that? Can't you use MM scraper in XBMC?

Simple, we now prefer to see the actual POSTER ART and not DVD covers.

Also, while MyMovies is great, you need to maintain an account in order to achieve enough points to be able to activate the MyMovies scraper or PAY for it as a commercial type license.

IMDB does everything I need without any additional hassle so to speak.
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#11
Also, just to followup, I now have my setup doing basically what I wanted it to do.

I have begun cataloging my HiDef collection (about 50 of 400+) so far. It is tedious but so was initially ripping all of my 275 Standard Definition DVD's to the 2TB drive.

So this is the end result... 275 of my SD DVD's are stored and can be played back instantly. I use Poster Art as the graphic for SD DVD's. Even though my HD DVD's and Blurays will NOT actually be archived, we can search the entire collection by genre, director, actor, etc. and that is what we wanted. And almost all titles have a working link to a trailer via IMDB.

For HD DVD and Blurays, I am getting most of the disc COVER ART art from DVDTown<dot>com, and manually placing it in the movie folder. Its very good quality from there and resizes perfectly within the XBMC poster wrap style interface. I could not use art from MyMovies because even when I manually use Collection Manager, all the HiDef covers are now cropped and have the red or blue HD/Blu border applied to the art by their newer system?

The last thing to still work out is the dummy video file or trailer thing for when someone attempts to play an HD DVD or BLU that isnt there. Right now, have to put up with the error message.

One thing I did find no matter how hard I tried is that the XBMC system NEEDS to see some kind of valid video file. By that I mean simply inserting a short video clip was NOT enough. Unless I also had a VIDEO_TS.ifo file in there, (had to insert a dummy one) it would NOT scrape the movie info.
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#12
CanadaPhil Wrote:One thing I did find no matter how hard I tried is that the XBMC system NEEDS to see some kind of valid video file. By that I mean simply inserting a short video clip was NOT enough. Unless I also had a VIDEO_TS.ifo file in there, (had to insert a dummy one) it would NOT scrape the movie info.

Use Ember or some other scraper outside of XBMC then transfer that info over to XBMC. That would allow you to use a small dummy file without having a VIDEO_TS or any other file.

With Ember: Name the folder (movie name), put the dummy file in folder (named movie name), scrape with Ember. Copy folder to 2TB drive.
Repeat for next movie.... easy!
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#13
OK, back again.

First off, I want to thank those that have previously responded as it helped to put me in the right direction to get this thing almost to where I want it to be. Nod

Just to clarify for those who may be wanting to do somehting similar to what I am doing, I have noticed a few quirks with this arrangement that I have now mostly sorted out....

One thing appears certain... when wanting to use IMDB to create the "fake" HD DVD and Bluray title listings you need to have dummy video files in the movie folder or it will NOT scrape the info for you. And it appears that these files MUST remain in the folder afterwards or the system will later respond with the message something to the effect of "the file no longer exists.. Do you want to remove it from the Library YES/NO" if you want to call up the info for that title. The good thing is, these files can be ANYTHING and small, as long at they have the right file extensions.

Also, I am now not worried about creating a "custom" dummy short video trailer in case someone were to select PLAY as I now have it to where the system will not respond with an error and want to exit out. When I was creating VIDEO_TS.nfo files, I was also saving another file but with a different extension.. VIDEO_TS.ifo. I just did this for the hell of it really, to act as another backup which could be re-read under notepad if something happened to the .nfo file. However, I found that after doing this, I could hit the PLAY button when viewing an HD DVD or Bluray listing and NOTHING would happen.... meaning the system would not respond with an error and exit out. It would just stay on the GUI screen with no problems. Cool

Now, I need a bit more help. Rolleyes

I have now been playing around with the .nfo files to try to create a custom xml where my HD titles will have those little logos on the gui screen just like the normal titles do... ie: SD Dolby Digital 5.1 16:9, but in this case, I am trying to get the GUI to show HD DVD, Bluray, TrueHD, DTS, etc. logos if possible.

I have looked and searched, but I cannot find exactly what I am looking for. I did find a passage in the wiki that shows the xml structure and I sort of extrapolated and experimented. Here is a section from it with certain sections highlighted...

<fileinfo>
<streamdetails>
<video>
<codec>h264</codec>
<aspect>2.35</aspect>

<width>1920</width>
<height>816</height>
</video>
<audio>
<codec>ac3</codec>
<language>eng</language>
<channels>6</channels>
</audio>

<audio>
<codec>ac3</codec>
<language>spa</language>
<channels>2</channels>
</audio>
<subtitle>
<language>spa</language>
</subtitle>
</streamdetails>
</fileinfo>

I have been able to get the system to show things like 2:35.1 and number of channels, but nothing else. I have tried mutliple combinations but cannot get things like a Bluray logo to show up. I could not even get the normal Dolby Digital logo to show up at it does in SD title info listings using various strings in the above <codec> section.

Does anyone know how I can get this done. Can you point me to where it shows what the variables in the xml file must say in order to show the appropriate logos I am looking for??

Thanks.

PS: Sorry, this post really, REALLY rambled. Sad
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#14
Looks like I will followup my own question.. LOL Wink

Ok, after playing around a little more, I am able to get it to display more info so that at least the look of the GUI between the stored standard def titles and the HD and Bluray ones is consistent. ((Again NO actual HD DVD or Bluray files are stored. They are just cataloged))

However, I am only able to get it to show 1080 set within the oval bubble,
Dolby Digital (no matter what I try to enter as an audio codec
5.1 for audio channels &
Aspect Ratio (although 2.40 changes to 2.35 and entering 1.85 results in 16:9 graphic in the GUI)

Here is my .nfo file from one of the Harry Potter titles as reference.

<movie>
<title>Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</title>
<fileinfo>
<streamdetails>
<video>
<width>1920</width>
<height>1080</height>
<codec>vc1</codec>
<aspect>2.40</aspect>
</video>
<audio>
<codec>ac3</codec>
<language>eng</language>
<channels>6</channels>
</audio>
<streamdetails>
</fileinfo>
</movie>
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304141/


Well, at least I am able to get something I guess. I have read up more on the mediaflag topic and see that I apparently need to have variables entered into a main xml file somewhere, but I dont see how I can accomplish this with an AppleTV setup.

So I suppose that given that I am using an AppleTV and IMDB for my movie info, the above are the most I can expect when it comes to the mediaflags??
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"Tricking" XBMC into retrieving art, plot info etc. for HD & BD Titles?0