[jkay6969]

Hi all,

I'm quite new to this fantastic program called XBMC, I honestly can't believe I've never seen it before now, It has got me hooked :-)

I have a large library of Movies (10TB), TV Shows (5TB), Music (500GB) and Pictures (10GB) so I need an easy to use (for the missus :-) lol) Media Player that displays content nicely. XBMC does this with bells on!!!

The problem is there is a reasonably large learning curve compared to other programs due to how customizable and in depth this program is.

This is where I have decided to list some of the problems I'm having and have had and post the answers I find/come up with.

Important resources you should use, This Forum (of course), http://www.TheTVDB.com, The Renamer (awesome file renaming program that links to TVDB and names your files correctly if it finds them in the database, your files must be named reasonably well to begin with)

Problem 1

When I first installed and ran the library update it only found a small selection of my movies and TV Shows.

Solution

Naming the files and folders is key to this problem, I found that my naming conventions were not fully compatible with the library search engine.

I found that Movies should be named simply Title, year and extension.

\Movies\F\The Firm 2009\The Firm 2009.avi

I found that TV Shows should be named Show, Season, Episode, Episode Name

\TV Shows\The A-Team\The A-Team - Season 1\The A-Team S01E01-E02 Mexican Slayride (1)

Any Special episodes like Babylon 5 The Gathering should be named;

Babylon 5 S00E01 The Gathering

The S00 Donates Special Episode and the E01 donates it's the First Special episode as found in the TVDB Specials list

Double Episodes should be named;

The A-Team S01E01-E02 Mexican Slayride (1)

The library engine has an issue with a space between S01 and E01 and E02, perhaps this can be corrected with a script or editing the config files but this naming convention will work without such methods.

Problem 2

I found that the TV Show Life On Mars was showing up wrongly with Special Episodes showing where there weren't any.

Solution

I navigated to the show through the videos filesystem view, then Right Clicked on the Life On Mars entry, selected Set Content, Settings, Then de-selected DVD Order. Then I right clicked Life On Mars entry and scanned for new content, then Right Clicked and Updated TV Show Information from the internet. I then checked in the library view and all was fine.

Problem 3

I found that only the first season of a show was being shown in Library view even though there were several seasons there

Solution

I found that I had inadvertently selected Set Content, Settings, Use Absolute Ordering (Single Season) when I de-selected this option and rescanned all was fine.

Problem 4

I can't find any way to get a TV Tuner in XBMC, if it had that functionality it'd be by far the perfect HTPC solution!

Solution

Any Suggestions?